Paige’s phone dinged with a text and she pulled it from her bag and glanced at the screen. “That’s my mom. She’ll be here any second to get me.” She looked my way. “I’m doing the family thing for Thanksgiving, but early next week, we’re meeting with the caterer. I guess there’s something they want to change on the menu, and they need me to approve. Want to come?”
“Of course. Text me the details. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
As soon as Paige was safely stowed in her mom’s luxury SUV, I turned to Chase. “Please tell me you didn’t tell her about stealing the dress back.”
“What do you take me for?” Chase said. “You told me not to tell, so I didn’t tell.”
“Coming down for Thanksgiving was a great cover,” Darius said. “She didn’t question the trip at all.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “I just don’t want her to get her hopes up.”
“She doesn’t know,” Chase said. “I promise.”
I motioned toward the trailer they’d hauled across six states. “Any idea how close my fabric bins are toward the front?”
“I have no idea, but I refuse to unpack a single thing from that trailer until you’ve taken me to the beach. Didn’t we already talk about this?” Chase said.
“Oh come on,” I said. “Just one quick peek? I’m pretty sure I have a stretch of ivory satin that’s going to be perfect for Sasha’s replacement dress.”
Chase propped a hand on his hip and shook his head. “Girl, you are pure evil.”
“Don’t act like you don’t love it,” Darius said.
“Of course I love it,” Chase agreed. “I feel like I’ve been dropped into the middle of a Danny Ocean movie. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
Darius helped me open the back of the trailer. I paused and stared at the entirety of my New York life crammed into a six-by-twelve-foot box. So sad. I heaved a sigh, willing the sadness away. Dwelling on the unfairness of everything that had happened wasn’t going to help. I shifted around a couple of boxes, stacking them next to the giant armoire—the only furniture in my old apartment that had actually been mine—and reached for a bin of fabric.
If I was going to steal Paige’s dress back, I had to have a replacement I could swap it for. I could have bought something benign and harmless from a local shop, but that didn’t feel nearly as fun. I wanted to make something that Sasha, in all of her conniving glory, really deserved. And that meant I needed my stuff.
Three bins later, I found what I was looking for. The ivory was perfect; perfect weight, just enough sheen. I held up the fabric. “This is it.”
Chase looked over my shoulder. “I thought you wanted to make something hideous.”
I shook my head. “No, it can’t be hideous. At least, not obviously so. Then she wouldn’t wear it. I need to make something convincing enough for her to actually go through with wearing it. I mean, she’ll be desperate. She won’t have another dress on hand. But still. I want the awful of the dress to be a little more nuanced.”
“So, you mean, not awful to the David’s Bridal crowd, but definitely awful to anyone in high fashion?”
I clutched the ivory fabric to my chest. “Exactly.”
Isaac and Alex came out and helped haul the essentials up to my bedroom above the studio. Darius and Chase each gave Alex a hug and the three of them spoke for a minute or two before they picked up any boxes. Seeing them there, standing on the sidewalk, hands shoved in pockets like true men, I was filled with a sort of . . . longing. We’d been good together, the group of us. I missed that.
There was barely enough room to work once we’d unloaded all my stuff, but we managed to fit a card table for my sewing machine, my dress form, and a stack of plastic bins full of notions—lace and buttons and anything else I might need—into the tiny space. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do.
“Any progress?” I asked Alex. He lingered in the doorway while Isaac took Chase and Darius to the main house to show them around. Ultimately, there wasn’t a reason to even make a dress if Alex didn’t think he could mount enough evidence against Sasha. Because without it, I wouldn’t risk crashing the wedding, not when Sasha wouldn’t hesitate to ruin my future in designing.
“I think I’m getting closer,” Alex said, though the doubt in his voice betrayed him. “I’m trying to look for patterns. Similar amounts, similar dates. I don’t know. I think I’ll get there.”
“I’ve been thinking back through my time there trying to remember anything that seemed suspicious,” I said. “The only thing I can come up with is this one fabric dealer she always worked with. His name was something different. Solomon something?”
Alex nodded. “Solomon Rivers. I’ve seen his name on the statements. He was a fabric dealer?”
“That’s what she told me. A wholesaler. She was very protective of their relationship. I don’t think any of the other designers ever worked with him, and I definitely didn’t ever see him at the office.”
“As a Senior Designer, that would be typical, right? Didn’t she handle most of the buying?”
“She did less than everyone else, but she was involved enough, it didn’t seem unusual for her to have a specific relationship with a wholesaler. At least not from my side of things. I can ask Chase for his opinion if that would help.”
“Do you remember ever seeing statements of what she purchased from him?”
“That’s just it. There never were any. No receipts. That’s what made me ask about him. Because it was my job to catalog the receipts. She said Solomon sent them straight to Accounting so I didn’t need to worry about them.”
“Sounds fishy,” Alex said.
“Let me text Chase and ask him what he knows,” I said. I keyed out a message, asking him to come up to my room before he and Darius left for their hotel.
A few minutes later, he dropped onto the chair that had replaced the red couch and leaned his head back. Poor guy. He’d been on the road for almost twelve hours. He was probably exhausted.
“Have you ever heard of a fabric wholesaler named Solomon Rivers?” I asked him.
He furrowed his brow. “Solomon? No. Never.”
“Sasha did a lot of ordering from him. I actually think most of our fabric came through him. You’re sure it doesn’t sound familiar?”
Chase looked at me like I’d stolen the only pecan pie at the end of Thanksgiving dinner. “The last two years we’ve worked almost exclusively with Phoenix and Finn. Their agent, Carmella, you remember her, right?”
I shook my head no, but that wasn’t surprising. Sasha kept me pretty far removed from the design side of her job. Well, except when she was stealing my designs, but that was a moot point.
“So you never saw or met with this Solomon Rivers guy?” Alex asked.
“Never,” Chase said. “What kind of a name is that anyway?”
“Maybe a made-up one,” Alex said. “Do you have any memory of working with fabric that didn’t come from Phoenix and Finn?”
“No,” Chase said. “Well, possibly here and there. Sample pieces an individual designer would bring in. But even those things would be taken to Carmella, in hopes that she could provide us with something similar when it came time to buy for a new collection. As long as I’ve been at LeFranc, Carmella has handled our wholesale account. I’m sure about that.”