The Couturiere's Tale

'May you gain your heart's desire.' Yvonne, Suzy, Jo, and Stephanie became friends over a shared affinity for misadventures, gluttony, the occasional book, and a lot of bickering. Although not entirely without intelligence or redeeming qualities, they displayed the usual giddy girlish interests in pretty things and fun, and had little else on their minds besides the blissful prospect of the upcoming Renaissance Ball and holidays. Nobody expected - least of all themselves - that these unprepossessing children would grow up to become the founders of a fashion empire or that they would fall into so many scandals along the way, in their public and private lives, with such far-reaching, sometimes fatal consequences. Many years later, another young woman receives a letter advising her of an inheritance and an apparently innocuous invitation. Summoned to a meeting at the offices of the House of Laurel with its three board directors, she proceeds to unravel the history and the untold secrets surrounding the inheritance, the Thomson & French invitation, and what happened to Stephanie Laurel. But secrets and stories - like choices - are complicated things. As the truth is revealed, the tentacles of that tangled past reach out into the present, and they are all confronted with another fork in the road... A three part collection of gentle ruminations on friendship, life and fate and other things which get in between the everyday business of living, seasoned with a few mildly distracting diversions such as murder, romantic entanglements gone awry, alternative uses for limoncello and rose petals, and the best laid plans of kind, well-meaning friends.