Ella
Eleven months. That was how long it had been since I'd gone off that balcony, and standing in the boardroom of DeLuca Maison, the luxury house I'd spent the last four months rebuilding from the inside out, it felt like measuring the distance between two different people rather than two dates on a calendar.
The company had been hemorrhaging money when Kylian handed it to me, an old fashion house with a storied name and a board too comfortable to notice the world had moved past them. I'd spent the first month simply listening, the second restructuring, and by the third the executives who'd greeted my arrival with barely concealed condescension had stopped bothering to hide their surprise instead.
"Fourth quarter numbers are in," said Grant, the CFO who'd once asked me, in my first we
