The design

The year I turned eighteen, when it came time to choose a university path, I brought my application to the Lyon Fashion Institute to my father, my heart full of hope.

I’d spent half a year preparing my portfolio, selecting my best work, including the collection that had won the competition when I was sixteen.

“I want to study design,” I said, setting the folder on his desk.

My father flipped through a few pages, nodded, then closed the folder.

“Cécile, you’re the only daughter who carries the Armand name,” he said.

“The company will need you in a management position, not sitting in a studio drawing.”

“But design is also a core part of this company,” I pushed back.

“Mama used to—”

“Your mother gave that up when she married me,” he cut in, his voice hardening.

“You’ll study Business Management in Paris. That’s my final decision.”

I bit my lip hard, fighting back tears in front of him.

Three weeks later, I learned that Maxime, despite average grades and no clear creative talent, had been sent by my father to a prestigious art institute in Milan to study the field he wanted — graphic design.

“He needs an environment that inspires him,” my father explained when I asked directly, “and he’s still figuring out what he wants. You’re different, Cécile — you already have a clear path.”

That “clear” path, I came to realize, was simply the path no one had bothered to consider carefully for me.

I left for Paris that year, my mother’s sketchbook hidden at the bottom of my suitcase, like a secret I didn’t dare admit I was still nurturing.

Julien, in his final year of law school in Lyon at the time, kept in regular touch.

“Are you still drawing?” he asked during a video call, a few weeks after I’d moved into the Paris dormitory.

“Sometimes,” I answered, trying to hide the bitterness in my voice.

“At midnight, when no one can see.”

“Don’t let anyone put that out, Cécile,” he said, an unusually serious look in his eyes.

“Not even your father.”

I didn’t respond right away, but I held on to it, like a thin thread keeping me tethered to the part of myself my family seemed determined to erase.

My first year in Paris was the loneliest stretch of my life.

I lived in a small dorm room, surrounded by Business Management students talking about financial indices and merger deals, while I quietly kept my mother’s sketchbook hidden beneath a macroeconomics textbook.

One semester, I nearly gave up my major to secretly enroll in an evening design course at a nearby art school, but I pulled back at the last minute, terrified, imagining what my father’s reaction would be if he found out.

“You’re censoring yourself before anyone else even gets the chance to,” Julien said over the phone, when I told him about that fear.

“Don’t you see that?”

I was quiet for a long moment, because he was right, and the truth of it was harder to swallow than I’d expected.

“I don’t want to give my father another reason to be disappointed in me,” I finally admitted.

“Cécile,” Julien said, an unusually serious tone in his voice, “your father was disappointed in you long before you ever did anything wrong — simply because you existed and reminded him of your mother. You can’t spend your whole life trying to avoid a disappointment that was already there from the start.”

I didn’t answer right away, only gripped the phone tightly, and stayed silent for the rest of the call.

I graduated on schedule, in the field my father had chosen, and returned to Lyon with an outstanding degree and a sketchbook still full of blank pages I hadn’t dared to fill.