The days after Griffin Marsh's office fell into a rhythm gentler than anything I'd let myself expect. Lancaster Corp's collapse continued in the background, distant now, no longer requiring emergency meetings or midnight phone calls, just the slow, unremarkable business of a company finishing what it had already started falling toward. Ryan didn't reach out again. Neither did Ava. For the first time in months, my days belonged almost entirely to my own work instead of managing the fallout of theirs.
I threw myself into the capsule collection, the one Diana and I had been quietly building for weeks with a small boutique manufacturer she'd found through a friend of a friend— plus-sized pieces cut the way I'd always wanted my own clothes cut, celebratory instead of apologetic, fabric that mo
