Chapter 4

I stopped at a clinic on the way home. Six stitches, a bandage the size of a credit card, and a nurse who kept asking if I felt safe at home. I told her I'd tripped. She didn't believe me, but she'd probably learned long ago that some women aren't ready to tell the truth.

The brownstone was empty when I got back. Salvatore and Isabella were out—dinner somewhere that required a reservation and a reputation. I went straight to my room and started pulling out every design I'd ever committed to paper.

The pile was thicker than I expected. Years of work, hundreds of hours of drafting and erasing and starting over. Every single page accounted for. Nothing missing.

So how?

How was she doing it?

I sat on the floor, surrounded by my own work, and let the question settle around me like cold air. No malware. No hidden cameras. No sign of entry. My physical drafts never left my control. My computer was clean. And yet Alessia had produced identical work, on a faster timeline, every single time.

I checked the firm's internal messaging platform. The group chat was alive with activity—dozens of messages scrolling past, most of them variations on a theme.

She should be terminated immediately.

How is she still employed here?

Her poor sister. Imagine finding out your own family would do that to you.

I always thought she was strange. Too quiet.

I'd lived this before. The phone calls that came at all hours. The strangers who found my number and used it. The way the word plagiarist started to feel less like an accusation and more like a name.

Last time, I'd hidden in my apartment for ten days. A rental in Brooklyn, nothing fancy, but it had walls and a lock. They'd found it anyway. Someone had hung a sign on the door: THIEF. Another had spray-painted FRAUD across the front window while I watched from behind the blinds.

When I finally ran out of food, I'd waited until 2 a.m. and crawled through a service alley to a bodega three blocks away. I was crouched on the curb, eating a cold empanada with both hands, when a kid spotted me. Maybe nine years old.

"Mom," he'd said, loud enough for the whole street. "It's that lady. The one from the internet."

He'd thrown a water bottle at me. Then he'd spit.

His mother had pulled him away, but not before I saw her expression. Disgust, maybe. Or worse—indifference. The kind of look you give something you'd scrape off your shoe.

I'd sat on that curb for another hour. The city had continued around me, indifferent and enormous. I'd thought about my grandmother, alone upstate, and about how tired I was. How heavy my body had become. How easy it would be to just stop.

The roof had seemed like the simplest answer.

Now I sat on my bedroom floor, a dead woman with fresh stitches and a second chance, and I made a decision.

I wasn't playing this game anymore.

If Alessia could only produce work when I designed first, then I'd stop designing. The firm could find another jeweler. The competition could go on without me. Let her explain why her miraculous talent had suddenly dried up.

I drafted my resignation email. Short. Professional. No explanations, no accusations—just a clean severance. I also withdrew from the competition, effective immediately.

Then I packed a bag.

The tickets I bought were for the earliest bus heading north the next morning. Not a strategic retreat this time. Not a power play. Just going home to the one person who'd never looked at me like I was something that needed to be fixed.

I didn't leave a note. I didn't say goodbye.

The bus station smelled like disinfectant and old coffee. I bought a ticket from a machine that didn't care about my name and found a seat near the back. The window was cold against my bandaged temple as the city started to shrink behind me.

Let her explain her way out of this. Let her produce designs from thin air.