Six weeks.

That was how long it took for the incision along my abdomen to fade from angry red to a thin pink seam I could press without flinching. Six weeks of bottles and night feeds, of one-handed emails answered at three in the morning, of learning the particular weight of a sleeping infant against my shoulder. Six weeks of the Tribeca penthouse going quiet around me in a way it never had when Waylon lived in it.

I didn't miss the noise.

The spare bedroom faced east. I'd had the movers haul out the guest bed the week I came home from the hospital and replaced it with a desk, two monitors, a filing cabinet, and a low gray bassinet in the corner where the morning light pooled but never fell directly on Thomas's face. That was the room I was sitting in at nine-fourteen on a Tuesday when I picked up the phone and called Diana Marsh.

She answered on the second ring.

"Regina." A pause, careful. "I heard about the baby. Congratulations."

"Thank you." I let the silence sit for half a beat. "Diana. Do you have twenty minutes?"

"I have as long as you need."

I could hear it already, underneath her voice — the particular flatness of a woman who had been holding something for a long time and was waiting to find out if she was finally allowed to set it down. I leaned back in my chair and looked at Thomas. His mouth was open in sleep, one fist curled near his ear.

"I'm opening an agency," I said. "Soho. I have the space, the capital, and the structure. I want you to come run the booking floor. Equity stake, title of your choosing, and a roster I'll build with you starting Monday."

There was a sound on the other end — not quite a laugh. Closer to an exhale.

"What's it called?"

"Apex One."

"When do you file?"

"This week."

Another pause. I could picture her — the corner office at Jadewood, the bookshelf I'd helped her pick out, the framed campaign tear sheets she'd matted herself because Waylon never authorized the budget. I didn't push. I let her arrive on her own.

"He's been letting her sit in on castings," Diana said finally. Her voice had dropped half an octave. "Mariana. She doesn't know what she's looking at. Last week she killed a booking for Lela because she said the girl's jawline was 'aggressive.' I had to call the client back personally and lie about a scheduling conflict."

"I know."

"He doesn't even argue with her, Regina. He just nods."

"I know," I said again, quieter.

We stayed on the phone for another forty minutes. I walked her through the cap table. The salary structure. The first six names I wanted to approach and the order in which I wanted to approach them. She asked two questions, both about non-competes. I had the answers ready. By the time we hung up, she had agreed to give Jadewood her notice on Friday.

I set the phone face-down on the desk. Thomas stirred in the bassinet, made a small dissatisfied sound, and settled again.

"That's one," I told him softly.

---

The Soho space was on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse on Greene Street. Brick walls, casement windows the length of my arm span, a freight elevator that opened directly into the reception area. I signed the lease on a Thursday. The incorporation documents went out the same afternoon. Apex One existed, on paper, by five p.m.

Within three months of the divorce, we were operational.

Diana came on the first of the month and brought four bookers with her, two of whom I had personally hired at Jadewood in the early years. The talent followed in a quieter, more deliberate trickle — a phone call here, a coffee there, a contract review for a model whose representation had quietly lapsed and never been renewed because Mariana hadn't bothered to track the renewal date. I did not poach loudly. I did not have to. The roster I had spent seven years building at Jadewood was, in the most literal sense, mine — built on relationships, on remembered birthdays, on the late-night emails I had answered when no one else would. They came because I called, and because when I called, I already knew their daughter's name and which agency in Paris had been circling them for a year.

The trades noted the departures. A two-line item in WWD about Diana's exit. A passing mention in Business of Fashion about a new Soho agency that had filed paperwork. No one had connected the pattern yet. That was fine. I wasn't trying to make a splash. I was trying to build something that would still be standing in ten years.

Meanwhile, across town, the pattern at Jadewood was becoming visible to anyone who cared to look.

I heard it in pieces. A casting director at a client lunch mentioned, almost apologetically, that Waylon had been forty minutes late to a fitting and hadn't apologized. A photographer I'd worked with for years told me Mariana had shown up to a shoot in heels she couldn't walk in and asked the lighting tech to "make the model look thinner." Diana came into my office one afternoon, set her coffee down, and told me Waylon had stopped showing up to Monday strategy meetings entirely.

"He looks bad," she said, not unkindly. Just factually. "He's lost weight."

