Love Redesigned

by Jenny Proctor

  “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.”

  “So what we need is proof that Solomon Rivers isn’t a fabric wholesaler or a dealer of any kind,” I said. “If we can prove that, then we can prove that all those charges Sasha made over the past however many months were fraudulent, right?” I looked at Alex. “Can you do that?”

  I glanced at Chase. He sat perfectly still, his lips pulled into a tight line across his face. I’d explained everything when I’d called him; he knew he didn’t have to be involved unless he wanted to be. I didn’t have anything to lose, really. I’d already lost my job at LeFranc and left New York. But Chase did.

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “I’m suddenly wishing I’d taken that class on forensic accounting when I had the chance.” He moved to the door. “If Solomon Rivers is incorporated, then the location of their headquarters, the president of the LLC, general contact information, that’s all publicly accessible information on file with the state.”

  “What if it’s registered overseas?” Chase said. “That’s what people do, right? If they e
mbezzle money, they store it in offshore accounts to avoid taxes?”

  I raised an eyebrow in Chase’s direction.

  He shrugged “What? I watch a lot of movies.”

  “Let me do some research,” Alex said. “I think I might know someone who can help. My friend, Angelica, did specialize in forensic accounting. I think she’ll at least be able to point me in the right direction.”

  I raised my arms into a shrug, motioning to the room around me. “And in the meantime?” I asked.

  “Oh, start sewing,” Alex said. “This woman is going down.”

  As soon as we heard the studio door close, Chase leaned in. “Okay. All jokes aside? I need to know what’s going on between you two.”

  I huffed a laugh. “What does it look like?”

  “Uh, it looks like he’s going to a lot of effort to help you steal back a wedding dress.”

  “It’s not about that for him,” I said. “This is his family we’re talking about. It’s personal.”

  Chase crossed his arms. “Stepfamily.”

  “Still.”

  Chase just looked at me, doubt written all over his face.

  “Why is it so hard for you to imagine two people working together to reach the same goal for different reasons?”

  “Maybe I could if we were talking about any other two people. But the two of you were in love less than a year ago. I think I’m justified in saying that complicates things.”

  “It’s been more than a year,” I said. “A year and . . . four months.”

  Chase rolled his eyes. “But who’s counting, right?”

  “I know. It’s weird. But it’s like we’ve landed in this strange middle ground where we’re polite and courteous and we get along. We just don’t talk about anything that happened.”

  Chase huffed. “But that’s not sustainable. Eventually, stuff will come up.”

  “What else is there to say?” I countered. “He apologized in New York.”

  “But you’re still mad,” Chase said.

  I stared at my hands. Mad wasn’t the right word. “I’m scared,” I finally said. “I feel like I barely came out of the fog a few months ago. It was worse than just getting over a broken heart. It was getting over it without any sense of closure. I finally feel okay again. I don’t know if I can risk opening my heart to him again.”

  “I know, sweetie,” Chase said. “But you’re still standing, even after all that. And now there’s this man who is so good in so many ways. And it might be worth recognizing—at least acknowledging that it’s a possibility—he’s doing this big thing because he still cares about you.”

  I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets. “Don’t say that. I can’t think about that right now.”

  “You know what Mark Twain said about denial?” Chase asked. “It ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not about being in denial. It feels like I just got the dam built, you know? My feelings for Alex are contained, safe, walled up. If you mess with that wall right now? It’s not like a little bit might trickle out. It’s all or nothing. The whole dam will break, and I can’t deal with a deluge. I’m afraid it will break me for good.”

  Chase stood and crossed the tiny room to where I sat at my makeshift sewing station. He pulled me to my feet and wrapped me in a hug. “Okay,” he said softly. “I get it. I won’t push.”

  I gave his shoulders a quick squeeze and draped my measuring tape over his shoulders. “Ready to make an ugly dress?”

  “Absolutely not. I’m ready to go to the beach. We can start the ugly dress tomorrow.”

  “What is it with you and the beach? It’s November. It’s not even warm enough to be at the beach.”

  “It was sixty-five degrees when we pulled up this afternoon,” Chase said, indignant. “That’s plenty warm enough. I didn’t say I wanted to swim.”

  “But it’s forty degrees now. And windy. I promise it isn’t as magical as you think this time of year.”

  He tossed my measuring tape back at my head. “You’re a terrible buzzkill, you know that, right?”

  I grinned. “What if we compromise and go get seafood for dinner?”

  “Ohhh, I’m intrigued. All of us?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. But you’re buying. I’m totally broke.”

  Chase rolled his eyes. “I miss the days when Alex was making enough money to buy us all dinner, all the time. How much does your brother pay him anyway?”

  “I doubt it’s half as much as he made at LeFranc, but he doesn’t seem to care.”

  “Yeah, I’ve picked up on that. He seems happy here,” Chase said. “Different, but happy. It’s like Alex 2.0.”

