Chapter 3

The theme of the open competition was “Belonging.”

I drew for an entire week.

Rejected drafts piled across the cutting table, but I still couldn’t find the heart of the collection.

The Sterling family cut off my allowance, and the brand that had promised me part-time work suddenly backed out.

So I attended classes during the day, revised designs for a clothing store at night, then returned to the sewing room after midnight to keep working.

Through the worst of it, the family seamstress, Marta, always left a light on for me.

One evening, she was widening the right armhole of a garment for a client.

The woman had injured her shoulder and couldn’t raise her arm very high. Regular ready-to-wear clothes were always uncomfortable for her.

“Life is already hard enough,” Marta said. “People shouldn’t have to force their bodies to accommodate their clothes too.”

She pulled an old measurement notebook from a cabinet.

It contained notes on all kinds of bodies.

One person had uneven shoulders. Another woman’s waist and abdomen had changed after childbirth. Someone else could barely raise her right arm because of an injury.

Beside one entry, Marta had written a sentence.

“It’s not the body that’s wrong. It’s the garment.”

I stared at those words.

And suddenly, I knew what I needed to design.

Belonging wasn’t about forcing everyone into the same standard.

It meant creating something that could accommodate a person exactly as they were.

I named the collection “Second Skin.”

Marta helped me refine the patterns and construction techniques while I handled the designs.

I also drafted a collaboration agreement.

Any future profits would be divided according to our actual contributions, and both our names would appear on the work.

Marta stared at it for a long time.

“I’m just a seamstress. You really want my name on it?”

“Without you, my drawings would always be nothing more than drawings.”

Once the full proposal took shape, I noticed a login record on my computer from the middle of the night.

The sketches beside my desk had also been rearranged.

The sewing room lock hadn’t been damaged.

There weren’t many people who could freely enter this place.

I said nothing.

I moved the real designs to an encrypted drive and saved the entire revision history.

Then I deliberately left a fake version on my desktop.

The concept, colors, and renderings were complete enough to look convincing.

Only the construction was wrong.

You couldn’t see the flaws from the drawings.

But once the garment was made, raising an arm would distort it, turning would pull the waistline out of place, and bending forward would inevitably split the back seam.

That night, I received another unauthorized-login alert.

Ten minutes later, the connection ended.

By the time I reached the sewing room, the folder on my desktop was empty.

The printed construction drawings were gone too.

Whoever did it had erased the access history.

What they didn’t know was that the system also kept records of external devices.

Marta asked if I wanted to call the police.

I shook my head.

“Not yet. We don’t have enough evidence.”

Three days later, Chloe publicly revealed her competition entry.

She called it “Homecoming.”

In the promotional video, she stood in the Sterling family garden wearing a white dress and told the story of how she had spent twenty-two years separated from her family before finally returning to her biological parents.

Behind her were the designs.

From the color palette to the construction, they were identical to my fake drafts.

She had submitted them six hours before I did.

That afternoon, a post appeared on the academy forum accusing me of being jealous of the biological daughter and stealing Chloe’s ideas.

It included fragments of my sketches.

The timestamps had been cropped out, and the sequence had been rearranged.

At first glance, it genuinely looked as if I had copied her.

I saved every page.

I didn’t explain anything.

She hadn’t just stolen a fake design.

She had already prepared witnesses and a fake timeline for herself.

What she didn’t know was that the beautiful-looking “Homecoming” had a problem buried inside it.