Chapter 12

• I woke at three thirty in the morning.
• The loft was still, and the silence pressed gently against the windows. Only the distant hum of the city stirred. Beneath my sheets I remained motionless, eyes open, staring into the grain of ceiling shadows. The echoes of yesterday circled slowly through my mind. I thought of legal notices. I thought of boutiques freezing orders. I felt again the anxious flutter that had lived beneath my ribs since the first cancellation.
• I had cried. I had accepted that fear was real. And yet, something inside me had shifted. My armor had cracked, but what it revealed was not weakness. It was a truth I had hidden even from myself. I was not just the architect of this strategy. I was its anchor. And I was afraid.