I nodded. I didn't ask for more. I had warned him about his stomach once, at a marble kitchen island at eleven-thirty at night, and he had folded the report and walked past me up the stairs. I was not in the business of warning him twice.

I turned back to the casting board on my desk and the call sheet I was building for the meeting that afternoon.

---

The first major campaign landed in the second week of the agency's third month.

Maison Verre — French luxury, six-figure season contract, the kind of booking that announces an agency the way a thunderclap announces weather. Their lead buyer was a woman named Hélène, who I had taken to lunch in the spring of my second year at Jadewood and who had been sending me handwritten Christmas cards every December since. She called me on a Wednesday morning. The conversation took eleven minutes. The contract was countersigned by Friday.

The model who booked it was one of Diana's — a girl I had personally signed at nineteen and watched Mariana let drift for a year and a half without a single editorial placement.

The trade press ran a brief item on Monday morning. *Apex One Lands Maison Verre — New Soho Agency Posts First Major Win.* Three paragraphs. A headshot. A single line at the bottom noting that Apex One had been founded by "former Jadewood Models co-founder Regina Thomas."

My phone rang at nine-forty.

"Regina Thomas."

"Celeste Vong." The voice was warm and unhurried and exactly as I remembered it. "I'd like to do a profile."

I smiled, very slightly, at the bassinet across the room. Thomas was awake, watching the ceiling fan with the unfocused intensity of an infant who had not yet decided what ceilings were for.

"Celeste. It's good to hear from you."

"I'd like to come in next week. A long-form piece. Cover, if you'll give it to me."

"Not yet," I said. "Let's revisit after Fashion Week."

A pause. Then, slowly, the sound of a woman who had been in this industry long enough to recognize what she was hearing. "After Fashion Week."

"After Fashion Week."

"Alright, Regina." A small, appreciative laugh. "I'll be watching."

"I'd expect nothing less."

I hung up and sat for a moment with my hand resting on the phone. Outside the casement windows, Soho was loud with the particular noise of a Tuesday at midmorning — trucks unloading, a horn somewhere on Broome, the rattle of a delivery cart on the sidewalk four floors down.

I walked to the bassinet, picked Thomas up, and held him against my shoulder. He made a small sound and pressed his face into the side of my neck.

"We're building something," I told him.

The ceiling fan turned slowly above us. Down on Greene Street, the city kept moving. I stood there a long moment, holding my son, and let myself feel — just for that moment — the quiet, structural satisfaction of a foundation that was finally, indisputably, mine.

The pitch meeting was scheduled for two o'clock.

At one fifty-nine, the freight elevator opened and Kasen Marshall stepped into the Apex One reception area.

Not one fifty-eight. Not two-oh-one. One fifty-nine, which told me he had been in the building for at least five minutes, waiting until the right moment to come up. That was the first thing I noticed.

The second was that he didn't look around the room the way most people did on a first visit — taking inventory, calculating, comparing it against some imagined version they'd already constructed. He just looked at me, nodded once, and said, "Ms. Thomas. Thank you for the time."

I shook his hand and led him to the conference table by the windows.

He was carrying a single folder. No laptop, no deck, no tablet propped at an angle designed to impress. He set the folder down and didn't open it.

I poured two glasses of water and sat across from him.

"Three questions," he said. "Then I'll tell you what I'm thinking."

I said nothing. I waited.

"Your top six bookings this quarter — were they relationship-driven or structure-driven? Meaning, would those clients have followed you specifically, or would they have gone to whoever offered the best contract?"

I looked at him for a moment. It was a good question. Most investors who came through my door wanted to talk about vision, momentum, the market gap. They wanted to feel something. Kasen Marshall wanted to understand the bones.

"Relationship-driven," I said. "Every one. Which is a liability if I get hit by a cab tomorrow, and an asset if I don't. I'm building the structure now to convert the relationship capital into something replicable. Diana Marsh is leading that transition on the booking floor."

He wrote one word in the margin of a page in his folder. I didn't try to read it.

"Second question. Maison Verre — six-figure seasonal contract. How are you protecting the renewal?"

"Exclusive first-look clause in the booking agreement. Hélène sees our new faces thirty days before they go to market. She gets priority, she stays loyal, and she feels like a partner instead of a client." I paused. "She also gets a handwritten note every season. That part isn't in the contract."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one.

"Third question." He leaned back slightly. "What does Apex One look like in five years if everything goes right?"

