Then she launched SEPH; she’s the “designer,” creative director and CEO and I’m the COO. She’s the face, I’m the person making it all happen, pulling the marionette strings, the one with the real power. The first line was inspired by my art, high-concept dresses and shoes, pants, too, made from prints based on my collages, not unlike other brands’ collaborations with Kusama and Mickalene Thomas or the estates of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. We hired a ghost designer, recently let go from a Paris haute couture house, to formulate actual pieces.

SEPH’s first collection sold out so fast last year that we had to contract another manufacturer to keep up with demand. This, of course, was after my gallery show went viral, when I had established critics from all over the world, including Peter Schjeldahl and Adrian Searle, calling me the next Rachel Feinstein or Niki de Saint Phalle. Compliments came, too, from Mark Ryden himself and his wife, Marion Peck. Everyone wants to see a woman’s rage if it’s beautiful, if it’s safely contained to a twelve-by-twenty-four-inch piece of paper.

I’ve made Peri more money in a year than she initially thought possible and it’s only full speed ahead. A beautiful, tragic woman with a redemption arc makes for a great heroine, especially when she’s backed by billions. And anyway, isn’t it trendy now to side with the supposed villainess, the woman who, in retrospect, was demonized unfairly by the media? Soon, no one will remember me as Tom Newburn’s mistress. People are already starting to forget. Thanks to Peri, thanks to my own tenacity.

With that thought in mind, the next collection, the next exhibition, may go in a different direction, but we’re not sure which. We’re only now beginning to plot, to plan.

When Peri offered all of this over my mother’s kitchen table, I couldn’t pass it up. Here was a woman with the world on a string, who wanted me to help her do something I already loved, I already knew I was brilliant at, who could catapult me to heights I hadn’t even considered when I was working for Huda. And the only thing she was asking for was my silence. It would have been stupid, naive, self-righteous to say no. I had wanted, from the beginning, to sell my collage work somehow; Peri was expediting that process.