"Take your time," she said. "If you need another size, just call out and I'll bring it to the desk."
"Thank you," Alicia said. "I may do exactly that with the blue one. My daughter sits between sizes, depending on the designer."
She was aware, as she said it, of being watched.
Deborah Lawson had not followed her so much as arrived, in the manner of weather arriving. She stood near a rail of silk blouses fifteen feet away, a cream coat over her arm, her phone in her hand, making a performance of examining a sleeve she had already examined twice. She was fifty-five, beautifully kept, the kind of woman whose hair appointment had its own standing place in a diary, and she chaired a charity committee with the serene confidence of someone whose instincts about people, she often said, had never once been wrong.
Her instincts were speaking now. They had been speaking since the first floor.
Alicia met her gaze in the long mirror beside the fitting-room doors โ not directly, but in reflection, which somehow made it worse. Deborah did not look away. There was no embarrassment in her, no pretense that she had been looking elsewhere. She simply watched, the way a person watches a door they expect someone to slip through.
Alicia had spent twenty years in rooms where people underestimated her and had learned to catalog the varieties. There was the boardroom variety, which mistook her quietness for uncertainty. There was the landlord variety, from the early days, which had looked at a young Black woman with a business plan and seen a risk it could not price. And there was this variety โ retail, daylight, unembarrassed โ which saw a woman alone with expensive dresses and performed arithmetic it never performed on anyone else.
She could have ended it in one sentence. She had ended versions of it before, in other stores, other cities, with a name and a title produced like a card from a sleeve, and she had watched the color leave faces and the apologies arrive in a flood. It always worked. It never felt like winning. It felt like paying a toll that only she was charged.
Besides, she had come here for Zoe. She had forty minutes when she walked in; she had perhaps twenty-five now, and a daughter waiting at home with strong opinions about blue.
"Room Four," Hannah said, holding the oak door.
Alicia stepped inside and heard the lock click softly behind her, the sound she herself had specified all those years ago: solid, private, final. She hung the three garments on the brass rail in ascending order of hope โ the cornflower dress, the plum gown, and last, closest to the mirror, Zoe's midnight blue.
From outside, muffled by oak, she heard Hannah's pencil scratch once on the tally pad.
And she heard, quite distinctly, Deborah Lawson ask the empty air a question that was not addressed to anyone, and therefore addressed to everyone.
"Three went in," Deborah said. "We'll see how many come out."
Chapter 7: Two Garments
The cornflower dress came off the hanger and went back on it within ninety seconds.
It was not the color. The color, against the fitting-room light, was lovely โ a bright, rinsed blue that would photograph beautifully and live badly, fading by its third wearing into something apologetic. Alicia knew fabric the way surgeons know anatomy, by touch before sight, and her fingertips told her the weave was looser than the price promised. She held it to the mirror anyway and took the photograph Zoe would demand, because seventeen-year-olds trusted evidence over maternal pronouncements, and then she set the dress aside with the particular tenderness of a woman rejecting something pretty.
The plum gown was another matter. It required negotiation.
She stepped into it carefully, worked the hidden zip up as far as her own reach allowed, and stood in the three-paneled mirror turning by degrees, the way she had taught generations of her own sales staff to let a customer turn: without comment, without hurry. The shoulder line was as intelligent as it had promised from the rail. The color did something generous to her skin. For a moment she was not a founder conducting research, not a mother on a clock, but simply a woman in a beautiful dress in a room she had built, and she allowed herself the whole moment, all three mirrors of it.
Then the clock reasserted itself. She had a call with her operations director at four. She had promised Zoe a decision, with photographs, before dinner.
She changed back into her own clothes โ charcoal trousers, a white shirt chosen that morning for its invisibility โ and took down the midnight-blue dress for the last, longest look.
This was the one. She was sure of the color and nearly sure of the silhouette, and unsure, precisely, of the size. Zoe was between a six and an eight in this designer's cutting, and the difference was not vanity; it was an inch at the waist that would decide whether her daughter breathed comfortably through an evening of dancing or spent the formal counting the minutes. Alicia held the dress against herself, a useless but universal maternal measurement, and frowned.
What she needed was both sizes at home, a daughter in front of a mirror, and a returns envelope for the loser. What she had was a procedure โ her own procedure, written into the store handbook in her own hand a decade ago: a customer could hold a second size at the fitting-room desk while she decided, so the garment never had to be carried back to the floor and lost to another buyer in the interval.
Alicia unlocked the door.
Hannah Price looked up from her tally pad. Beyond her, near the silk blouses, Deborah Lawson had not moved in any way that mattered. Her coat was still over her arm. Her attention was still a weather system parked over Room Four.
"The blue," Alicia said, holding out the midnight dress, "could you keep this one at the desk for me? I want to try the other size against it before I decide โ my daughter's between sizes, and I'd rather not lose this one to the floor while I think."