  I couldn’t tell Chase how much I agreed with him; if I did, I was pretty sure he’d pick up on the hope in my voice—the hope I’d just tried really hard to convince Chase didn’t even exist.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Alex

  I’d never really loved Thanksgiving. Since I lived with my Dad full time, I’d always spent holidays with Mom and Alicio. Thanksgiving at the LeFranc house had always looked like it belonged in a magazine. Everything looked perfect, right down to the coordinating outfits Mom made us wear to dinner. The meals had been extravagant, prepared by a kitchen full of personal chefs I always felt sorry for because wouldn’t they rather have been cooking a Thanksgiving meal for their own families?

  Once a photographer from ELITE Fashion had come to dinner and taken a photograph of Alicio at the head of the table, a cashmere scarf loosely draped around his neck, the glistening, perfectly browned turkey displayed on the table before him. In the photo that made the magazine, he held my mother’s hand. Though he stared at the camera, smiling broadly, she stared at him, warmth and affection in her gaze. In the foreground, two boys in matching sweaters sat on either side of the happy couple. I had taken my sweater off before dinner, claiming the wool made my neck itch. That was the reason my mother gave later, after the magazine had gone to press with the third son cropped out of the shot. My lack of a sweater.

  Dani and I had spent one Thanksgiving together in New York, the only time I actually remembered liking the holiday. It had been the six of us. Chase and Darius, Paige and Reese, me and Dani. Reese and Dani had done most of the cooking; Darius baked all the pies. I’d felt mostly useless—I didn’t know the first thing about basting a turkey—but there was something magical about watching from the sidelines, seeing the meal come together from the efforts of the people I’d grown to care most about in the world.

  That Thanksgiving felt like a lifetime ago.

  The scene in Isaac’s kitchen wasn’t all that different, though Reese had been replaced with Isaac as sous chef. When Dani had asked for an assistant, he’d been quick to volunteer before anyone else even had the opportunity. The gesture had clearly surprised Dani, but I could have predicted Isaac’s willingness. He had been intentional in his effort to be closer to his sister lately. Things weren’t perfect between them, but they were both trying, which went a long way toward creating a happy holiday atmosphere as they prepared the meal.

  Darius, of course, had agreed for a second time to take care of dessert. Which left me and Chase and the rest of the guys watching football in the living room.

  “Hey, can we get a hand in here?” Dani called from the kitchen.

  Chase moved to stand up, but I reached out my arm and stopped him. “I’ll go.”

  He raised an eyebrow, the expression in his eyes telling me he knew exactly why I was eager to be in the kitchen. I shrugged my shoulders, but I couldn’t exactly contradict him. I’d found a hundred different reasons already to pass through the kitchen, all of them completely unnecessary except for the fact that they brought me closer to Dani. I wasn’t ready to admit what it meant that I still felt so drawn to her, or worse, what it meant that I was finally giving in. But I wasn’t idiot enough to try and deny it either.

  I rounded the corner into the kitchen, and Dani smiled. Had her eyes lit up when she�
��d seen it was me? She and Isaac stood holding the large roasting pan full of turkey between them. “We didn’t exactly plan ahead,” Dani said. “Can you clear a space on the counter?”

  I shifted Darius’s pies to the edge of the island and moved a package of celery and a bag of carrots back into the fridge. “Where’s Darius?”

  “He had to go buy more butter for the mashed potatoes,” Isaac said. “Apparently, we underestimated just how many pies he intended to make.”

  “I should have warned you,” Chase said from the doorway. “Even when it’s just the two of us and his Mom, he makes at least two pies per person. The man feels strongly about his dessert.”

  “Two pies per person,” Isaac said. “I think this is a tradition we should try and implement when Mom and Dad come home.”

  “If they ever come home,” Dani said with a laugh. “I did not anticipate them loving Europe this much.”

  “They’ll come home eventually,” Isaac said. “I mean, sooner or later one of us will get married or have a kid. They’re bound to come back for something like that.”

  At once, Dani’s gaze flew to mine. The conversation we’d once had about children popped into my head. We’d been walking in Central Park after attending a fashion gala at the Met a couple of months before we’d broken up. We’d just passed the zoo, where some sort of children’s charity event had been taking place. “Do you want kids?” Dani had asked bluntly, looping her arm through mine.

  “I do,” I’d said, hardly taking time to think about my answer. “I’d like them to come with blonde curly hair and bright blue eyes.” I’d stopped walking then, and turned her to face me, slipping my arms around the small of her back. “Just like their mother.”

  She’d closed her eyes and I’d wondered for a moment if I’d spoken too plainly, too boldly. “What about you?” I whispered. “Do you want kids?”

  She’d smiled then, her cheeks full of new color. “Yeah. Twins might be fun. But I’m kind of partial to brown eyes.” She’d pulled herself closer to me, reaching up on tiptoe to kiss me just beside my left eye. Her lips trailed a row of kisses down to my earlobe, and then across my jawline until she found my lips. Her hands moved to my cheeks and she’d kissed me right there in front of a homeless woman, a hotdog vendor, and a pair of teenagers who appeared to be high on something, but not so high to keep them from whistling at us when the kiss didn’t stop. We’d kissed so many times in our relationship. Every day. But there was an unexpected tenderness to that moment that I wouldn’t ever forget.