ISABELLA'S POV
The bus terminal in New York City smells like unwashed people and broken dreams.
Isabella stands with her suitcase in one hand and her portfolio in the other. The suitcase is light. Too light. It holds everything she owns. Two pairs of jeans. Four shirts. One jacket. Her mother's sewing kit. Her father's lucky lighter that she's never actually used but carries everywhere.
She has three hundred and forty-two dollars in her pocket and no place to sleep.
Around her, people are moving like they know where they're going. New Yorkers look different than people from her small town. They move faster. They dress sharper. They look like they've already won something just by being here. Isabella watches them and feels small. She's never felt small before.
Her phone buzzes. A text from her mother: "Did you get there safe? Call me when you have an address."
Isabella doesn't call. She doesn't have an address yet and she knows the sound of her mother's voice will make her cry and she can't cry because she needs to find a job today. She needs to find a place to sleep tonight. She needs to start becoming the person she came here to be.
That person is not someone who cries at the bus terminal.
By noon, Isabella has been rejected from four different restaurants. They all say the same thing. She has no experience. She looks too young. She doesn't have references. By two in the afternoon, she's been rejected from two coffee shops and a retail store. By four, she stops counting.
At six, she's exhausted and starving and she finds a basement room for three hundred and ten dollars a month from a man who doesn't ask questions and doesn't look at her like she's a person. To him, she's just money. That's fine. Money she can be.
The basement room is six feet by eight feet. The ceiling is so low she can touch it if she stands on her tiptoes. There's one window at street level where she can see people's feet walking past. The mattress smells like other people's lives. Isabella sits on it and tries not to think about her mother's soft bed that she slept in for twenty years.
She has two hundred and thirty-two dollars left and rent is due in thirty days.
That night, Isabella searches for jobs on her phone until the battery dies. She applies for anything that will hire her. Waitress. Dishwasher. Retail clerk. Gas station attendant. Cleaning service. She writes her name on every form like it's a magic spell that will make someone say yes.
The next morning, a coffee shop calls back. They need someone to work the morning shift. Five in the morning to two in the afternoon. Five dollars and fifteen cents an hour. Isabella says yes before they finish the sentence.
She works there for three months. Her feet blister and then callus. Her hands smell like espresso and milk. Her back aches from standing all day. She saves every dollar and applies to fashion design programs at night. She gets rejected from three of them. Accepted into one that costs twelve thousand dollars a year that she doesn't have.
She works nights at a clothing warehouse instead. Ten in the evening to six in the morning, organizing inventory. During the day, she works at the coffee shop. In between, she sleeps for two hours and studies sketching.
By the end of year one, Isabella is a ghost. She exists in the spaces between other people's lives. She sees them come and go. She watches them live while she just survives.
But something is building inside her. Something quiet and furious. She sketches at night. She designs dresses in her head while organizing boxes. She imagines fabrics and colors and the way cloth should move on a body. She dreams about the dress she's going to create that will prove all the people who rejected her wrong.
By year two, she's working three jobs and has saved enough money to take two online fashion classes. She still can't afford the real school. She doesn't need it. She teaches herself. She finds free tutorials. She reads fashion blogs at midnight when she should be sleeping. She studies the way successful designers think about color and structure and movement.
By year three, Isabella is twenty-three years old and she's never been kissed. Never been on a real date. Never done anything except work and study and save money. She has no friends except Grace, who she met at a charity event where she was working coat check, and who decided for some reason that Isabella was worth knowing.
Grace is different from Isabella. Grace is confident. Grace has money. Grace doesn't apologize for taking up space. Grace looks at Isabella like she sees something special even though Isabella is exhausted and small and usually covered in coffee stains.
"You need to get out," Grace tells her one night. "You're going to work yourself to death and what will that prove?"
"That I deserve to be here," Isabella says.
"You already deserve to be here," Grace says. "You don't have to earn your right to exist."
Isabella doesn't believe her. She's been earning since she was sixteen. She doesn't know any other way to be.
By year four, Isabella is working three jobs and attending community college part time while building a secret design portfolio. She has a portfolio of fifteen pieces. Every design is better than the last. Every piece is obsessive. She's poured her loneliness and her hunger and her anger into every stitch.
Grace keeps pushing her to do something with it. Show someone. Enter a competition. Apply to work at a design house. Isabella says she's not ready. She's not good enough. She needs more time.
The truth is, Isabella is terrified. Terrified that showing her work to someone who matters will result in rejection. Terrified that she's been working toward nothing. Terrified that she came to New York for a dream that was always impossible.
Then Grace shows up at her basement room one Friday night with two dresses and a firm look.
"There's a charity gala tomorrow night," Grace says. "Very exclusive. Very rich. A designer for a major house is going to be there. You're going to wear one of your designs. You're going to talk to him. You're going to stop hiding."
"I can't," Isabella says. "I have to work tomorrow."
"No you don't," Grace says. "I already talked to your boss. You have the day off. And before you say you don't have anything to wear, you do. You made this dress three months ago and you told me it was perfect. So wear it."
The dress is black silk and Isabella made it in a fever. She designed it in two days and spent a month perfecting the seams. It's the best thing she's ever created. She's been saving it for a moment important enough. She never thought the moment would come.
The next night, Isabella walks into a ballroom that costs more per hour to rent than she makes in a month. She's wearing her dress and Grace is beside her looking like she owns the place. Around them are people who look like they were born rich. They talk like it. They move like it. They belong here in a way Isabella never will.
Isabella is thinking about leaving when she sees him.
He's standing at the bar alone. Tall. Dark. Expensive. He's wearing a suit that probably costs more than her entire yearly budget. He has the kind of face that makes people stop moving. He's looking at her like he's trying to solve a puzzle.
Isabella looks away because boys who look like that don't look at girls like her.
But he walks over anyway.
"That dress," he says. "Where did you get it?"
"I made it," Isabella says and her voice sounds very small.
He looks surprised. Actually surprised. Like he wasn't expecting that answer.
"It's beautiful," he says. "I'm James. James Mitchell."
Isabella knows who James Mitchell is. Everyone in New York knows who James Mitchell is. His father owns one of the biggest companies in America. James is supposed to take it over someday. He's the kind of man who lives in a different world than hers.
"I'm Isabella," she says.
"I know," he says and he smiles. "I asked around about the girl in the black dress."
He asks the bartender for a drink. He tells Isabella she has the most interesting face in the room. He talks to her for two hours like she's the only person at the party worth talking to. He makes her laugh. He makes her feel like she belongs in the expensive ballroom. Like maybe she has a right to take up space after all.
By the time the night ends, Isabella is falling in love with him.
She doesn't know yet that falling in love with James Mitchell will destroy her.
She doesn't know yet that this moment will lead to the greatest pain and the greatest power of her life.
She just knows that for the first time in four years, something feels possible. Something feels like winning.
She smiles at him and he smiles back and everything changes.