I Made His Wife’s Dress Now I’ll Marry Another Chapter 54
The emergency meeting was held on the top floor of Whitmore headquarters.
When I arrived, Grandfather sat at the head of the long table, the board minutes he had already signed placed beside his hand. My father sat to his left, dark circles under his eyes. The other directors wouldn’t look at me. They stared instead at the projections of nine garments on the screen.
The nine garments that had defined Whitmore’s most important windows for the last six years.
Grandfather’s eyes went first to my tool bag. “The master patterns?”
“With my counsel.”
His cane hit the floor. “Those are company property.”
“That’s why I brought a lawyer.”
The lawyer behind me laid out nine trust summaries, the copyright-correction filings, and the board minutes, one by one, on the table.
“Whitmore has been paying royalties on these designs into Miss Clara Whitmore’s trust,” he said. “The company then froze those disbursements when she refused a marriage arrangement. Now, the company acknowledges she is the original designer, while simultaneously demanding she unconditionally surrender the only master patterns that prove the original handwriting. Those three positions cannot all stand at once.”
A muscle twitched in Grandfather’s jaw.
“I can make you creative director,” he said. “We’ll correct the internal records. We’ll pay you the back royalties. But the public credit remains unchanged.”
“Why?”
“Because Sabine’s name is already tied to those collections. Change it now, and you destroy Whitmore.”
I looked at the image of the ivory rehabilitation coat on the screen.
“It isn’t the correction that will destroy it,” I said. “It’s the fact that the lie stood for six years.”