“Paige is just one person. How would Sasha even know that Paige wore the same dress?”
“That’s just it. Paige’s mother is a Pinckney. You know what that means around here. Debutante balls, big society events, private schools, yacht parties, all of it. Her mother has already hired Southern Royalty magazine to come and photograph the wedding. I mean, I can’t know for sure Sasha would do anything, but I’m not sure I’m willing to risk everything to find out.”
“That probably would have been some nice publicity for a new designer. Paige wearing your dress.”
Dani only shook her head and let out a disheartened laugh. “Yeah. It would have been.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. Paige’s mom made her buy a back-up dress anyway.” She looked at me. “Great that she had so much confidence in me, right?”
“I bet Paige loved the dress you made,” I said.
Dani offered a small smile, almost enough to lift the frown lines creasing her forehead. “Yeah. She really did.”
The smallest seed of a plan took root in my mind. It was ridiculous. And probably wouldn’t work. But just maybe . . . “Did she love your dress more than the back-up dress?”
“I don’t know why it matters, but yes. I’m pretty sure she loved it even more.”
I reached over and grabbed Dani’s hands, pulling her up so we stood facing each other beside the bed. “I think I have a plan.”
Her eyes narrowed. “A plan for what?”
“I have an invitation to the wedding,” I said as if that were explanation enough.
“And?” she prompted.
“And I can bring a date.”
Her narrowed eyes turned into a frown. “What are you getting at?”
“Let’s go to the wedding. Me and you. Let’s go get Paige’s dress.”
Dani’s eyes went wide. “What? Like, steal it?”
“It’s not stealing if what you’re taking already belongs to you.”
She remained silent for a few moments, as if considering my plan, then shook her head. “No. It would never work. They’ll have security at the wedding and I’m not exactly Sasha’s favorite person right now. I’d never get close enough.”
“That’s where I come in,” Alex said. “I’m not technically still family, but they’re getting married at Alicio’s house in the Keys. I know that house. If Alicio still uses the same security firm he always has, I’ll know people there. And I was officially invited to the wedding. They can’t stop me from going home. I have a room there. Full of things that belong to me. I have a right to show up.”
“Getting into the house and getting close to Sasha are two entirely different things. Even if we manage to pull it off, if I steal the dress, she’ll know it was me. What’s going to keep her from going public with the theft? I’m not too naive to still care what Alicio thinks of me, and I absolutely don’t care what Sasha thinks, but I would like to eventually work again. Everyone who is anyone in fashion will be at that wedding. I can’t afford to trash my name, even for Paige’s dress.”
She made a very valid point. If all we did was steal the dress, it wouldn’t be enough. There had to be a way to simultaneously incriminate and expose Sasha, which I couldn’t do because I didn’t have the evidence.
I paced around the room. I didn’t have the evidence, but maybe Dani did. She’d been Sasha’s assistant which meant she was probably the one who had handled Sasha’s expense account—managed statements, filed receipts, sent validating documents to accounting.
I could ask. I could ask, and we could find out the truth and I could give it all to Alicio.
But he’d made the consequences clear.
Keep digging, break the cease and desist, and I’d be cut off. My Ivy League education had cost more than four hundred thousand dollars. That was a lot of student loan debt to suddenly inherit.
But truth was truth.
And Dani was hurting.
And I still cared about that.
I didn’t want to, but I did.
“Dani, were you the one who handled Sasha’s expense account?”
She looked at me funny but then nodded. “Sure.”
“What did that entail?”
She wrinkled her brow. “I sent statements of her account with attached receipts to accounting once a month.”
“So you had access to her actual account?”
She looked at me quizzically but answered anyway. “Yes.”
“Do you think you still have access?”
Her expression clouded. “I doubt it. The system required me to change my password monthly. Even if Sasha didn’t have all of my credentials erased manually, it’s been long enough, it would have already required a password reset.”
I grumbled under my breath. “What about your email? Can you still access it? The messages you sent to accounting would still be in your sent messages, yes?”
She frowned and shook her head. “They would be, but I can’t access my email anymore. I tried a few days ago. It didn’t work.” Nervous energy radiated off of her in waves. “But,” she said, her voice full of sudden excitement. She pulled out her phone and started swiping.
“What?” I asked, my voice impatient.
She shook her head, a gesture willing me to wait a moment longer. Then she looked up, a smile stretched wide across her face, and handed me her phone. “My computer at work kept crashing. The hard drive was faulty or something and I kept losing files. So tech support set up an account in the cloud where things were automatically backed up. It wasn’t standard protocol, so when HR erased me from the system, they probably didn’t know to wipe this.”
I looked at her phone, quickly scrolling down. Dozens and dozens of files were listed, purchase orders, design specs, but I immediately picked out a handful labeled with some variation of monthly statement. It was exactly the information I could have used a year ago when I was trying to incriminate Sasha, but that didn’t matter anymore. I had it now. Matched with the screenshots I’d saved before I left, it might be enough.
“Can I access this from my laptop?” I asked Dani.
She shrugged. “Sure. I can text you the password.”
“Perfect.”
She wrung her hands. “Do you think it’ll be enough?”
“I don’t know. I think so, but I’m following hunches here. I could dig in and find out that I was wrong, and Sasha’s only crime is being a first-class jerk. But if I’m right, I should be able to find the proof in these statements.”
“What exactly do you think she was doing?” Dani asked. “I mean, what is it you’re trying to prove?”
I only hesitated a moment. It wouldn’t take that long to pay for my education. “Company expenditures took a huge climb when Sasha came on board. It was a subtle increase at first, but then over time, the increases became more noticeable. The increases were all categorized as design development. I tried to access the information needed to break down the expenditures further, to see where they were coming from and which designer was responsible for them, but I was shut down and told to back off. I became insistent, called for an internal audit—”