The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 254

The Night of Mirada 

HANNAH’S POV: 

I had thought beforehand about whether I was going to look at people as I walked or focus somewhere neutral above the crowd. Some designers look at their shoes. Some look straight ahead at nothing. I had decided that I was going to look at the people because this collection was for people and it felt wrong to walk through a room of them and pretend they were not there. 

So I looked. At the press in the second and third rows still trying to write things down even though their faces were betraying them. At the buyers with the expressions of people who were going to need to make a phone call after this. At the friends I could see scattered through the room, Cherry somewhere on the right side with her hand pressed over her heart, Jacob beside her, both of them watching me with an expression I recognised as the kind people get when they are genuinely proud of someone and do not quite know what to do with that. 

Paige was in the front row on the left side. She had been crying since before the show started and she was still crying and she was not trying to stop. She looked at me and I looked at her and I did not plan what I did next, it just happened. I looked at her face and I thought about her mother and my mother and the folder and the dress she was ear to her wedding and I said, without sound, just with my mouth, the words she had first said to me at Lub: I told you. 

Both hands over her mouth. 

room rose. 

I stood at the end of the runway and the applause came up around me like something physical, like the temperature of the room had changed, and I looked out at all of those faces and I thought about a woman named Mirada who had been twenty-two years old and brilliant and robbed of her name. I stood in the collection built from her story and I let the room be loud about it. 

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