I opened a new text and stared at the blank field, the blinking cursor keeping time with my pulse.Would he want to meet with me?After I texted him yesterday, he’d agreed we could meet this week for a drink, but was Monday evening too soon?Would I seem to, hell, I don’t know.
“Desperate?”I whispered aloud.“Fuck it.”
I quickly tapped out a message.
I had the day from hell.Can we meet tonight?I could really use the company.
ChapterTwelve
Arthur
The fit model stood on the low platform like a patient statue, arms lifted while I fussed at a seam that refused to behave.A dozen mirrors made a dozen versions of the same navy blazer—my navy blazer, from the upcoming ready-to-wear drop for Thorne & Whitmore—each reflection catching a slightly different angle of the lapel roll, the light on the horn buttons, the crisp edge of a chalked hem.
“Hold there,” I said, tucking a pin between my lips.“I want the shoulder to read ‘competent,’ not ‘cross-examined.’”
Our fit model—Maya, who’d been with us long enough to bully muslin into obedience with her stare alone—laughed, careful not to move.
“It’s cut from a wool gabardine, not spreadsheets,” I muttered, easing the sleeve cap a hair.“Tilt right.”
She tilted.I stepped back, squinted, and wrote a note on the clipboard:reduce sleeve ease ?”, open back seam ¼”.
The blazer was conservative by Instagram standards, but that was the point.I’d found the bones of the collection in the back of Mum’s closet: 1970s jacket silhouettes in honest fabrics, the sort of clever restraint that made a woman look chic, but not uncomfortably so.
We’d stripped the kitsch out, but kept the nerve.My ready-to-wear line for women had to pay for the caprices of Chris and his extravagant formalwear; it needed to sell to women who sat in boardrooms where men explained things to them like they were idiots.This blazer would pass the test and smile while doing it.
“Boyfriend’s a real mess,” Maya said, conversational as a kettle coming to a boil.She rotated on the platform so the mirrors caught the line of the back vent.“Left the milk out—again.It’s like sharing a flat with a very lovable Labrador who shouldn’t have an Uber Eats app.”
“Housebroken, I hope?”I asked, eyebrows raised.
“Mostly.He’s a slob, but a lovable one.”She glanced down at the blazer.“Which is also how I’d describe a few of our clients, God help them.”
“Careful,” I said.“The mirrors gossip.”
She grinned, then sighed the sigh of a woman evaluating both a shoulder seam and her life choices.I tugged the hem, chalked a swift mark, and wrotedrop front hem ¼.The line fell into place like a held breath released.
The door clicked.Laurence slipped in with a tab of measuring tape looped around his wrist and a shimmer in his eyes that meant news.
“Apologies, sir,” he said.“Eddie Gray has dropped by, wondering if we might take his measurements again for the Emmys tuxedo.He swears he’s gained weight.”A micro-pause for effect.“He has not.”
His eye roll was operatic.I snorted.“Of course he hasn’t.”
Maya stopped pretending not to listen.“The Eddie Gray?”
I didn’t answer immediately.The name flickered like a match struck in a dark room and I was back in a black box theatre that smelled of dust and paint, Eddie on stage in a secondhand linen shirt, an entire audience leaning toward him as if breath were a thing he could steal and keep.
Eddie was my ex, and the memories came flooding back.Those Royal Academy of Dramatic Art days.RADA.Toasties after rehearsals.Kisses nicked behind a door marked Props.ThenThe Violet Hourhappened—a streaming darling about clever people in bad times—and Los Angeles opened its jaw and swallowed him whole.We broke up like adults, cried like teenagers, and promised each other holidays that never lined up.
“Tell me you can fit him in,” Laurence went on, amusement bright as a blade.“He’s being very pleasant about it.”
“Pleasant,” I echoed, because among Brits that was code for one prosecco away from tears.I set the clipboard down and wiped chalk from my fingers.“Find Chris—he’s doing the Emmys tuxedo.Take Eddie to the Mirror Room and tell him I’ll be right there.”
“On it.”Laurence pivoted, then remembered himself.“He asked for you specifically,” he added, casual as a cat stretching in a sun patch.
“Of course he did.”I kept my face composed; my heart did a small, disloyal hop.“Mirror Room in five.”
Laurence vanished.
Maya’s eyes were wide, the blazer briefly irrelevant.“Eddie Gray,” she mouthed, as if the syllables themselves were a dessert.
