Chapter Seven
Nerissa
I found the campaign materials the way I found most things concerning my own life lately, by accident, scrolling through Aureline's marketing preview folder that I still technically had access to from years of unpaid foundation work.
I'd logged into the shared drive that morning to pull an old donor list for the foundation's spring gala, a task that had nothing to do with the Marisol at all, and found myself, instead of closing the browser once I'd found what I needed, scrolling further into folders I hadn't opened in months.
Some instinct I didn't fully examine kept my cursor moving, folder after folder, until I landed on the one labeled Marisol Heritage Campaign, a name specific enough to make my stomach tighten before I'd even opened it.
REIMAGINING ONE OF AURELINE'S EARLIEST ICONIC DESIGNS.
The copy ran beneath a rendering of Room 314, restored almost exactly to its original specifications, down to the window seat I'd insisted on over a chair nobody would have questioned. Odette's name appeared in the credit line beneath the rendering. Mine appeared nowhere in the document at all.
I sat with the folder open for a long time before I did anything else, scrolling back through the earlier pages, the mood boards, the marketing copy, three separate mentions of Odette's design philosophy and not one mention of the woman whose actual design the entire campaign was built to celebrate.
I read the copy a second time, then a third, half hoping I'd missed my own name somewhere in the fine print, some small credit line tucked into a footnote I'd overlooked in my first read.
There was nothing. Thirteen years of my own history, repackaged as someone else's heritage story, ready to run in front of thousands of guests who would never once know the room they were sleeping in had come from anyone but Odette Voss.
I kept scrolling, unable to stop myself, and found a promotional video script attached further down the folder, storyboarded shots of Odette walking through the recreated room, narrating in voiceover about the inspiration behind its design.
I read the script twice, my hands cold by the second pass, watching my own memories, my own words even, filtered through someone else's mouth and presented as her personal creative journey.
The script quoted a version of my old jewelry box line, softened and reworded just enough to avoid direct plagiarism, attributed entirely to Odette's evolving design philosophy over the years.
That was the detail that finally moved me from stunned to something sharper. Not the missing credit line alone. The specific theft of language I recognized as unmistakably my own, laundered through enough rewording to look original while carrying every trace of where it had actually come from.
I called Camille before I did anything else, needing to hear the situation described back to me by someone outside my own head before I trusted my read on it.
"They're rebuilding Room 314 for the Marisol launch," I told her. "Down to the window seat. And the credit line names Odette."
"Have you talked to Stellan about it?"
"Not yet. I wanted to make sure I wasn't overreacting before I did."
"Nerissa." Camille's voice was gentle but firm. "You're not overreacting. If anything, you've been under-reacting for months. Go talk to him."
Her certainty steadied something in me, enough that I finally closed my laptop and drove to the house instead of sitting with the folder open for another hour, building a case in my own head that I might talk myself out of presenting at all.
I found Stellan in his home office that evening, phone in one hand, the campaign folder open on my own screen in the other.
"I designed Room 314," I said, setting the phone down on his desk between us.
He looked at it, then at me, confusion crossing his face before understanding caught up. "I know you did."
"Does she?"
"Of course she does." He said it quickly, easily, like the question itself didn't quite make sense to him. "Odette's been around long enough. Everybody knows the history."
"Does your company?"
Something shifted in his expression, the first real flicker of understanding what I was actually asking. "Nerissa, everybody who matters knows what you did."
"Who matters, Stellan?"
He didn't answer right away. I watched him search for something to say, watched the silence stretch long enough to become its own answer, and felt something in my chest go very quiet and very still.
"I'll have them add your name to the credit line," he said finally, already reaching for his phone. "I'll call Griffin tonight. It'll be fixed by morning."
"That makes it worse."
He looked up at me, genuinely baffled. "I don't understand. Isn't that what you want?"
"I don't want my husband to fix this with a phone call, Stellan.
I don't want credit that has to be requested after the fact, quietly, because his wife noticed the omission and made a fuss about it.
I want it to have never been left out in the first place, because the person approving the campaign understood, without being told, that it was mine.
" My voice had gone very steady, very calm, in the way it only did when I was holding something enormous underneath it.
"It was never yours to give me. It was already mine. You just let everyone forget."
"Nerissa, that's not fair. I've never once denied your work. I've said your name to that reporter myself, more than once, over the years."
"Saying my name in a private conversation isn't the same as making sure the world remembers it.
You used to understand the difference." I closed my laptop, the campaign folder disappearing along with the screen.
"You used to insist on it. Now you're offering to patch it after the fact, like an oversight instead of a pattern. "
"What do you want me to do, Nerissa? Tell me exactly, and I'll do it."
"I want you to have already done it. That's the entire problem with the question.
You're asking me what fixes this moment, and I'm telling you the moment was never the actual issue.
It's every moment like it, going back years, that you let slide because correcting them cost you something small and inconvenient. "
"That's not who I want to be."
"I know it's not who you want to be. I'm asking whether it's who you've actually become, one convenient silence at a time." I stood, my hands steadier than I expected. "I don't think you can answer that tonight. I'm not sure I can either."
He didn't have an answer for that. I watched him try to find one, watched him fail, and left the room before either of us said anything we couldn't take back that night.
I sat in our own guest room for a long time that night rather than our bedroom, needing distance without yet being ready to name what kind. My phone buzzed once, Stellan, a text rather than a call, as though he understood I needed the space more than I needed his voice again so soon.
I'm sorry. I mean that more than I know how to say right now.
I didn't respond immediately. I lay awake most of the night turning the conversation over. The anger had thinned into grief, and for the first time I understood exactly what I was grieving.
I called Marlowe close to midnight, needing to hear a voice that had known me before any of this, before I'd let myself become someone whose entire professional history required a phone call to Griffin to correct.
"I think I finally said the actual thing," I told her. "Not the polite version. The real one."
"How did it feel?"
"Terrifying. And also like exhaling after holding my breath for years." I sat up against the headboard in our guest room, phone pressed to my ear. "I don't know what happens next. I don't think he does either."
"You don't have to know yet. You just had to finally say it out loud, to him, plainly, instead of just carrying it by yourself. That's the actual milestone tonight, regardless of what he does with it."
"What if he doesn't do anything with it?"
"Then you'll know something important that you don't currently know. Either way, you're not worse off for having said the truth instead of swallowing it one more time." Her voice was steady, certain. "Get some sleep if you can. Call me tomorrow, whatever happens."
I promised her I would, and lay back down, and though sleep came slowly and unevenly, something in me had settled simply from having said the confrontation out loud to someone who understood exactly what it had cost me to finally have it.
Stellan left early the next morning, before I woke, no note this time, the first morning in longer than I could remember without one. I found him instead at the kitchen table when I finally came downstairs, dressed for work, cradling a cup of coffee he clearly hadn't touched.
"I didn't know if you wanted a note," he said, quiet, uncertain in a way I wasn't used to hearing from him. "After last night. I didn't want to assume."
"I don't know either, honestly."
"The interview's tonight. The televised one, for the launch. I could postpone it, if you need more time before I'm back in front of cameras talking about any of this."
"Don't postpone it on my account. I'll be fine."
He studied me for a long moment, clearly wanting to say something more and unable to find the right words for it, and finally just nodded, gathered his things, and left for the day with none of his usual energy, the whole exchange leaving a silence between us that felt different from every other silence we'd navigated in thirteen years of marriage.