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“She never has, even before the scandal erupted.”
“Why doesn’t she just leave him?” I asked.
“She doesn’t want to return to her moneyless life. When you get used to a certain way of living, it's hard to go back.”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You come from money?”
“Yes, my family is wealthy but when I married Scott, I gave up my inheritance. They were always so happy that I married him but I wanted to be my own woman. When I divorced him, the shit hit the fan and I was ostracized.”
“So you made this business from scratch?” she asked me.
“Yep, from my divorce settlement anyway. Most of it went into the apartment I live in, but the rest was capital for my business.”
“Damn,” she said. “Do you ever think about him?”
“I used to,” I told her, honestly, for a year I cried over him, and wondered why he had chosen to sleep around and why he couldn’t just love me like he claimed he did, but then I woke up. I looked in the mirror and I didn’t like what I saw. I joined the gym, I started to wear makeup again and I joined clubs. That’s when the business really started to take off, and it so happened that COVID happened just a few months later.”
“It thrived, hey?”
I nodded. “Sure did.”
“I get it, my business went quiet at first but then there was this boom of people wanting me to design their jewelry pieces.”
“That’s what you do?”
She nodded. “I can mold clay into pretty much anything and I can work with gemstones and crystals pretty easily. My father was a glass blower so I picked up some tricks and started to do that in small doses too.”
“Sounds incredible, why do you need this conference?” I asked her.
“Oh,” she giggled. “I don’t. I needed the contacts for sure, but my business wasn’t floundering. I just…needed an away from my husband for a few days. This conference gave me like minded friends and a holiday that I desperately needed.”
“You don’t get along with your husband?”
“Well, I do, I love him to bits but he’s a little needy sometimes. He’s an artist, the poor soul, and he has his moments of feeling a little lost.”
I’d heard that about artistic types but I’d never met an artist before.
“Were you his muse?” I asked her, noticing Janet was eyeing me for being so noisy. Sophie waited for her to continue by turning around before she responded.
“He says so but I don’t know what’s so musey about myself.”
I smirked at her but stopped talking before Janet made an example of us. I really needed to focus. Veruca was kind enough to give me her ticket. I couldn’t sour her name at this conference.
Janet was asking the audience who they thought they were and how they put that into marketing their product. I tried to think of the content I produced for my store online, and if I ever showed my face.
One woman put her hand up and said she never showed her face because her product shouldn’t show her, it should sell itself.
Janet smiled, and I could feel the lecture that was about to land.
“You don’t think a customer wants to know who designed whatever it is you design? That they don’t want to see you as a business to support because you're a local woman trying to make a living?”
I looked down at the woman and saw her cheeks becoming red. “It’s not about me. It’s about what I sell.”
“And you sell it for what purpose?”
“Because I enjoy making them.”
