Coralie read Bryony’s approval twice before picking up the scissors.
The room was quiet. She had moved the other work away, covered the clean table and laid the dress exactly as she wanted it. There was no reason to delay except the weight of knowing someone had once danced in the shape she was about to change.
She thought of Bryony taking those first clipped, hopeful steps toward the door. Then she cut.
The sound was small. Ordinary. The fabric separated without protest, and she was relieved enough to become annoyed with herself.
She worked slowly through the first section, keeping what could be saved and putting the spare lace aside in a labeled packet. When she stopped to stretch her back, the skirt no longer looked like a finished thing. It looked like work. She preferred it that way.
At half past eleven, the bell rang.
Stellan stood in the doorway with rain on the shoulders of his jacket.
“Bryony asked me to collect the box. Apparently she needs it for wedding things that don’t fit in the other wedding things.”
Coralie glanced beneath the table. The empty cardboard storage box had been there since last Wednesday, gradually acquiring a little pile of her own paperwork on its lid.
“Of course. Give me a second.”
“There’s no hurry.”
She moved the papers, suddenly aware of the dress spread behind her. His eyes went to it, then away.
“I’ve started,” she said.
“I can see.”
“It’s going well.”
“Good.” He took the box. “You don’t need to explain it to me.”
She liked him for saying that, although she had wanted to explain. She had wanted him to see that nothing careless had happened here.
He balanced the lid and looked toward the window. The rain was coming down harder.
“Have you had lunch?” he asked.
“It’s half past eleven.”
“So that’s probably no.”
“Probably.”
He smiled. “I’m stopping for coffee before I go back to work. You’re welcome to join me.”
She looked at the table. A morning’s work lay in careful pieces. It would still be there in half an hour. She had eaten toast standing up at seven, and there was nothing romantic about being hungry.
“All right. Let me cover this.”
He waited outside while she washed her hands and took off the wrist pincushion. She checked the mirror, then turned away before she could begin improving herself.
The cafe was two doors from the hardware shop and full of people escaping the rain. They found a small table at the back with one chair that tilted toward the window.
Stellan took that one without comment. Coralie noticed and then told herself not to turn basic manners into a character reference.
He set the empty box beneath his feet. It looked absurdly large there.
“Is that coming to lunch?”
“It’s very quiet company.”
“Unlike me?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She laughed. He looked at her mouth, briefly enough that she could have imagined it.
They ordered at the counter, each paying for their own drink. Coralie added a sandwich because she was hungry, then felt embarrassed by how determined she was to behave as though this were entirely unremarkable.
At the table he asked about the teaching trial. She blinked.
“Petra told you?”
“There’s a notice in her window. I went past this morning.”
“She said she’d wait until she’d read the plan.”
“Maybe she’s read it.”
Coralie checked her phone. There was indeed a message approving the plan, sent twenty minutes earlier. She put the phone away, feeling foolish.
“I suppose she has.”
“What are you teaching?”
“A small project. Something they can change enough to make their own, but not so much that we all end up sleeping in the shop.”
“What sort of changes?”
She began explaining, then stopped. “You don’t have to be interested.”
“I asked.”
“Yes.” She picked at the edge of the napkin. “Sorry.”
He waited while she found the thread of her answer again. She described the idea in two sentences. He asked whether people would be able to finish within the evening. It was the exact question she was worrying about, and she admitted she didn’t know until she had tried the sample against a clock.
“What happens if they don’t?”
“They might be disappointed.”
“They might want to come back.”
“Or demand their money.”
“That too.”
She looked up and found him smiling, not trying to rescue the thought. She could be nervous without him requiring her to become confident for his comfort.
“Do you ever agree to a job and then wonder why you said yes?”
“Every time somebody says they want low maintenance.”
She laughed.
“It usually means they don’t want to look after anything and they want it to look looked after.”
“Do you tell them that?”
“Less directly if I’m hoping they’ll pay me.”
He told her about his crew, briefly: two people who knew what they were doing, an occasional extra pair of hands during busy weeks, and himself trying to do the accounts when he should have been asleep. He wasn’t embarrassed by the scale of it. She found that attractive too, and began to suspect the afternoon might become inconvenient.
“What would you make if nobody ordered anything?” he asked.
The question caught her with the sandwich halfway to her mouth.
“That’s a terrible business plan.”
“Probably. I meant what would you choose.”
She put the sandwich down. “Clothes people could actually live in. Interesting clothes. Not just sensible.”
“Like the jacket.”
“You remember that?”
“The sideways pockets.”
“Angled.”
“Those.”
She smiled, then looked out at the rain. “I spend a lot of time helping people fit into something they’ve already bought. I like it when it works. But I’d like to decide what the thing is sometimes.”
