Chapter 80

• The boutique was closed that morning. Claudia had drawn the curtains before I arrived, and someone had written a note in careful block letters and taped it to the door: “Temporarily Closed for Inventory.” It was not a lie, but it was not the full truth either. We were not counting garments or checking receipts. We were collecting ourselves.
• Julian sat at the back table, flipping through the morning papers with a kind of practiced detachment, the way someone reads not to learn something new, but to see how far the story has traveled. Helena had come in early, too, laptop open, phone buzzing with messages that none of us answered right away. There were too many to sift through. Too many headlines. Too many voices trying to interpret something that had not been theirs to hold.
• I had not slept. Or rather, I had slept for a few hours in the quiet pocket between midnight and dawn, only to wake with the kind of weight that does not shake off easily. I had poured tea, stared at the window, and read every word of the altered footage Alessia had released. Not once. Not twice. But four times. I wanted to understand what they had done. I wanted to feel the damage with clarity, not guess at it from behind fear.