Nina POV
Nina's phone was face down on the nightstand.
She knew before she even touched it. The way it had buzzed continuously from two in the morning until she finally turned it on silent at four. The way she had lain in the dark listening to the silence and feeling the buzzing anyway, like it had gotten inside her chest.
She picked it up.
Forty-seven missed calls.
Not texts. Not emails. Calls. From her brand manager. From her publicist. From two journalists whose numbers she recognized. From her college roommate who never called. From a number she did not know that had tried six times.
She sat up.
She opened the comments on last night's post.
She stopped reading after thirty seconds.
The first half was what Kevin had promised. Fans celebrating her. Women saying she was an inspiration. The fashion crowd calling the collection groundbreaking. That half was real and warm and exactly what three years of work deserved.
The second half was something else entirely.
Heartless. That word appeared more than any other. Cold. Cruel. She divorced him while he was working a minimum wage job and then put his photo online as a joke. Who does that. I used to love her brand but I cannot support someone who treats people like this. Does she have any idea what that man's face looks like in that photo. Someone find him and tell him he is better off.
Nina put the phone face down again.
She breathed in slowly through her nose. Out through her mouth. She was not going to spiral. She was a professional. She had dealt with bad press before. This was manageable.
Her phone buzzed with a call. Kevin.
She answered.
"Do not go outside yet," he said immediately. "There are people outside your building."
"I know."
"It is going to pass. By tomorrow there will be a new story and nobody will remember this one."
"Kevin." She kept her voice very flat. "There are reporters outside my building."
"All publicity—"
"Is not good publicity." She stood up and walked to the window. Three people on the sidewalk below, two with cameras, one with a microphone. "My publicist called me fourteen times last night. My brand manager called me nine. Those are not people who call that many times when everything is fine."
A pause. "Let me handle it."
"You keep saying that."
"Because I keep being right." His voice was warm and steady, the voice he always used when she was anxious, the voice that had talked her down from a hundred ledges in two years. "Get dressed. Go to the office. Work. By end of day this will look different."
She hung up.
She stood at the window and looked at the people below with their cameras pointed at her building and she thought about the document she had signed last night without reading it and the cold stone feeling that had settled in her stomach afterward and had not left.
She got dressed and went to the office through the back entrance.
Her brand manager Priya was waiting inside the door.
Priya had been with Nina since the beginning. She was calm under pressure, creative in a crisis, and almost impossible to rattle. She was visibly rattled.
"We have a problem," Priya said.
"I know about the comments."
"It is not just the comments." Priya pulled up her tablet. "Three brands that were going to partner with us for the spring campaign have gone quiet in the last twelve hours. Not cancelled, just quiet. Which in this industry means they are waiting to see if you become a liability." She turned the screen toward Nina. "And someone found an old interview where you talked about Ethan. You said he was your rock. You said you would not have survived the first year without him."
Nina looked at the screen.
It was a small interview from two and a half years ago. A boutique fashion blog. She had barely remembered giving it. But there it was, her own words in her own voice, and next to it the photo of Ethan with the mop cart, and the person who had posted it had simply put both things side by side with no caption at all.
They did not need one.
Nina set the tablet down.
"Give me an hour," she said.
She went into her office and closed the door and sat at her desk and pulled up the photo on her own screen. She had looked at it so many times since last night that she had stopped really seeing it. She made herself look at it again. Properly this time.
Ethan was in profile. He did not know the camera was there. His head was slightly down, not in a defeated way, just in the focused way he had when he was doing something that needed doing. His uniform was clean except for the one small stain near the pocket. His jaw was set. His shoulders were straight.
He looked like a man doing honest work.
That was all. That was the whole photo.
And someone had put her words across his face and called it funny.
Nina pressed her palms flat on the desk.
She did not feel guilty. She told herself this firmly. The divorce was the right decision. She had not posted that photo. She had not written that caption. She had simply given a speech at her own event and someone else had made it into something cruel. That was not her fault.
She told herself this again.
Then she told herself a third time.
It did not get more true.
At eleven-fifteen her assistant Mara knocked and came in.
Mara was twenty-three and very good at reading the room. She came in carefully, the way you enter a space when you are not sure what you are walking into.
"There is a reporter asking for comment," Mara said.
"Tell them no comment and refer them to the publicist."
"I did." Mara paused. "But she is not asking about the post."
Nina looked up. "What is she asking about?"
Mara looked down at the notepad in her hand. "She wants to know if you have any comment on Cole Group's announcement this morning."
Nina stared at her.
"Cole Group," Nina repeated.
"Yes."
"What does Cole Group have to do with me?"
Mara glanced at her notepad again. She looked genuinely uncertain, like she was not sure if she was missing something obvious or if this was as strange as it seemed.
"I don't know," Mara said. "But she said it was urgent. She said to tell you specifically—" Mara checked her notes. "She said to tell you the name of Cole Group's new chairman."
Nina went very still.
"Who is it?" she asked.
Mara looked up.
"Ethan Cole," she said.