Emily looked toward the fitting rooms. From inside, faintly, came Zoe's voice β "Mom, no, the other mirror" β and a murmur of laughter, ordinary as bread. Emily had started that fitting room herself. She had judged sizes with her own eyes, carried the graphite suit, promised a crepe dress that would move like water. The woman in there had thanked her by name, reading the badge, the way considerate people do. The woman in there had stood on her toes for a dress rail and laughed at her own daughter's teasing and left β Emily remembered it now, with an unease that had nothing to do with Deborah β her tote sitting open on the fitting-room bench.
Everything Emily knew said these were customers. Everything her training said added: all customers are customers until a manager says otherwise, and Mrs. Lawson was not a manager. Mrs. Lawson was, however, a name. A committee, a husband, a table at every benefit in the county, a woman whose displeasure traveled through stores the way weather travels through a valley β and Emily was twenty-four, four months from a performance review, renting an apartment whose lease assumed she stayed employed and stayed liked.
"Mrs. Lawson," she said carefully, "I can't really treat a customer asβ"
"I am not asking you to treat anyone as anything." Deborah touched her wrist, lightly, an anointing. "I am asking you to be observant. To mention it, perhaps, to Maria. That is all. If I am wrong, no one has been harmed, and we will all have a little laugh about Deborah being Deborah. But if I am right β " She let the sentence stand unfinished, because unfinished sentences recruited the listener to finish them, and Emily, unwillingly, finished it.
"I'll... keep an eye out," Emily said at last. "And I can mention it to Maria. When she's free."
"That's a good girl." Deborah picked up the cream clutch again, restored. "Now. I think I will try the jacket after all. And Emily β let's keep this between us. There's no kindness in embarrassing people unnecessarily."
She moved away toward the jackets, unhurried, a benefactor leaving a church.
Emily stood alone between evening bags and evening wear with a pair of sandals in her hand and a feeling she could not file. She did what she would replay, later, in the small hours β she took three steps toward the fitting rooms, as if proximity were the same as watching, and then stopped, and went instead to find Maria Santos, telling herself that passing it upward was the responsible thing, the trained thing, the safe thing.
Behind the walnut door, unaware, Alicia Grant was zipping her daughter into midnight blue and saying, "Turn around. Let me see," in the voice of a mother with forty protected minutes and not one of them wasted.
Emily knocked once, softly, on the manager's office door, and hated the sound her own hand made.
Chapter 6: The Fitting Room
The fitting rooms at Harlow & Vine had been Alicia Grant's idea down to the last brass hook.
Eleven years earlier, when the architects had presented their plans for the second floor, they had shown her narrow cubicles with curtains that never quite closed and lighting the color of a rainy afternoon. Alicia had rejected the drawings on the spot. A woman trying on a dress that cost more than a month's rent, she had told them, should not feel as if she were changing in a corridor. She should feel, for three unhurried minutes, that the dress had been waiting for her.
So the rooms were generous. The doors were solid oak and locked with a soft, satisfying click. The mirrors were three-paneled, the carpet was deep enough to silence heels, and above each door a small numbered plaque in brushed gold caught the light. Alicia had chosen all of it. Standing outside Room Four with three garments over her arm, she felt the familiar, private pleasure of a thing built properly β and the sharper pleasure that no one around her knew she had built it.
"Three items, ma'am?" Hannah Price asked from the fitting-room desk.
Hannah was twenty-six, neat as a folded napkin, with a pencil tucked behind one ear and a tally pad open in front of her. She had worked at the store for fourteen months. In all that time she had served Alicia perhaps a dozen times without ever learning her name, because Alicia had arranged her life, deliberately, so that almost nobody on the floor recognized her as the owner. Ownership, she believed, changed the way people handed you a dress. It made them careful instead of honest. She wanted honesty from her own store, the way any ordinary customer would receive it.
"Three," Alicia confirmed, and held them out one by one for the count, the way the store's own procedure required.
First, the blue dress for Zoe β midnight blue, almost black until the light moved across it, with a fitted bodice and a skirt that would turn when her daughter turned. Zoe Grant was seventeen and had sent Alicia four photographs that morning, each blue, each different, each accompanied by the same message: *Not this blue. The other blue.* Alicia had laughed in the car. This, she thought, holding the dress up in the fitting-room light, might finally be the other blue.
Second, a second blue dress, lighter, cornflower shot through with silver thread, beautiful and wrong in a way Alicia could not yet name. Zoe would want to see it tried against the first, even if only in a photograph.
Third, a gown for Alicia herself β deep plum evening wear she had no earthly need for and had picked up anyway, because the cut along the shoulder was so intelligent it had stopped her mid-stride on the floor. She told herself it was research. Founders were allowed research. She had a charity dinner in three weeks and nothing she owned felt new, and she was forty-five years old and permitted, occasionally, to want a dress simply because it wanted her back.
Hannah wrote the number on her pad, hung a small numbered disc β *3* β on the hook of Room Four, and smiled the professional smile the store trained into its attendants: warm, brief, and entirely without curiosity.