"Mm." Grammy doesn't look up from her chair by the hearth. Her needle keeps moving through the hoop in her lap, in and out. "And the thread scissors? The little ones?"
I open my mouth to say of course I packed the little scissors, and then I close it.
I did not pack the little scissors.
She holds them out to me without looking.
"Fifty years of weddings," she says, as I take them. "You learn what walks away and what gets left behind. Are you ready?"
I nod. Ysolde's dress is boxed up like treasured gems on their way to a museum or a dignitary's collection. I pick it up as Grammy sets down her hoop.
She doesn't hurry. She never hurries with this part, and I watch her, amazed, like I did as a child.
She folds the tissue back like turning down a bed. Her deft fingers find the inside of the hem, and she threads a needle with a single strand of pale pink silk. She completes one stitch, so small that no one will ever find it who doesn't know to look. She's done it to every piece that has left our shop since before the shop was mine — since before I was born, if the stories are true.
"For luck," she says, same as always. "Every Sunfell dress carries one."
"Even for orcs?"
"Especially for orcs," she says as she folds the tissue back over the silk as though tucking in a child.
I busy myself with the box lid so she won't see my expression.
Because this is the part of every wedding that gets me — not the ceremony, not the flowers, I'm ironclad through all of that. It's this. Ysolde is going to stand up in front of everyone she loves and begin the rest of her life, and this stitch will be in the hem of it.
And no one will ever know, and it is the closest thing my family has to a blessing.
And on the mantel above Grammy's head, where it has sat my entire life, the book watches me.
I don't mean to look at it. I never mean to look at it. It's just a book — but it’s not just a book.
The Fable of the Oak and the Needle. The Sunfell story. The reason, depending on how much of it you believe, that Grammy buried her husband and son-in-law, lost her daughter, and then raised me.
The reason that I’ll always be the dressmaker and never the bride.
Weddings are what I help to make. They will never be what I get – I promised myself that. And every Sunfell woman who everthought otherwise is in that book, one way or another, pressed like flowers, beautiful and heartbreaking.
"Lissy."
I startle. Grammy is watching me. Her needle has stopped.
"Your cart is waiting," she says.
"I know,” I say, hoisting my satchel up on one shoulder, and tucking the box under my arm. “I'm going."
"Eat at the feast. Don't work the whole night."
I laugh dryly. "I'm going to work the whole night."
"I know." She takes my free hand in both of hers. Her hands are the safest place I have ever known. "Lissy. Whatever else that family is — however loud, however large — a wedding is a wedding. Let it be a happy thing. Don't stand at the edge of it and worry the whole night."
"What else should I be doing?"
Grammy looks at me a long moment. "Go on," she says, and she kisses my knuckle. “Be proud.”
"You're not dancing."
I nearly choke on my canape.
