Castoffs（Lila's POV）

I didn't realize I was trembling until I'd left the house. From the moment I stepped into that villa, I hadn't allowed myself a single stray thought — every ounce of willpower had gone toward maintaining the performance: I was Adrian's girlfriend.

For forty minutes at that dining table, I hadn't let my guard down once. Every barbed remark from Samantha, I caught with a smile. Every glance her father aimed at me, I met with studied indifference. The two of them had worked in perfect coordination, with a single shared objective: to test whether Adrian was real.

Samantha had probably expected me to run out crying after that comment, or slam the door on my way out with a face like stone. That was how it had always gone before — a few cutting words from her and my eyes would be red; one disapproving frown from Father and I'd go silent for days.

But not today.

I had shot to my feet, and in that instant I'd summoned the image of Adrian looking down at people with that particular expression of his — the one that reduced everyone in the room to something beneath notice. I'd borrowed it. Fixed Samantha with that same look, straightened my spine as though I'd finally found solid ground beneath me, and said with a coolness I barely recognized as my own: "Who exactly do you think you are, offering me your castoffs?"

The expressions on their faces had been worth every second of it. Samantha — who in any other version of this scene would have launched into a tirade — had simply frozen, her mouth working without sound.

Then Father had smiled that false smile of his and claimed Samantha had only been joking, before turning to rebuke me for frightening her. He said I was behaving like a creature without family feeling, without blood ties, like something not quite human.

How perfectly absurd. A man who had never once looked at me with any genuine regard was now scolding me for having the nerve to fight back.

My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and found an automated billing notice: the rent on my studio was coming due, and I still hadn't settled the outstanding balance with my fabric supplier.

Father's fake smile flashed through my mind again, and something settled into place. The plan had begun.

Father prized his reputation above everything else. So what would happen if I made him look bad?

What if I showed up to the gala looking like I'd scraped together an outfit from a clearance rack — standing next to Adrian Cyrus Lowell in some dated discount-store dress, in full view of every business associate Father had ever cultivated? The image alone would be enough to rattle him. People would talk. They'd say he was exactly what they'd always suspected: a self-made man with no real pedigree, a man who couldn't even be bothered to ensure his own daughter was dressed appropriately for a formal event.

I leaned against the lamppost and let the corners of my mouth curl slowly upward, then took out my phone and called him.

He picked up with the sound of my stepmother laughing in the background at something. He said a flat hello, his tone giving nothing away — clearly he hadn't expected to hear from me again so soon after I'd left.

"Dad," I said, keeping my voice easy. "I've been thinking about what you said. I can bring Adrian to the gala next Friday. But I need a favor."

Two seconds of silence. "What kind of favor?"

"My fabric supplier has been pushing for payment, and Adrian's already asked about it. And I can hardly show up with him in what I'm wearing now."

A beat of quiet followed — three seconds this time — and when Father spoke again his voice carried that particular caution he reserved for calculating risk: "Shut that little brand of yours down. No amount of money is going to make it work."

I smiled inwardly. I had expected exactly this.

"My boyfriend doesn't see it that way," I said. "He was actually surprised to hear my parents hadn't invested anything. He joked about whether I was really your daughter." That last part was something I had genuinely wondered myself, once. When I was small, I'd stolen one of Father's hairs and had a DNA test done on the quiet. The result had been a disappointment: I was his biological child after all.

Father went quiet in the way that meant he was recalculating. He didn't know whether to believe me, but Adrian was too large a fish to gamble on losing. When he spoke again his voice had the irritated flatness of a man being inconvenienced by someone he considered beneath him.

"How much?"

My pulse spiked. "Two hundred fifty thousand or so. The ready-to-wear line is already in sampling. Once the funds come through, I can launch."

A quarter million dollars was nothing to him — the price of a few pieces of jewelry for Samantha. Money given to me might as well be thrown into the ocean.

"I'm lending it to you," he said, his voice weighted and deliberate. "However you manage it, you pay back every cent — with interest."

He'd added conditions. It didn't matter. I had no intention of signing anything.

"Fine," I said.

After I hung up I stood under the lamppost and waited. Three minutes later my phone vibrated: a bank notification. The balance in my account had grown by a string of zeros.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I was going to use it to get Aurora's ready-to-wear line off the ground.

I put my phone away and glanced back at the house. A light was on in one of the third-floor windows — Samantha's dressing room, I was fairly certain, the one lined with dresses whose price tags I had never dared to look at.

I had lived in that house for thirteen years. After my parents' divorce, my room had always been the one at the end of the third-floor hallway, facing north — a room that was cold as a freezer in winter and airless in summer. When I came back after starting university, I found the room had been converted into Samantha's dressing room. My belongings had been packed into two cardboard boxes and left in the storage room.

Those boxes held a few old photographs and some pieces of jewelry I'd had since childhood. Samantha probably assumed they'd been thrown out. They hadn't been. They were still there in the corner of the storage room, buried under a stack of old tennis rackets and Christmas decorations.

I turned away from the light and walked toward the subway, moving quickly, leaving the warm amber glow and the faint smell of black tea behind me.

By the time I got back to the studio it was nearly nine o'clock.

I stood in the doorway and looked around: a converted warehouse, barely four hundred square feet, its walls covered in design sketches, dress forms clustered in one corner, the worktable scattered with measuring tape, tailor's chalk, and fabric shears.

I sat down at the table and opened my laptop, pulling up Aurora's planning document for the next season. The screen cast a pale light across my face as I looked over the designs I had drawn line by line, matched the fabric swatches against their color codes, and entered two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into the cost projection.

When I finished I leaned back in my chair and let out a long, slow breath. Behind my closed eyes, the list of what came next was already running: contact the fabric supplier, negotiate pricing, confirm the production schedule with the factory, get the samples made in time to have a finished run ready before the end of next month.

There was a great deal to do. It was all tedious and granular and every piece of it required money and time.

But I had money now.

I needed to get the production line moving before I went to apologize to Adrian — at minimum, it would make me look like an actual entrepreneur rather than someone who had deliberately engineered a collision for personal gain.

I thought back to the banquet hall. Adrian, a man whose schedule was precise to the minute, who had cleared time specifically to have dinner with me — did he really do all of that just to hear an apology?

Something told me it wasn't that simple.