A day before my sister's wedding, my mom chopped off 20 inches of my hair for not outshining my sister. "Your sister is married to a billionaire. Wear a hat, selfish brat," Dad sneered. I touched my jagged scalp, my blood freezing. I didn't scream. I just picked up my phone. At the ceremony, 500 elite guests weren't staring at my ruined hair. They were watching the fraud investigators storm the aisle to the groom...

By March, the river ice had turned into grey slush, and the first retail tenants were moving their display cases into the ground floor of the South Harbor terminal. The public market was a hive of activity—local carpenters building cedar stalls, sign painters lettering the glass windows, and the smell of roasting coffee beans beginning to drift through the central atrium.

I was standing near the main entrance, reviewing the final lighting grid with the electrical foreman, when a woman stepped out from behind a stack of packing crates.

It was Chloe.

She wasn't wearing her wedding gown or her satin robes. She was dressed in a plain gray trench coat from a high-street chain, her blonde hair cut into a short, messy bob that looked as though she had tried to style it herself with grocery-store box dye. Her face was pale, but the old, petulant sharpness in her eyes had been replaced by something resembling survival.

"Harper," she said, her voice low.

The electrical foreman looked at her, then at me. "Give us a minute, Ben," I told him, nodding toward the utility room. He picked up his clipboard and walked away.

I looked at my sister. It had been seven months since the St. Regis. "What are you doing here, Chloe?"

"I'm working," she said, pulling a small plastic name tag from her pocket that read South Side Floral Logistics. "I'm the assistant delivery coordinator for the market vendors. I’m the one who managed the tulip distribution for the flower stalls this morning."

I blinked. "You’re working for a floral logistics company?"

"I didn't have a choice, Harper," she said, her eyes dropping to her worn leather shoes. "The feds took everything Julian bought me. They even took the engagement ring out of my nightstand. When we moved to Rockford, Mom just sat on the couch and cried all day. Dad was earning fourteen dollars an hour doing data entry. If I didn't find a job, we wouldn't have had milk."

She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising under the cheap trench coat. "I hated you, Harper. When the marshals came down that aisle, I thought you had destroyed my life because you were jealous of my dress. But then I started doing the payroll for the drivers at the flower shop. I started looking at the contracts, the tax forms, the shipping lanes. I realized... how hard it is to make a single dollar stay in a room."

She looked up at me, her brown eyes filling with a sudden, genuine moisture. "You did all of that for us for seven years. You wrote my papers, you fixed my budget, you saved my wedding from collapsing three different times before the end. And we... we went into your room while you were sleeping and cut your hair because we were afraid you’d look too pretty in a photograph."

A long, heavy silence fell over the bustling atrium. A forklift moved past us, its backup beeper clearing the space between two concrete pillars.

"Why are you telling me this now, Chloe?" I asked, my voice dropping its defensive edge for the first time all winter.

"Because the florist vendor is looking for a primary commercial lease for the terminal's central pavilion," Chloe said, wiping her face with the sleeve of her coat. "The application is on your desk. I didn't write it, Harper. The owner wrote it. But I managed the logistical projection for the first three quarters. I wanted you to know... that the numbers are real. I checked them twice. Like you used to."

I looked at her for a long moment. Then I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out my digital tablet, bringing up the leasing portal for the ground floor.

"The central pavilion has three competing offers from major retail florists, Chloe," I said, my thumb scrolling through the files. "But the community board prefers local distributors. Tell your owner to meet me in the leasing office on Monday morning at ten. And bring your logistical projections."