Every Word

You don't sleep that night either.

You sit at the office desk with the teaser on the screen and a legal pad beside you, writing down every detail of the Ridgeline you can remember. Arm radius. Seat height. The exact angle of the runners. Your hand cramps. You keep going, because the alternative is thinking about who could have sent those drawings to a company in Charlotte, and you already know the answer, and you don't want to know it.

Thorsten went home at ten. The stove has burned down to coals.

At 12:07 you hear tires on the gravel lot.

A white van. Headlights off before it even stops. Then the sliding door rattles, and Fiorella is there, still in the green flannel from this afternoon, holding a laptop against her chest with both arms like she's carrying something that might go off.

She's pale. Not tired-pale. Something else.

"I need to show you something," she says. "And I need you to let me get through all of it before you say anything. Okay?"

"Fiorella, what—"

"Okay?"

You nod.

She sets the laptop on the workbench, between a block plane and a coffee mug, and opens it. She doesn't sit. Neither do you.

"Two weeks before the party," she says, "Celandine came to my apartment. Her printer was broken, she said. She needed to print boarding passes for some trip to Charlotte, for work. She used my laptop. She was in a hurry. She left." Fiorella swallows. "She didn't log out of her email."

The screen glows. A browser. An inbox that isn't Fiorella's. celandine.ashbury@...

"I didn't look," Fiorella says. "I swear I didn't. I saw it was still open the next day and I almost closed it, and then I thought, she'll just log back in, it's not a big deal, and I forgot. I use the studio computer for everything. I didn't open this laptop again until tonight." Her voice catches and she pushes through it. "After I saw that teaser. After I saw your chair. I came home and I couldn't stop thinking about her calling the Cathedral table very farmhouse and then taking it anyway. So I opened it. And I searched for one word."

She types it into the search bar. Duvernay.

Forty-one results.

"Read from the bottom," she says quietly. "From February."

You read from the bottom.

The first email is from Langston Duvernay to Celandine. Friendly. A great to meet you at the hospitality summit note, a mention of how much he admired her brand work for Ashbury Inns, a line at the end: and your fiancé's work, if that rocker on your Instagram is his. Remarkable. Would love to talk.

The next one is longer.

Then they're not friendly anymore. They're something else.

L.D.: Frankly, the line is ready for production. He just doesn't have the capital or the name to do anything with it. We do. The question is how to get it without a fight.

C.A.: He'd never sell. He's sentimental about it. He'd rather sell nine chairs a year to people who "get it."

L.D.: Then he doesn't sell. If the designs come to us through you, and the launch is ours, what's he going to do? Sue? With what money? And who's going to believe him?

C.A.: People believe him. He's annoyingly likeable.

L.D.: Then make him not likeable. Publicly. Before the launch. A man who cheated on an Ashbury at his own engagement party doesn't get a sympathetic hearing from anyone in that town. He'll look bitter. A jilted guy claiming his ex stole his chair.

You stop reading. Your hands are flat on the bench. You don't remember putting them there.

"Keep going," Fiorella whispers. "I'm sorry. Keep going."

C.A.: I can do it at the engagement party. Two hundred people. Dad will make a speech, he can't help himself.

L.D.: And the texts?

C.A.: I have his phone password. I'll set up a contact, send a few messages from his phone to a burner while he's in the shop, screenshot them, delete them. He never checks his sent folder. I'll get a photo. Any guy in a parking lot from behind.

L.D.: Beautiful. And the files?

C.A.: Laptop and sketchbooks are at the house. The prototypes too. I'll have the locks changed during the party. He'll be too humiliated to fight about furniture.

The last emails are about money. A consulting agreement backdated to January. Three hundred thousand, payable on the Expo launch. A title: Vice President of Brand, Duvernay Home. A start date in November.

And then, the most recent one, dated the morning after the party.

L.D.: Flawless. You were made for this. Summit unveils Oct 14. Once it's on the floor with our name on it, he can scream all he wants.

C.A.: One loose end. My sister walked out with him. She's always taken his side. I'll handle her.

The shop is silent except for the river.

You read it again. And again. Annoyingly likeable. Any guy in a parking lot. He'll be too humiliated to fight about furniture. Three years of sharing a bed with someone. A ring you saved eleven months for. And the whole time, or at least since February, she was looking at you the way a buyer looks at a piece in a showroom: what's it worth, how do I get it home.

Something in your chest goes cold and very still.

"Ethan." Fiorella's voice is barely there. "Say something. Please."

"She used my phone." You hear yourself as if from across the room. "She sat in my house and texted a burner from my phone so she could put it on a screen."

"Yes."

"She planned the party around it. She let your dad make that speech on purpose."

"Yes."

"Did you know?" It comes out before you can stop it. You hate it the second it's out. "Before. Did you—"

"No." She says it fast and fierce, and her eyes fill, and she doesn't look away. "Not this. Never this. I found it two hours ago. I sat on my kitchen floor and read it and threw up, and then I got in the van."

You believe her. You don't even have to think about it. You believe her the way you believe in level and plumb.

"You know what this costs you," you say. "If we use it. She's your sister. Your dad—"

"I know exactly what it costs." She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, hard, like she's angry at it. "I did the math in the van. I don't care."

"Fiorella."

"She stole your work. She stood on a stage and made people laugh at you, and she planned it. She wrote I'll handle her about me like I'm a stain." She closes her hand around yours on the workbench, the first time she's touched you since she pulled you out of that great room, and her fingers are freezing and absolutely steady. "I'm not handling anything for her ever again."

She turns the laptop so the screen faces you fully. The thread. Forty-one emails. Dates, names, numbers.

"She planned all of it, Ethan," Fiorella says. "Every second of that night."

She doesn't let go of your hand.

"And I have every word."