Before Seraphina could even think about buying factories, she knew she needed the people who actually knew how to run them. Standing on the quiet street corner outside the bank, she opened her briefcase and pulled out the dusty sheet of paper with her mother’s handwriting. She sat in the back of her private car and spent the next hour making phone calls, her voice calm and full of purpose.
She reached out to the first three names on the list: Mr. Harrison, the old master weaver who could judge the quality of cotton just by touching it with his eyes closed; Mrs. Gable, the fierce factory manager who used to keep the assembly lines running perfectly; and Marcus, the brilliant finance director who had been forced into early retirement by Victoria.
When they first answered their phones, thei
