Chapter 1 - THE PAGE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN GONE
Grant Cole already had the sketchbook halfway out of the glass display case when Avery caught the other end.
The old leather cover bent between their hands.
“Let go.”
Avery’s voice was quiet enough that Lena, standing six feet away beside a rack of champagne-colored product samples, stopped moving.
Grant didn’t.
Instead, Avery’s ex-husband tightened his grip and shoved a navy legal folder toward her with his free hand. The folder struck the walnut counter hard enough to scatter two finish samples.
“Sign half over,” he said. “My money made this company possible.”
Three hours earlier, Cole House had been preparing for the biggest launch in its nine-year history.
Now its founder was wrestling her own design book away from the man she had divorced six years ago.
Avery pulled hard once.
Grant released it with a mocking little smile, almost as if letting her win had been his idea.
She pressed the battered sketchbook against her ivory blouse.
“You called every design in this book pathetic.”
“I called your obsession with them pathetic.”
He opened the legal folder.
The showroom was empty except for the three of them. The retailer delegation wouldn’t arrive until four. Sunlight from the tall South End windows stretched across the dark walnut floor, catching the brass edges of the new serving collection Avery had spent eighteen months preparing.
Grant removed a transfer agreement.
“Fifty percent of the underlying design rights,” he said. “That’s considerably less than I could ask for.”
“You could ask for the building too. It wouldn’t make it yours.”
He pushed the agreement toward her.
Avery pushed it back.
The edge of the document caught something inside Grant’s folder.
A yellowed sheet of paper slipped free.
It floated once and landed on the counter.
Lena stared at it.
Avery did too.
It was covered in black pencil lines.
Her pencil lines.
There was a small brown crescent burned into one corner.
For several seconds, Avery didn’t touch it.
She knew that burn.
In 2017, when Cole House had still been three people working out of Avery and Grant’s kitchen in Dilworth, she had set a hot cast-iron skillet too close to her sketchbook. The heat had scorched the bottom corner of six pages.
Avery opened the sketchbook.
Pages forty-one, forty-two, forty-three.
Then the rough edge between forty-three and forty-five.
The missing page.
She laid Grant’s yellow sheet beside it.
The torn fibers met perfectly.
Lena whispered, “Avery.”
Grant’s expression changed.
Not dramatically.
That frightened Avery more.
His face simply lost its amusement.
Avery looked down at the drawing.
It was an early version of the nested brass hinge system she had later abandoned after the prototype failed.
Or thought she had abandoned.
“This disappeared before our divorce,” she said.
Grant reached for the page.
Avery moved faster and pulled it against her body.
“Where did you get it?”
“I think you know.”
“No. I don’t.”
His jaw flexed.
Avery had spent years learning what that movement meant. During their marriage, it had usually appeared two seconds before Grant stopped answering and started controlling the conversation instead.
He closed the legal folder.
“If you want tomorrow’s launch to happen,” he said, “you’ll sign.”
Lena moved slightly closer to Avery.
Grant noticed.
“You should stay out of this,” he told her.
“I work here.”
“You work for her. There’s a difference.”
Avery stepped between them.
“Get out.”
Grant picked up his folder but didn’t leave immediately.
His eyes dropped to the yellow page in Avery’s hand.
For the first time since he had walked into her showroom, Avery saw something beneath the arrogance.
Not anger.
Fear.
“Ask your mother,” he said.
Avery stopped.
Grant turned toward the doors.
She caught his sleeve.
“What does my mother have to do with this?”
He looked down at her hand until she released him.
Then he said the one thing Avery had not expected.
“Ask Diane who gave me that page.”
The showroom doors shut behind him.
Lena looked at Avery.
Avery was still holding the piece of paper she had believed lost for eight years.
On the back, in handwriting that was not hers, someone had written one short line:
May you like
H-17 — APPROVED FOR SAMPLE.
And underneath it were her mother’s initials.
