Chapter 1 - The Practice Girl in the Back Room
At 4:17 on a rain-dark Thursday afternoon, Meline Hayes drove a pearl-headed pin through six hundred dollars’ worth of French silk because Lorenzo Moretti leaned across her cutting table and asked whether telling a woman she had beautiful hands sounded sincere or creepy. She stared at the pin buried crookedly in the fabric, then stared at him. Lorenzo sat in the green velvet chair near the front window of Hayes Bespoke as though the chair had been built around him. Thirty-eight years old, broad through the shoulders, dressed in charcoal wool that Meline had fitted to his body herself, he possessed the kind of stillness that made other men lower their voices without understanding why. People in Boston knew his name. They knew his father had died eleven months earlier. They knew Lorenzo had inherited businesses that did not appear on tax returns, friendships that did not survive subpoenas, and enemies who regarded funerals as networking opportunities.
Meline knew something more humiliating. He was terrible at flirting. “Beautiful hands?” she repeated. Lorenzo glanced at her fingers. They were thick, callused, scarred by needles and hot irons, the nails kept short because long nails caught thread. “Yes.” “Whose hands?” “Theoretical woman.” “There is no theoretical woman.” “There could be.” “There has been a theoretical woman every Tuesday and Thursday for six weeks.” His mouth twitched. “That sounds like jealousy.” “That sounds like arithmetic.” Rain ticked against the tall storefront windows. Behind Meline, an old Singer machine hummed beneath the careful foot of her assistant, Nina, who abruptly decided she needed something from the basement. Coward. Meline watched her disappear. Lorenzo lifted the espresso she had stopped offering him three weeks ago and which he continued making himself in the tiny employee kitchenette. “What if I said,” he continued, lowering his voice, “‘A woman’s hands tell me what she has survived. Yours make me wonder who taught you to build beautiful things out of damage.’”
Something inside Meline went painfully still, and then irritation arrived to save her. “Oh, absolutely not.” “No?” “You sound like a man seducing a widow in a candle commercial.” He laughed, and she hated when he laughed. Not because the sound was unpleasant, but because it was. Warm, low, unexpectedly boyish. And because Lorenzo Moretti had apparently decided her shop was the appropriate place to rehearse being charming for whichever polished society woman he planned to marry. Meline yanked the ruined pin from the silk. “You have a dinner tomorrow, don’t you?” “Maybe.” “With her.” “Who?” “Don’t insult me.” “I’m trying to identify the victim.” “Isabella Romano.” His expression changed so quickly most people might have missed it, but Meline did not. Dressmakers survived by noticing what bodies confessed before mouths did. A shoulder rising half an inch, a waist expanding on an inhale, a bride flinching when her mother touched her, a groom whose suit suddenly needed letting out because grief had made him eat in the dark for four months.
People lied, but bodies rarely did. And Lorenzo’s body, at the mention of Isabella Romano, did not lean forward with interest. It closed, just slightly, before the smile returned. “Is that what people are saying?” “That her father wants an alliance with your family? Yes.” “The neighborhood has become disappointingly informed.” “The neighborhood has eyes.” “So do you.” There it was again. That voice, that look, delivered directly to Meline as though she were not forty-one, plus-sized, perpetually dusted with tailor’s chalk, and currently wearing reading glasses on a chain because she had lost three pairs in one year. She folded her arms. “Don’t.” His brow furrowed. “Don’t what?” “Try the line on me before you use it on someone else.” The humor left his face, and Meline turned away before he could see what the sentence had cost her.
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Hayes Bespoke had been hers for thirteen years. She had survived a recession, two burst pipes, one spectacularly dishonest business partner, her mother’s cancer, her mother’s funeral, and a landlord who treated annual rent increases as a hobby. She knew how to survive embarrassment. You made yourself useful, you stood straight, you finished the hem. “Your jacket,” she said. “Take it off.” He did, because of course he did. Lorenzo Moretti could make a restaurant owner empty a dining room with a glance, yet in her shop he obeyed instructions like an altar boy. She stepped behind him and checked the seam she had altered along the back. “You’re carrying your right shoulder differently.” “Am I?” “You know you are.” “Old injury.” “No. New.” Silence. She touched the cloth near his ribs, and he flinched. Her hand froze. “You’re hurt.” “I’m fine.” “That sentence should be printed on men’s tombstones.” “Meline.” “Did someone stab you?” “No.” “Shoot you?” “No.” “Hit you?” “That feels judgmental.” She moved around him. “Lorenzo.” His gaze met hers, and for one second she saw exhaustion beneath everything else. Not the elegant danger people whispered about, not the man who arrived in black cars and had other men open doors for him, but just raw exhaustion. Then he reached for the tape measure hanging around her neck. “You worry about me.” She slapped his hand away. “I worry about the suit. If you die in it, I’m not giving your family a refund.”
The old teasing should have restored the balance, but it did not. His eyes stayed on her. “Would you miss me?” Meline’s throat tightened. There were questions that were flirtation, questions that were cruelty, and questions that a lonely woman could not afford to misunderstand. She stepped back. “Enough.” Lorenzo went still. “I mean it.” “Meline—” “No.” She pulled the measuring tape from around her neck and threw it onto the cutting table, the brass end striking wood with a sharp crack. “I have stood here for six weeks while you asked me whether to send roses, what music to choose, what restaurant feels intimate, whether a compliment sounds sincere, whether touching a woman’s hand is too much, whether telling her she makes you forget your own name is ridiculous.” “I never said that last one.” “You were working toward it.” His mouth almost curved. “Do not smile.” He didn’t, which made it worse. Meline’s voice trembled, and she hated him for noticing. “I am not your practice woman.” His expression emptied. “I never said you were.” “You didn’t need to.” “Meline—” “You come in here and try all your polished nonsense on me because I’m safe. Because I’m the dressmaker. The fat woman behind the counter who knows how to make powerful men look ten pounds thinner and wealthy women look like they slept eight hours when they haven’t slept since 2019.” His jaw tightened. She kept going because stopping would mean crying, and she would rather set her own shop on fire. “You get to see if the line works. You get to watch my face. Then you take the improved version to Isabella or whoever else belongs in your world.” “Meline.” “Stop using me to practice your dating tricks!” The words cracked through the room, silencing the rain, the traffic, the soft clicking of the old wall clock, leaving only the sound of her own breathing. She wished she could pull the sentence back and cut it apart like a bad seam. Lorenzo slowly stood, six foot three of pure intimidation. Meline was not frightened easily, but there were moments when the mythology surrounding a man suddenly became difficult to ignore. This was one of them. She had just screamed at Lorenzo Moretti. He stepped toward her. She lifted her chin. “If you’re going to threaten me, do it quickly. Mrs. Whitmore is coming at five for a fitting.” “What exactly do you think Isabella Romano is to me?” Meline blinked. “What?”
