Chapter 3 - The Seamstress's Ledger
The next morning at 8:00 AM, an hour before *La Reine Bridal* opened its doors to the public, I knocked on the service entrance at the back of the boutique.
The heavy steel door groaned open. Rosa stood there in a floral housecoat, holding a steaming mug of black espresso, a pair of reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She looked at me, took in the dark purple rings under my eyes, and stepped aside without a word.
"Come," she said, nodding toward the back workroom.
The backroom was an empire of fabric. Bolts of silk faille, duchess satin, and Chantilly lace hung from floor-to-ceiling racks. Industrial sewing machines sat alongside mannequins pinned with half-finished masterpieces. It was a space dedicated entirely to transformation, to taking raw materials and making them armor for the women who wore them.
Rosa sat down behind a wide cutting table and set her espresso down on a cork coaster. She reached beneath a stack of pattern paper and slid a white envelope across the mahogany wood.
"It is all there," Rosa said. "Two hundred dollars. I did not touch a cent."
I picked up the envelope. The paper felt heavy, dirty, contaminated by the intention behind it.
"Why didn't you just throw her out of the store?" I asked, my voice cracking despite my best efforts to keep it steady. "You could have banned her. You could have called security."
Rosa leaned back, intertwining her fingers. Her nails were trimmed short, the skin on her thumbs calloused from millions of needle pricks.
"Forty years, Emily," Rosa said softly. "Forty years I have been fitting dresses for brides in Naples, in New York, and now here in Virginia. You learn to read the eyes of the women who walk through that door. Sometimes, it is the mother-in-law who wants to destroy the bride. Sometimes it is the bitter sister. But the worst, the most dangerous, is always the childhood friend who believes she was supposed to be the main character."
She tapped her fingernail against the table.
"If I had thrown her out, she would have found another way. She would have poured wine on your dress at the rehearsal. She would have hidden your shoes. She would have told your fiancé a lie so terrible at the eleventh hour that he might have hesitated at the altar. When an enemy shows you their weapon, you do not swat it away and let them pull a knife. You let them think their first weapon is working."
Tears pricked my eyes. "She wanted me to choke, Rosa. She wanted the dress so tight I’d look deformed."
"She wanted you to look desperate," Rosa corrected fiercely. "She wanted you red-faced, sweating, panicked, gasping for air as you walked toward that man. She wanted him to look at you and feel disgust instead of wonder. She wanted to orchestrate your humiliation and then be the gentle shoulder he cried on when the reception fell apart."
Rosa reached across the table, taking my cold hand between her two warm, leathered palms.
"Your dress is finished, Emily. I stayed late last night after you left. I reinforced every seam with double-twist silk thread. The boning is reinforced with flexible steel that will hold your posture straight as a marble pillar, but the waist... the waist has ease. You will breathe. You will dance. You will outshine every shadow that girl has ever tried to cast over your life."
I looked down at the white envelope in my hand.
"What do I do now, Rosa?"
The old Italian woman smiled, a slow, dangerous curve of the lips that held no warmth for Jenna.
May you like
"You play the hand she dealt you," Rosa whispered. "You let her think the poison is in the cup. And then, at the moment she waits for you to swallow it... you make her drink it instead."
***
