Not similar. Mine. Down to the angle of the stems.

I clicked on the photo. There was a paragraph underneath.

“The Rose” is the heart of the collection, and the most personal design Sienna has ever created. Lily of the valley was her beloved grandmother’s favorite flower. Sienna spent her childhood at her grandmother’s side, learning to sew in a tiny alteration shop on Pell Street. This gown is her love letter to the woman who taught her everything.

I read it three times. Sienna had never threaded a needle in Nana Rose’s shop. Not once.

She used to sit on the front steps with her phone while I sat inside at Nana’s feet. Nana used to call her in for lemonade. That was all.

I scrolled down. Investor partners: Whitaker Vineyards Family Holdings. Graham’s mother.

I picked up my phone and called Odile. It was past nine on a Sunday night. She answered on the second ring, and I could hear the television behind her.

“Chérie,” she said. “Margot told me everything. I am going to k!ll your sister with a pair of pinking shears.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “I need you to call Theo.”

Theo Castellanos is Odile’s lawyer. He’s fifty-eight, wears bow ties, and specializes in intellectual property for fashion houses.

He sued a department store for copying one of Odile’s sleeves in 2015 and won so much money that the department store changed its whole design department. He met us at the atelier at eight the next morning.

He spent two hours at Odile’s long workroom table with my sketches, the photographs, the certificate, and Sienna’s website, without saying much of anything. Then he took off his glasses.

“Ms. Hale,” he said. “In thirty years, I’ve never seen a cleaner case. Your sister didn’t just copy a design. She copied a registered design, from a gown sitting in her sister’s own atelier, and she’s about to present it to investors and the press as her original work.” He tapped the paragraph about Nana Rose. “And then she wrote a fairy tale about your grandmother to sell it.”

“What can we do?”

“Today? We can send a cease-and-desist letter. Tomorrow, if she ignores it, we can file for an injunction.” He folded his glasses. “But Ms. Hale, if you want my honest advice? Don’t send anything yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’ll pull the gown, change three stems, call it something else, and launch anyway. And you’ll spend two years in court proving she copied a gown nobody saw.” He leaned back. “Or you can wait.”

“For what?”

“For her to stand up in front of three hundred people and the press,” Theo said, “and say it’s hers.”

There was one more thing I had to know before I decided. I’d been carrying it for two years. That night, I searched for the date.

The week of Sienna’s surgery. March, two years earlier. I scrolled back through her Instagram.

Nothing. She’d posted nothing that week. That was the week she’d been “recovering.”

Then I searched the other way. I searched the bridal industry. And on the third page of results, I found it.

The Lumière Bridal Market, in New York. The biggest bridal trade show on the East Coast. Every year, the third week of March.

I went to the market’s photo gallery. New designers. Emerging talent.

Day two. And there, in the background of a photo of a booth full of sample gowns, holding a clipboard and laughing with a buyer, in a black blazer and her hair in a sleek ponytail, was my sister.

The caption said: Sienna Hale, Sienna Rose Bridal (launching soon!), exhibiting at the Emerging Designers Pavilion. The emerging designers’ booth fee was listed on the market’s website. Twelve thousand four hundred dollars.

Due one week before the market. The week I’d wired her fifteen thousand dollars for her cyst. I sat at my desk and looked at that photograph for a long time.

Sienna, laughing, in a black blazer. On the day she’d sent me a picture of herself in a hospital bed. I took a screenshot.

I printed it. I put it in the folder with everything else. Then I called Theo.

“I’ll wait,” I said.

Eleanor Whitaker called me herself on Wednesday. I didn’t expect that. I’d met her a dozen times over three years.

She’s sixty-five, silver hair in a low chignon, always in pale linen, and she runs Whitaker Vineyards with the same quiet, terrifying calm that she uses to choose a wine.

“Juliet,” she said. “I’d like you to come to the house. This afternoon. Alone, if you don’t mind.”