“Why don’t you?”
It was too simple a question. For a moment she was irritated.
“Rent. Time. People expecting me to be available for the work they already know I do.”
He nodded. “Yes. That was a stupid question.”
“Not stupid.”
“Badly timed, then.”
She shook her head. “I ask myself the same thing. I just tend to answer more rudely.”
He leaned back, accepting that. Outside, the rain began to thin.
His current worksite was five minutes away on foot. He mentioned it as they left the cafe, not as an invitation, and Coralie asked whether she could see it before she had thought through what she was doing.
“You’ve got work.”
“So have you.”
“The owner said I could show people, but it isn’t much to look at yet.”
“I look at unfinished things all day.”
He considered, then nodded toward the next street. “Come on.”
They walked past a row of houses to a side gate in a high brick wall. Stellan opened it with a key and held it while she stepped through. Beyond was a small walled garden, not abandoned but tired: old beds, a narrow path, a tree reaching over a bench. Part of the planting had been cleared, and there were tools laid neatly beneath a shelter.
“It belongs to the house,” he said. “The owner doesn’t use this end much. She said I could work on a restoration plan between the regular jobs.”
“Paid work?”
“Some. Some of it’s me being interested beyond what she’s paying for.”
He sounded a little defensive, and Coralie recognized the feeling.
“What are you trying to do?”
He pointed toward the far corner. “Make that somewhere you’d want to sit. At the moment it looks as though you’d be waiting for an appointment.”
She could see it immediately: the straight path, the bench positioned for convenience rather than pleasure, the empty bed beside it.
“Why that corner?”
“Light in the evening. And you can’t see the house unless you turn round.”
He took her a few steps farther along the path, keeping away from the loose soil. The garden smelled wet and alive in a way she hadn’t expected behind an ordinary street.
“I’d put something tall there,” she said, pointing.
“Would you?”
“To hide the wall.”
“I like the wall.”
“Oh.”
He ran a hand over the old brick. “It holds the heat. And somebody built it to last. I’d rather let it show.”
She looked again. “Fair enough.”
“You don’t have to agree.”
“I was only here for thirty seconds before redesigning it. I can probably wait a minute.”
He smiled, then showed her a rough drawing tucked inside a folder. It was less polished than she had expected, crowded with crossings-out and a sketch of a tree that looked like a fist.
“Is that the tree?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I was worried about the giant hand.”
He laughed, sudden and full. She felt the sound in her chest more than she wanted to.
“I told you I drew badly.”
“You did. I thought you were being modest.”
He showed her where he had changed the path, and for several minutes she listened to him talk about something he plainly wanted. Not his daughter, not his late wife, not a client who needed placating. He became less hesitant when he spoke about the garden, his hands moving through the air as though the shapes already existed.
She watched his fingers and lost track of the path.
“Does that make sense?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, then added, “Mostly.”
“What didn’t?”
She admitted she hadn’t been listening at the end. His face changed, and she hurried to explain that she had been looking at the drawing. It wasn’t entirely a lie. He looked down at it, then at her, and she thought he knew.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
A voice called from the house. The owner wanted to know whether he could move a delivery from the side entrance. Stellan called back that he would be there in a minute.
“I should let you work,” Coralie said.
“I should let you work too.”
At the gate he held out the folder for her to look once more at the corner he had described. “Come back when there’s something there. If you’d like.”
“I would.”
This time she didn’t add anything about being in the area.
Back at the studio, the dress waited beneath its clean cover. Coralie washed her hands, checked the clock and began the next stage of work. She was forty minutes later than she had intended to be. Nothing had fallen apart.
At three she sent Bryony a brief progress photograph, keeping the image close enough to show the new shape without making unfinished work look alarming. Bryony replied with an enthusiastic string of messages and one question about the next fitting. Coralie answered it, then put the phone away.
She worked until six. When she finally sat down, there was a message from Farah asking whether she wanted to walk through the plant market on Saturday morning. Coralie began typing yes.
Then a second message arrived, from Stellan. Bryony had given him her number only for collecting the box, which he acknowledged with an awkward apology before asking whether she might like to see the market if she wasn’t busy.
Coralie stared at the screen, then laughed softly.
She told Farah about the invitation. Her friend answered, Bring him. I need someone who knows whether I can kill a fern.
Coralie looked at Stellan’s message again. He hadn’t offered to help with anything. He hadn’t asked for a favor. There was no dress in the question.
She typed, I’d like that. Farah’s coming too, if you don’t mind.
His answer came a minute later. I can cope with two people knowing about the bird.
She put the phone beside the finished work and found she was looking forward to Saturday.