The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 273

A Name Returned 

HANNAH’S POV: 

I put the phone face down on the worktable and kept looking at the pieces. 

Sandra, who missed absolutely nothing, said without looking up from the hem she was examining, “Go and look. boss. Then come back and be present here.” 

I looked at her. 

“It is your mother’s name,” she said, still not looking up. “You are allowed to look at what happens when it goes out into the world. Then you come back and we finish the review.” 

I picked up the phone. 

The case had been filed in two jurisdictions simultaneously, which was Castellan’s strategy and which she had described as making it expensive and noisy and difficult to absorb cleanly. The filing document was public record and the press had received embargoed information the night before through the journalist Castellan’s team had been working with, a woman named Lura Mike who had been writing about intellectual property and the fashion industry for fifteen years and who had asked every question I had hoped she would ask when we first spoke. 

The article was live. I read the headline: Mirada Kensington: The Woman Who Built a Fashion Empire and Was Erased From It. 

I sat down on the nearest stool. 

I read the whole thing. It took twelve minutes. Lura Mike had written it with the sort of care that you can feel in every sentence, the care of someone who understood that this was not just a business story or a legal story but a human story about a woman who had made something beautiful and been robbed of the credit and who had, against everything, left enough of a paper trail that fifty years later the truth had somewhere to land. 

The folder was referenced. The contracts were referenced. My mother’s own letter, the one she had written two weeks before she had an accident with my fsther and they both died, was quoted in the closing section. Just one line from it. I am not angry. I am sad for the time lost. But this work existed and these designs existed and me, I existed. 

I pressed the phone against my chest for a moment. 

Then I stood up, put the phone back face down on the worktable, and said, “Right. Where were we with the hem on piece four?” 

Sandra handed me the measuring tape without a word. 

That was the beginning. 

I called Adele that evening. 

She had been following the coverage from her house, which she had told me the night before in a message that said simply: I am watching. I am so proud. And then a second message that said: your mother would not have been surprised. She believed this was always possible. 

When I called she answered quickly, which meant she had been expecting me to call. 

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