“Contain yourself,” I said, mostly to amuse her.“He puts his trousers on one leg at a time.”
Maya laughed, delighted and scandalised.“Is he nice?”
“He’s very good at being looked at,” I said, half-teasing, half true.“And kinder than he needs to be.It’s a killer combination.”
“I’d pass out,” Maya confessed.“Like, genuinely swoon.”
“Please don’t,” I said, stepping in to pluck a last pin from the lapel.“I’ve spent an hour getting this blazer to telegraph ‘I woke up competent,’ and it doesn’t pair well with fainting.”
She stifled another giggle, then sobered under the lights.“How is it, then?”
I let the mirror answer first.The jacket skimmed and structured in equal measure, a 1970s whisper without the appearance of a costume.“Good bones,” I said finally.“It says what we want it to say.”
“Which is?”
“Hire me, promote me, underestimate me at your peril.”
“Sold,” Maya said, satisfaction warming the word.
I slid the clipboard onto the worktable and scribbledSend to sample room with updates—urgent.“We’re through for today,” I told her.“Go rescue your milk from the golden retriever.”
“Bless you,” she said, carefully stepping off the platform.“And Arthur?”
“Yes?”
“Tell Eddie I loved him in the episode with the hallway monologue.”
I smiled.“He’ll pretend to be embarrassed and then he’ll glow for the rest of the day.”
“Iconic,” Maya breathed, and vanished.
The room exhaled when she left.The chatter of the atelier filtered through the door—steamers hissing, shears whispering through cloth, the busy purr of machines, a tailor’s low oath in a language my grandmother would have pretended not to understand.Bolts of fabric leaned like polite columns along the wall: moss crepe, a sober pinstripe, a shot-silk that misbehaved when you praised it.On the board, the collection’s palette—ink, bone, oxblood, a single belligerent marigold—looked like a clean sentence with one exclamation point.
I stepped into the corridor.Clarence Atelier on a Monday was a busy place: interns ferrying clothing samples on padded hangers, Chris’s laugh breaking out like champagne somewhere down the hall, pattern paper crackling under a cutter’s hands.We’d christened the fancy fitting room the Mirror Room ages ago—capital letters earned by the floor-to-ceiling glass that made stars blush and stylists weep.I turned into the hallway and headed for my reunion with Eddie.
Halfway there, I paused at my office, where I’d left my phone facedown on a stack of lookbooks.A quick, traitorous glance—no new messages.I wasn’t expecting any, not really, and yet the blank screen made my stomach dip.Bryce’s name might have lit it.It didn’t.I tucked the phone into my pocket, just in case.
I pushed through the last stretch of hallway, and Chris emerged from the sample room with a bundle of teal silk draped over his arm.He spotted me and waggled his brows.
“Found our swan,” he said.“He’s ready for his tragic death on the red carpet.”
“No swans dying on my watch,” I said.
Chris cackled and swanned off.
At the Mirror Room door, I smoothed the front of my shirt.It was ridiculous that my pulse climbed like a teenager’s, but there it was.I blamed the mirrors, the Emmys, and Eddie Gray’s mouth, which had once made the rest of the world disappear.
Laurence opened the door before I reached for it, perfectly timed as always.“He’s decent,” he murmured, which in Laurence meant “he’s armed with charm.”
“Any sign of weight gain?”I whispered back, wicked.
“Of course not.Now go in before he has a nervous breakdown.”
I slipped inside.
Through the forest of reflections, I caught Eddie’s profile as he turned toward me—chin up, eyes bright, smile tucked at the corner like mischief waiting for a cue.For a fraction of a second, the years collapsed into a single breath, and I was twenty-one again.
“Hello, stranger,” he said, and the room forgot to be a room and became a stage.Chris breezed in as if the room had been waiting for applause, measuring tape draped around his neck like pearls and a pincushion cuffed to his wrist.