I didn't hesitate. "NYC's primary agency for talent with actual longevity. Not the flashiest roster in the room — the most durable one. Careers that last a decade, not eighteen months. Clients who come back because the models we place never embarrass them." I folded my hands on the table. "The agency that the best people in this industry trust, which means editors, buyers, and talent. All three. At the same time."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he opened the folder, turned it around, and slid it across the table to me.

The terms were on one page. Clean, structured, generous without being reckless. A Series A figure that gave me operational runway without the equity dilution that would have made it feel like a leash. I read it through twice, which took about ninety seconds.

"I'm not going to ask what changed your mind after the WWD item," I said.

"Good," he said. "Because it wasn't the WWD item."

I looked up.

"I've been watching the Jadewood departures for four months," he said. "Diana Marsh's exit was the tell. That's not an employee leaving. That's the institutional memory of a company walking out the door. I wanted to see where it walked to." He glanced at the windows, then back at me. "It walked here."

I signed the term sheet at two forty-three.

He stood, picked up his folder, and shook my hand again. His grip was firm and brief and didn't linger. At the elevator, he turned back once.

"You'll want a follow-up meeting in three weeks," he said. "I have a client in the luxury retail space who's been looking for an agency with exactly your renewal structure. I'll make the introduction if you want it."

"Three weeks," I said.

He nodded and stepped into the elevator.

I stood by the conference table for a moment after the doors closed, the signed term sheet still in my hand, and felt something I hadn't felt in months — the particular, quiet satisfaction of a conversation that had cost me nothing and given me exactly what I needed.

I went to check on Thomas.

---

The gala was in Soho, a converted gallery space on West Broadway, hosted by a luxury watch brand that wanted to be seen adjacent to fashion without actually being in it. I arrived with four of our models and Diana, who wore black and never stopped scanning the room.

I wore ivory. Simple cut, no ornamentation. The kind of dress that makes other people look overdressed.

The room was full within the hour — buyers, editors, photographers, the usual current of industry faces I had known for years. Three separate people stopped me before I'd reached the bar to talk about the Maison Verre booking. I kept the conversations brief and warm and moved on.

I saw Waylon across the room at forty minutes in.

He was standing near the east wall with Mariana. My first thought, which arrived before I could shape it into anything more considered, was: he looks like a man who has been ill and doesn't know it yet. Twenty pounds, at least. His jacket fit the way clothes fit when a body has quietly rearranged itself without the owner's permission. His collar looked loose. He was holding a glass of something he wasn't drinking.

Mariana's hand rested on her stomach. Visibly, deliberately, with the practiced ease of a woman who had decided that stomach was a statement.

I turned back to the conversation I was having with the WWD editor — a woman named Petra who had been trying to get me to agree to a full interview for the past two months — and let the room settle around me the way it always did.

I felt her before I saw her.

That particular quality of approach — too deliberate, too direct, the specific trajectory of someone crossing a room with a destination in mind.

Mariana stopped in front of me. Her hand stayed on her stomach. Her smile was a warm, wide thing, the kind that takes practice.

"Regina." She let my name sit for a beat, like a gift she was presenting. "Apex One. Look at you. Such a surprising little run you've had." Her eyes moved over me once, quickly. "You look well."

Petra had gone very still beside me.

I smiled. Full and easy and entirely without effort.

"Mariana. Congratulations." My eyes dropped to her hand on her stomach, then back up, warm and unreadable. "You must be so happy."

A half-second where her smile held a beat too long.

I turned to Petra. "I'm sorry — you were asking about the Maison Verre renewal structure?"

Petra, who had covered this industry for fifteen years and knew a door closing when she heard it, picked the thread back up immediately.

I didn't watch Mariana leave. I didn't need to. I could feel the room's attention the way you feel a current shift — a subtle, unmistakable reorientation, like a whole space quietly deciding where the center was.

Sometime later, Diana appeared at my elbow with two glasses of sparkling water and said nothing. She handed me one. I took it.

Across the room, Waylon was still standing by the east wall. He wasn't talking to anyone. His glass was still full. He was looking in my direction with an expression I didn't try to interpret, and I didn't hold his gaze long enough to give him the chance to interpret mine.

I turned back to Petra.

"After Fashion Week," I told her. "Come see me after Fashion Week."