The following Monday, she asked the head of Sterling Living's design archive whether the original Caldwell records were still available. They were, though some had been scanned poorly during a succession of office moves. Victoria requested the files because she wanted to understand how the company's enduring furniture collections had developed, not because she intended to use them as evidence in a private inquiry. Miriam Cole agreed to a limited review so long as no confidential employee or contract information was disclosed to outsiders. The archive staff began organizing the records for her.
One folder contained early sketches for the Alder House collection, a line of clean oak cabinets with subtle tapered legs and carefully concealed joints. The series had been one of Sterling Living's most reliable sellers for more than ten years, purchased by people who might never have heard of its original studio. The earliest drawings were marked with a name Victoria had not expected to see. Daniel Brooks, junior designer, Caldwell Formworks. Beneath the technical measurements, the same narrow handwriting she had watched moving across wood in the workshop appeared again.
Victoria studied the drawings for nearly an hour. There were margin notes about strengthening cabinet doors without increasing their weight, sketches of drawer pulls that would be easier for arthritic hands, and a proposal to make repairable parts accessible without replacing an entire cabinet. Several of those features had survived through later revisions and become selling points in Sterling Living's marketing materials. Other drawings bore names of colleagues and supervisors, evidence of a team that had revised and developed them together. Victoria resisted the temptation to reduce the history to the simple discovery of a hidden genius whose work everyone had stolen.
She asked legal to trace the ownership and attribution records accurately. The contracts indicated that Caldwell had paid its designers as employees and licensed the resulting products to manufacturing partners. Those agreements explained how Sterling Living had obtained the right to sell the line, but they did not explain why the public history of the collection credited only senior executives and the studio itself. At some point, Daniel's contribution had been absorbed into a story in which the people who made things gradually disappeared behind the company name. That bothered Victoria more than she expected.
When she mentioned the discovery to Ethan, he did not act surprised. "That happens more often than most executives realize," he said. "The catalog remembers the product. It forgets the person holding the pencil."
Victoria remembered her mother's repaired yellow table and the way Eleanor always told guests exactly who had helped her finish a job. The contrast felt uncomfortably sharp. She instructed the design department to begin researching the origins of other long-running collections as well.