Bought A Stripper Husband

Chapter 02 : Evalyne’s Daughter

When they reached the penthouse, staff appeared the moment the elevator doors opened. Kai, her head butler, inclined his head.

“Welcome home, Madam Eva. Theresa. Shall I have Nanny Rhea draw a bath for Miss Theresa?”

“Yes,” Evalyne said.

Theresa slipped her hand from Evalyne’s, if she had ever really held it, and went down the hall without looking back.

Evalyne watched her daughter’s small, straight back.

They moved around each other like planets, orbiting the same sun, never colliding.

In her office, the one with floor to ceiling windows and an entire wall of awards, Evalyne dropped into the leather chair and opened her laptop. Three hundred and twenty unread emails waited, lined up like troops.

She clicked one from three years ago instead.

Subject: Re: Where are you

The thread was long, stretching back to when Theresa had been a baby and she had still believed exhaustion could be fixed with better time management.

Harris’s name glared from the top of the thread.

You missed her doctor’s appointment.

he had written in one of the earlier exchanges.

Again. The doctor asked about your schedule. I lied for you.

She scrolled.

I cannot keep doing this.

another message read.

You missed dinner.

You missed bath time.

You are always “at the office.”

When are you at home, Eva?

And then, the one drunken text that had changed everything.

fuckyou, I found better bitvh

She remembered reading that one in a hotel room in Tokyo, surrounded by sketches and fabric samples. At first she had thought he was being dramatic.

Then she had received the photo. From him, just to spite her.

Harris, half dressed, a woman she did not know wrapped around him with one of her breasts out, hair mess. Both of them grinning at the camera like idiots. There had been a wine bottle on the nightstand, Theresa’s baby monitor visible in the background, green light glowing.

She had not screamed. She had not thrown her phone. That was not how she broke.

She remembered setting the device down on the white duvet, then walking into the bathroom and turning on the shower so hot it felt like it would peel her skin away.

The noise of the water had covered the sound of her breathing as it hitched and stuttered. She had stood there in her clothes, makeup running, fabric clinging, until the mirror blurred and she could not see the outline of her own face.

After that, things had moved fast.

A lawyer. Papers. Harris’s protest that it “meant nothing,” that she was overreacting, that she had chosen her work over him first.

“You chose them,” he had shouted in their kitchen, hands flung wide. “Those people, that company, that stupid atelier, over your own family.”

“I built this family,” she had said quietly. “I am the one who keeps a roof over our heads.”

“And what good is the roof if you are never under it?”

He had called her cold. Unfeeling. Said she cared more about dresses than her own husband.

He had never accused her of not loving Theresa. Even he had not been that reckless.

He had, however, accused her of not knowing how to love anyone in a way that did not feel like a contract.

In the first weeks after he left, Evalyne had tried to be everywhere at once. In the office at dawn and at home for dinner, on calls between bedtime stories, on flights scheduled around school recitals. It had not worked. Something had always been missed.

Theresa, who had been a quiet baby, became a quieter toddler. Other children screamed and laughed and demanded. Theresa watched. She held onto the hem of Evalyne’s skirt in public and retreated behind her legs. At home, she sat on the floor with her blocks, building towers that were perfectly balanced and perfectly alone.

One night, when Theresa was two, Evalyne had walked into her room at midnight after a late flight and had found her awake, sitting in her crib, staring at the door.

“You should be asleep,” Evalyne had whispered, throat thick.

“I wait,” Theresa had replied, mispronouncing the t so it sounded like “I weyt.”

“For who?” Evalyne had asked, although she already knew.

“Someone,” Theresa had said, and lay down.

After that, Evalyne hired more staff. A nanny. A second driver. Tutors. People to weave a net around her daughter where she could not.

Theresa grew. The distance grew with her.

Now, at five, she spoke clearly and rarely. The teachers said she was bright, that she understood everything, but she avoided eye contact. She did not push herself into games. She stood at the edges and watched.

Just like her mother.

Evalyne closed the laptop. The room was too quiet.

She went down the hall to Theresa’s room. The door was ajar, a soft wedge of light spilling out. Inside, Rhea sat on a chair by the bed, scrolling through her phone. Theresa lay under a pale blue blanket, eyes closed, face smoothed out.

“She fell asleep easily today,” Rhea whispered, standing.

“Did she eat enough?” Evalyne asked.

“Yes. She finished her dinner. She asked for extra rice.”

Evalyne nodded. “Thank you. You can go now.”

When the nanny had left, Evalyne stepped closer to the bed. Theresa’s hair fanned on the pillow, a silvery halo. In sleep she looked younger, closer to the baby Evalyne remembered holding between conference calls.

Evalyne reached out, very carefully, and brushed a stray strand away from her daughter’s forehead. Her fingers hovered in the air for a second longer than necessary.

She knew exactly how to save a failing collection, how to cut a department that was underperforming without collapsing morale, how to pivot a narrative on social media within an hour.

She did not know how to ask her own child if she was happy.

“Good night,” she whispered.

Theresa did not stir.

Evalyne lingered a few seconds more, then turned off the lamp and closed the door most of the way. In the hallway, the walls were hung with framed magazine covers.

Evalyne Delaire Visionary of the Year.

Evalyne Delaire, The Ice Queen of Fashion.

Evalyne Delaire, The Woman Who Built An Empire From Thread.

She walked past all of them, the echo of her heels shallow compared to the silence.

In her bedroom, the city glowed beneath the floor to ceiling windows, alive and distant. Evalyne stood there and watched it, arms folded loosely across her chest.

Down there, she could handle anything. Negotiations. Scandals. Growth targets.

Up here, in the quiet spaces between her and the small girl sleeping down the hall, there was a problem she could not solve with a contract or a check.

She pressed her palm to the glass, fingers splayed.

“I can handle everything,” she told her reflection.

The reflection looked back, immaculate and hollow.

“Except you,” she thought, and she was not sure if she meant Theresa, or herself.