The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 251

HANNAH’S POV: 

The courtyard was extraordinary. 

I want to be careful about how I say this because I am the one who chose it and I am not trying to congratulate myself. But it was extraordinary. It was a courtyard in the centre of the city that had been used for different things over the years and currently belonged to a cultural centre that had let us use it for the show. The walls were old stone and there were lights strung above in long soft lines from one side to the other and in the daylight they looked like part of the architecture but when the sun went down they were going to turn the whole space into something that felt less like a fashion show and more like a dream someone was having about one. 

The runway itself was a pale stone-coloured walkway running through the centre of the courtyard with chairs arranged on both sides. Not hundreds of chairs. Eighty. This was not a stadium show. This was something intimate and deliberate. Eighty people, the press, the buyers, the clients, the friends, and the people who had been part of this story in one way or another, in a space small enough that they would feel every moment of it and not be able to look away. 

That was the intention. I had thought about it for a long time. 

Choosing this courtyard had not been an obvious decision. Lucas had shown me four other options when we were planning the show with bigger venues and more prestigious addresses. I had looked at all of them and they were all fine but still none of them were right. And then we had come to see this courtyard and I had stood in the middle of it and looked up at the old stone walls and the sky and knew immediatelyy of recognising the right fit. 

In between four forty-seven in the morning and seven in the evening there was an enormous amount of activity. 

Sandra fixed look nine’s hem. I did not ask her what the adjustment had been and she did not volunteer the information. Look nine came out of her hands pressed and perfect and that was the end of the matter. Lily went through every single piece on the hanging rail with the focused attention she gave to her best work, checking seams and linings and the tiny details that would only be visible at very close range but which would be felt even by people who never got that close. Priya checked the draped back piece three times, although it is not because anything was wrong with it but because she had built it and she cared about it the way you care about the things you have genuinely poured yourself into. 

The models arrived and the hair and makeup team turned the dressing area into the particular type of organized beautiful chaos that always preceded a show. I walked through it at around two in the afternoon and someone handed me a sandwich that I ate standing up while making two simultaneous decisions about the order of the earrings in look seven and whether the shoes for look twelve needed to change. They did not need to change. I had been right about those shoes.