Isabelle looked down at me, her dark eyes shining with unshed tears. For a moment—one fleeting, agonized second—I saw the woman who had held me while I cried over rejected sketches, the woman who had shared a single bowl of soup with me in the dead of winter. She reached out, her fingers lightly touching my jaw, her thumb brushing against my skin with a tenderness that made my eyes burn.
"We were beautiful once, Gabriel," she whispered softly. "But you can't buy back a foundation after you've set the house on fire."
She gently pulled her hand away and walked toward her small desk in the corner. She lifted a heavy, leather-bound ledger—the original record book of Laurent Atelier, the one where we had hand-written our very first orders in 2011.
"I didn't bring you here to hurt you," she said, opening the ledger to the final page. "I left that envelope in Soho because you deserved to know the full cost of your freedom. But there is one last thing you need to see. Something I found in my mother's estate after the surgery."
