"There's been no transfer." When I speak, I sound like Grammy, confident and take-no-bullshit. "I know that for a fact, because my grandmother owns this building. And she has for the past fifty years. And if she sold it, I promise you that all of Starling Vale would have heard the argument." I hold the paper back out to him. "So either your employer has bought a building from someone who doesn't own one — or this paper is a lie. Either option is grounds for me alerting the city watch."
He doesn't take the paper. His eyes flick to Torgan — who has not moved and has done nothing except exist — and then back to me, recalculating.
"Perhaps," he says, "there's been a clerical?—"
"Perhaps there has." I walk past him and open my own door. The bell gives a polite little jingle, wildly out of scale with the moment. "You can tell whoever sent you that the landlord's answer hasn't changed. She burned the last card. I'd hate for her to burn more false claims."
For a heartbeat he looks at me, as if considering his next move.
He chooses the door. Wisely, and without saying good-bye.
It shuts behind him. The bell settles.
Torgan stands looking through the window for a long moment — noting which way the man goes, I realize — and then he goes back to his corner, folds himself into the too-small chair, and picks up his newspaper.
As if the last minute hadn’t happened.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the shop exhales.
"What," says Saskia, delighted, "was that?"
"That," says Mirelle, hopping down off my cutting table to squeeze my arm, "was our dressmaker eating a man alive. Lissy! You've been holding out on us."
"Your grandmother sounds like my kind of woman," Brynna says.
"She burned his card," Saskia says. "Whose card? What card? I need every detail of this feud immediately."
My hands have decided, independently of me, to make tea. It's what they do.
And by the time the cups are out I've mostly stopped shaking — because I am shaking, now that it's over, now that the door is shut — and the sisters have mostly swept Ysolde back up into wedding talk, seating and flowers and —
And I carry a cup to the corner.
Torgan looks at the tea. Then at me. Four fittings, and he has refused this cup four times.
"You didn't say a word," I say, quietly so his sisters don’t hear me. "But thank you. Truly."
Nothing. He goes back to his newspaper.
"I froze," I add. I don't know why I'm confessing it. "When he said vacancy. I knew he was lying — I knew it the whole time — and I just. Stood there."
"For three seconds,” he says to the newspaper. "Fear gets in front of what you know. It's the same in the front line of battle." A page turns. "You let yourself feel the fear, assess the situation with your senses heightened, and then you make your move."
It might be the most words he has ever said directly to me. I stand there holding the tea he isn't taking.
"Human frippery," I hear myself say.
The newspaper lowers one inch, and he raises an eyebrow up at me. "What?"
"That's what you called all this. Last fitting." I nod at the dais, at Ysolde glowing in candlelight while her sisters argue about table settings. "And I've been sitting on my reply for two weeks, because you're a client's brother and I need this commission. But I've just thrown a man out of my own shop, so I guess I'm feeling brave." I set the tea on the windowsill beside him, since his hands won't have it. "Can I tell you what all this frippery is for?"
The newspaper lowers. He turns one palm toward me and gestures.
Go on.
So I tell him. Quietly, under his sisters' noise, I tell him about the leather bodice cut like ceremonial armor and the shoulders that are built, not draped. I tell him about a bride who stands a head over her groom and loves him desperately and almost didn't ask him for courtship, because she was afraid he would decline. I tell him the boning of the dress won't let her slouch, because she deserves to stand tall on her wedding day. That on the solstice she will stand at her whole height in front of every person who ever made her feel too large, and it will look like confidence and it will become confidence.
Because that is how it works. That is how it has always worked.
