The boutique sat on a narrow street called Linden Row in downtown San Aurelio, a city where glass towers pierced the sky and fortunes rose or collapsed without warning, yet this small storefront had once been the entire world to my mother and the beginning of something far larger than anyone in my family ever imagined.
My sister Aubrey Bennett folded her arms impatiently while glancing around the boutique with thinly disguised disgust and said, “Honestly Victoria, this place still smells like old fabric and forgotten dreams, and I still cannot understand why you keep pretending this shop means something important.”
I watched her carefully as she spoke because she wore a pair of heels from my company’s latest winter collection and she clearly believed she purchased them from an elite Parisian label rather than the corporation secretly owned by the sister she had mocked for two decades.
My brother Tyler Bennett leaned against the display counter with the tired confidence of a man who once believed he controlled the financial world, and he said with a short laugh, “Aubrey, leave her alone because some people cling to hobbies when real careers fail them.”