On the second evening I worked until the threads on my fingertips left tiny ridges in my skin. We shaped the missing panels, built a stronger waist stay and spread the black skirt over six chairs so the layers would hang without tangling. Amaya sorted silver seed beads into saucers while Inez showed me how to attach them in short, independent groups. If a thread snapped during the runway walk, only a few stars would fall instead of an entire constellation. It was the kind of practical knowledge that never appeared in glossy fashion magazines, and I listened as if my future depended on it. Because it did.
At midnight a seam split near the left hip. I had shifted too much weight onto a narrow strip of satin, and the tension tore the fabric when I moved. I stood motionless with the broken stitches in my hand, imagining what would happen if the whole gown came apart onstage. Inez did not allow me to pretend it was nothing. She unpicked two hours of my work, replaced the damaged support with a wider internal panel and made me repeat the movement that had caused the failure. We tested it three times. On the fourth, it held.
The following morning I found Dad standing at the kitchen counter with a photograph open on his phone. It was a picture from the first week I began Blue Hour, taken before the bodice had any crystals. He asked why I had never shown him the work in progress. I reminded him of the evenings I had invited him upstairs and he had said he would come after finishing one more email. He looked away. I thought, for a second, that he might finally ask me to tell him the whole story. Instead he said Brianna had been under pressure lately and maybe I could be the bigger person.
I left without answering. At school, I sat behind the auditorium during lunch and cried for ten minutes, quietly enough that nobody would come looking for me. The tears were not only for the stolen dress. They were for every small moment when I had learned that asking for fairness made me difficult, and every time my father's exhaustion had been treated as a reason I should accept less. When the bell rang, I washed my face and went to math class. There were still calculations to finish for the weight of my skirt, and anger was not going to solve them.
Amaya found me after school holding a piece of black tulle against the window. She had brought an envelope containing a few more supplies, not gifts but remnants donated by a costume shop that sometimes worked with the arts center. Among them were small silver beads, a square of pale organza and a length of black ribbon with enough strength for the gown's waist. We spread everything across the table like people sorting clues at a crime scene. The material would not be enough for perfection. But I began to understand that a design could become stronger when it accepted what was available instead of pretending the limitations did not exist.