Chapter 3 - The Sketches Without Her Signature

Helena Ward, the chief operating officer of Laurent, arrived in my office with three binders and an expression that told me she had already guessed this would be difficult. The company had grown far beyond the apartment where Isabelle had sewn my first designs. We now employed hundreds of people across several countries. Our archive occupied climate-controlled rooms. I had signed contracts approving the use of images I had not looked at closely in years.

"You asked for everything from the first collections," Helena said. "There is a retrospective planned for the anniversary season. The team has been pulling material for months."

I had approved the exhibition before leaving for Rome. At the time, I thought of it as a celebration of my career. Its working title was The Laurent Beginning. My portrait appeared on the preliminary invitation. Isabelle's name did not.

"Who chose the early sketches?" I asked.

"The studio archive team. Your signature appears on the final boards."

"That wasn't my question."

Helena placed a slim folder in front of me. It contained photographs of rough pencil drawings, alterations marked in different hands, and fabric studies from the first years. I recognized my own impatient lines. I also recognized the narrower writing Isabelle used when she corrected a measurement or changed the fall of a seam.

On one page I had drawn the shape of a coat. Isabelle had redrawn the sleeve, moved the fastening, and added the interior structure that made the garment possible. The finished coat had been photographed under my name alone. Nobody had deliberately hidden her in the picture. I had simply become used to describing a collaboration as my vision and her help.

"Did we ever pay Isabelle for these particular patterns?" I asked.

Helena looked at me carefully. "I don't know. We need to establish what the company licensed, what it purchased, and what she kept as personal work."

"Then we establish it. Before anyone displays a single page."

The legal department could have found ways to make the question about corporate ownership. I knew enough about contracts to understand that. I also knew that an argument I could win on paper might still be dishonest. Isabelle had not asked for revenge or a share of the company. She had asked to be allowed to keep her own work.

I told Helena to pause the retrospective's archive approvals until an independent review could identify the creators of the original material. Her face tightened.

"The venue is booked," she said. "We have sponsors and a press schedule."

"Then they can wait for an accurate account of what they're sponsoring."

She didn't argue. Instead, she opened the second binder. It contained photographs of more recent designs. Near the front was the dress Camille had worn on Isabelle's thirty-ninth birthday.

I had told Isabelle it was exclusive to her. That much was true when I first said it. But I had then arranged for Camille to wear it for a private brand appearance, without telling the woman for whom I claimed to have created it. Seeing the dress in the binder made the decision look even smaller and crueler than I remembered. I had taken a promise and turned it into a convenience.

"The marketing team included the dress in the retrospective," Helena said. "It's one of the strongest images we have from last season."

"Remove it from the proposal."

"Gabriel, we need a reason."

"It was made as a personal gift. I gave someone else access to it, and I lied about that. That's the reason."

Helena closed the binder. She had worked with me long enough to know that an admission like that did not come easily. I found I wasn't interested in whether she admired it. I was interested in whether the image would disappear from the exhibition before Isabelle saw it used again to promote my name.

Later that afternoon, I visited the archive. White gloves lay beside the folders, and the archivist showed me the order in which the drawings had been entered into our collection. Some had come directly from the apartment. Others had arrived years later when our old storage units were cleared. Each item had been given a number, a date range, and often a creator's name copied from whichever folder had contained it.

"What happens when a folder says Laurent but doesn't specify which Laurent?" I asked.

"We normally assign it to the house founder."

"That's me."

"Yes."

"And Isabelle?"

The archivist hesitated. "The system doesn't list her as a designer."

I thought about the third box in our bedroom, the scissors Isabelle had left beside so many other relics of our beginning. She had not put a price on those objects. She had made me look at them. Now I could see a quieter version of the same erasure written into the company's records.

I asked for the archive to be photographed and reviewed without altering any original labels. We would preserve the historical record, including its mistakes, and document corrections separately. I didn't want anyone producing a cleaner version of our past for my benefit.

That evening, the mansion seemed larger than it had the night I returned. The seven boxes were still in the bedroom. I had closed them to protect the contents from dust, but I had not moved them. The seventh remained empty.

I took the old scissors from the third box. Their metal handles had been worn smooth by years of use. I remembered Isabelle working beside me while I explained what I wanted a dress to look like. I remembered how often she had discovered the practical answer before I finished explaining the problem.

I wasn't ready to decide what that meant for the company. I was ready to stop pretending it meant nothing.

My counsel called before midnight. Isabelle's lawyer had sent a short, professional request for the return of several personal sketchbooks and fabric patterns. The list matched some of the materials Helena had brought that morning.

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There was no demand for money. No accusation. Just a list of things Isabelle believed were hers.

For fifteen years I had assumed that when someone referred to Laurent's first designs, they meant mine. I looked at the names on Isabelle's list and realized that the most difficult part of telling the truth might be accepting how ordinary the deception had become.