Chapter 91

• The boutique had been quiet all morning. Not empty. Just still in that way a room can be before something begins. The windows were polished, the displays reworked, and the air carried that faint scent of fresh linen and cedar that always came with new fabric shipments. No one rushed. No one whispered. There was a sense of breath being held, but not in fear. In readiness.
• This was not a reopening. It was not a rebrand. It was something else. Something slower, deeper. The kind of change that does not arrive with loud declarations but with the deliberate act of choosing a new name and standing inside it.
• The invitation had gone out under a name that did not belong to one woman alone. It was not Juliana Cross. It was not Noelle Vale. It was Noelle Juliana.