The Catherine

There is a ladybug hidden in this scarf.

Most people never find it. It's small, quiet, and easy to miss inside all that bold red — I've watched people study this design and walk away without ever spotting it. It's also the most important thing on the silk. We'll get there.

Catherine was my first real best friend. We met as kids, and thirty-some years later the bond has simply never let go. She is the boldest woman I know — unapologetic, confident, follows her heart at full speed — and she does it all with a chic, impeccable elegance, like fearlessness came with a dress code. Today she runs a beautiful blended family of five kids with that same combination: grace on the outside, steel underneath.

At first glance, the design is the Catherine the world gets: a field of bold, unapologetic red, a great white bloom blazing at the very center, feathers fanning out in every direction, butterflies passing through. Confident. Chic. Impossible to miss — a scarf that walks into the room the way she does.

But the ladybug is her heart. It's for her father, who she lost.

Here's the part I didn't know until Catherine told me — and it's better than anything I could have invented. After her dad died, she read a book about signs: about how the people we love keep speaking to us, if we choose a language to hear them in. Catherine chose the ladybug. She picked it because it felt happy. Cheerful.

Then she started looking back. The gold charm bracelet he gave her right before he died. The ladybug charm her mom gave her a few years later. Her very first Beanie Baby — the ladybug. The ladybug tile a childhood friend painted for her shower. She hadn't picked a sign at all. She'd finally noticed the one that had been choosing her all along.

Now she sees ladybugs everywhere. Especially, she says, when she needs them most. They just happen to be there.

So I hid one in her scarf. Everyone else who looks at this design sees the red. Catherine looks down and finds the ladybug — and on the days she needs one most, it just happens to be there.

Some signs are for the whole world to see.

Sometimes the best ones are just between a girl and her dad.