My mother used to say a seam was a promise. If you stitched it badly, the fabric remembered, even when nobody could see the mistake. She had died when I was twelve, leaving behind an old iron, a wooden sewing box and more unfinished patterns than I could count. For a long time I could not touch any of them. Then one winter, when the house felt so empty that I thought I might disappear inside it, I threaded her old machine and made a pillowcase from the lining of a damaged coat. I cried when I finished it. I also slept better than I had in months.
My father, David Carter, loved me in the distracted way of someone who believed love could exist without attention. He worked long hours managing construction projects, paid the bills, and came home too tired to ask why my bedroom light was still burning. When he married Vanessa two years after my mother's death, he promised us all that we would become one family. Vanessa had smiled and used the word equal so often that I believed it for almost a month. Then her daughter Brianna started borrowing things that never came back, and Vanessa began calling my complaints evidence that I was jealous.
Brianna and I were the same age, though she liked to remind people she was older by nine months. She had beautiful photographs, expensive shoes and a talent for making other people's achievements sound like favors she had done them. I sewed the hem of her prom dress because Vanessa said family helped family. I altered her jackets for free because Brianna said the fit made her look cheap. Once, when I won a district art prize, Vanessa told everyone how fortunate I was to have Brianna's confidence to inspire me. I stopped bringing trophies into the kitchen after that.
On the afternoon everything changed, Brianna came into my room without knocking. She wore a cream sweater, held a phone in one hand and stopped when she saw Blue Hour. For the first few seconds she said nothing. Then she walked around the mannequin, the way a buyer walks around a car, and ran two fingers across a row of crystals. I told her not to touch them because the adhesive beneath one section was still curing. She looked at me as though the warning itself were an insult.
"You made that?" she asked. When I nodded, her eyes moved from the skirt to the fitted waist and back again. "It would look amazing at my graduation dinner." I tried to smile and told her I already had a design for her to borrow if she wanted something special. She shook her head. She wanted this one, the one that fitted my measurements and carried my mother's initials hidden inside the lining.
Vanessa appeared in the doorway before I had finished explaining. She inspected the gown, asked how much the crystals had cost, and decided aloud that Brianna should wear it to the charity gala held on the night of the competition. I reminded her that the gala and the competition were two parts of the same event, and that Blue Hour was registered under my name. She waved a hand, impatient. "You can make something else," she said. "Brianna knows how to present herself. People will pay attention to her. That helps all of us."