international markets. Lawyers exchanged folders, camera flashes appeared through the glass wall, and one investor congratulated her on a deal expected to make headlines before evening. She thanked him with her usual composed smile, even while calculating how the agreement would affect shipping schedules and manufacturing capacity. Excitement had become a task on her calendar rather than something she actually felt.
She was thirty-six and lived alone in a house with rooms she entered so rarely that the housekeeping staff sometimes left furniture coverings in place for weeks. Her company operated factories, design studios, and distribution partnerships across three continents. Her face appeared in business magazines beside words like visionary, formidable, and relentless, and she knew perfectly well that formidable was often a polite substitute for difficult. She had worked long enough, and fought hard enough, to stop caring whether the people using those words liked her.
Her mother would have cared. Eleanor Sterling had cared about strangers, waitresses, delivery drivers, and the young woman who cleaned the little office Victoria rented when she launched the company. Eleanor believed that being successful made a person responsible for noticing more, not less. She had died before Sterling Living became the industry name it was now, after a long illness that stripped away the ordinary routines in which Victoria had always felt safest. The ring had been the one possession Victoria insisted on keeping close after the funeral.
Victoria had worn it for a few years, until long hours and repeated travel made her afraid of losing it. Instead, she slipped it into a hidden pocket in her wallet, behind a photograph of Eleanor standing in front of a crooked kitchen table with young Victoria at her side. That table had been one of the first pieces of furniture Eleanor restored herself. Its legs had not matched, but she had sanded them carefully and painted the wood the warm yellow of afternoon sunshine. "Something doesn't have to be expensive to be worth saving," she used to tell her daughter.
Victoria remembered those words as her town car carried her back through the city. She remembered them with particular bitterness because the wallet was probably being opened by someone who would notice the money first. Fifty thousand dollars could erase debt, pay rent, or change a stranger's year in ways Victoria understood only from a distance now. She would not even blame a person for feeling tempted. But the thought of Eleanor's ring sitting in a trash can after the cash had been taken made her stomach turn.