The lavender gown had taken me nearly five months to make. It wasn't the black academic robe I would wear onstage; that belonged to the school. It was the dress beneath it, the one I planned to wear in the photographs afterward, the dress I had imagined showing my mother if she had lived long enough to see this day. I had bought the fabric in three separate lengths because I couldn't afford the whole amount at once. My grandmother had sewn the star during a weekend when arthritis made her fingers ache, insisting that one stitch from her mattered more than the finest label in the city.
Now there was coffee running through her stitches.
My stepmother, Celeste, entered with the practiced expression of a woman who had already chosen which version of the story she would believe. She wore an ivory belted outfit and delicate gold earrings, every detail carefully arranged for the family photographs. Her gaze moved from Brielle's innocent face to my ruined gown, but she did not ask what had happened.
"Naomi, lower your voice," she said.
"I haven't raised it. She poured coffee on me."
Celeste looked at the cup, then the stain. "Brielle was probably trying to help you get ready. Accidents happen. If you had been watching where you stood—"
"I was standing in front of my mirror."
"And now you're arguing. Your father is going to come home to this noise, and we'll all be late." She reached into her handbag for her phone. "Find something else to wear."
Brielle leaned against the dresser, smiling. It was such a small smile that anyone entering halfway through might have missed it. I knew it well. I had seen it the night my college acceptance letter disappeared and turned up folded into a pile of grocery coupons. I had seen it when Brielle told her friends I had bought my graduation dress secondhand, deliberately leaving out that I had sewn it myself. I had seen it whenever Celeste gave her exactly what she wanted and asked me to be mature enough not to mind.
"You know I made this," I said. "You both know how long it took."
"Then you should know how to clean it," Brielle replied.
Something caught in my throat. My mother had died when I was thirteen, but she had been absent in pieces long before that, disappearing into chemotherapy appointments, hospital waiting rooms, and days when she was too tired to lift her head from the pillow. On her better afternoons, we sat together and watched videos of designers working late into the night. She loved the courage it took to make something nobody else could see yet. When her strength failed, I threaded needles for her and listened to her explain why a seam needed room to move.