J’ai passé quatre cents heures à broder ma robe de mariée. Puis je l’ai vu sur ma sœur, avec mon fiancé tenant son champagne.

I’d seen the filing date on the website when it launched. I’d told myself it was a coincidence. I’d told myself a lot of things.

I left Atelier Fontaine at 7:40 that night with my veil over my arm. I didn’t cry in the car. I cried later, at home, on my studio floor, next to the cold bowl of pasta.

Then I got up. I washed my face. And I went to the flat steel cabinet in the corner of my studio, where I keep every sketch I’ve ever made, and I opened the third drawer.

Every sketch I’ve ever made is dated. Nana Rose taught me that, too.

“Write the date in the corner, baby,” she used to say. “Always. One day, somebody’s going to tell you your own idea was theirs. And the date is going to be the only friend you’ve got.”

The third drawer held the lily gown. Forty-one pages. The first one dated May, almost a year before my engagement, when it was only an idea.

A single sprig of lily of the valley, curving across a bodice. Then the silhouette. Then the stems, wind-blown.

Then the pearl placement, flower by flower. Behind the sketches were the photographs. Odile photographs every stage of every gown in her workroom, for the insurance.

Hundreds of them, all timestamped. My hands in the hoop. The first lily.

The hundredth. And behind the photographs, in a clear plastic sleeve, was a certificate I’d almost forgotten about. United States Copyright Office.

Certificate of Registration. Visual art: embroidery design, “Lily of the Valley, Windblown.” Registered ten months earlier.

Odile had made me do it.

“Your hands are worth more than this building, chérie,” she’d said, filling out the form at her desk with her reading glasses on her nose. “Somebody will try to steal them. Somebody always does.”

I sat on the floor and spread it all out around me. Then I opened my laptop and typed Sienna Rose Bridal. I hadn’t looked at her website in months.

I’d been too busy embroidering. The homepage had changed. There was a new banner across the top.

The Debut Collection. Unveiling May 2 at the Ashcombe Glasshouse. Underneath was a single photograph. A sneak peek, the caption said.

The centerpiece gown. Silk crepe. A bateau neckline.

A long, low back. And across the bodice, curving down the skirt, wind-blown lily of the valley, in silk and seed pearls. My lilies.

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?”