I Made His Wife’s Dress Now I’ll Marry Another Chapter 57
On the day of the temporary hearing, the first snow of the season fell over New York.
Whitmore’s lawyers painted me as a woman who had abandoned her family for six years, only to return and claim historical achievements just as the brand was struggling.
“Miss Whitmore never handled production, sales, or promotion,” one of them argued. “Even if she contributed to early pattern drafting, the finished garments were the product of team labor.”
The judge looked at my lawyer. “Is she claiming to have completed every stage of the work herself?”
“I’m not,” I said, before he could answer.
Grandfather looked up at me.
“Samplemakers, cutters, embroiderers—they should all be credited and paid,” I said. “But ‘team labor’ is not a justification for replacing the original designer’s name with someone else’s.”
My lawyer then presented the royalty trust documents.
If I had never created anything independently, the family would never have established a design-based trust in my name. If the master patterns were assets the company unconditionally owned, Grandfather would never have needed to freeze the disbursements to force me toward Nathan Cross.
The very documents Grandfather had used to control me became the first pieces of evidence laid before the court.
My father sat in the gallery, growing paler by the minute.
The judge did not rule on final ownership that day. He allowed the existing inventory to continue selling temporarily but ordered that all disputed royalties from the nine silhouettes be placed into a supervised account.
Ten minutes later, Whitmore’s PR team issued a breaking news alert:
*Court Rejects Clara Whitmore’s Request for Complete Sales Ban.*
The headline made it look like I had lost.
Julien turned his phone facedown on the table. “Do you want to respond?”
“No.”
I looked out at the snow thickening beyond the window.
The part of the ruling that mattered wasn’t the sentence they chose for their headline.