Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Arthur
The fit model stood on the low platform like a patient statue, arms lifted while I fussed at a seam that refused to behave.
A dozen mirrors made a dozen versions of the same navy blazer—my navy blazer, from the upcoming ready-to-wear drop for Thorne it needed to sell to women who sat in boardrooms where men explained things to them like they were idiots.
This blazer would pass the test and smile while doing it.
“Boyfriend’s a real mess,” Maya said, conversational as a kettle coming to a boil. She rotated on the platform so the mirrors caught the line of the back vent. “Left the milk out—again. It’s like sharing a flat with a very lovable Labrador who shouldn’t have an Uber Eats app.”
“Housebroken, I hope?” I asked, eyebrows raised.
“Mostly. He’s a slob, but a lovable one.” She glanced down at the blazer. “Which is also how I’d describe a few of our clients, God help them.”
“Careful,” I said. “The mirrors gossip.”
She grinned, then sighed the sigh of a woman evaluating both a shoulder seam and her life choices. I tugged the hem, chalked a swift mark, and wrote drop front hem ⒈／⒋. The line fell into place like a held breath released.
The door clicked. Laurence slipped in with a tab of measuring tape looped around his wrist and a shimmer in his eyes that meant news.
“Apologies, sir,” he said. “Eddie Gray has dropped by, wondering if we might take his measurements again for the Emmys tuxedo. He swears he’s gained weight.” A micro-pause for effect. “He has not.”
His eye roll was operatic. I snorted. “Of course he hasn’t.”
Maya stopped pretending not to listen. “The Eddie Gray?”
I didn’t answer immediately. The name flickered like a match struck in a dark room and I was back in a black box theatre that smelled of dust and paint, Eddie on stage in a secondhand linen shirt, an entire audience leaning toward him as if breath were a thing he could steal and keep.
Eddie was my ex, and the memories came flooding back.
Those Royal Academy of Dramatic Art days.
RADA. Toasties after rehearsals. Kisses nicked behind a door marked Props.
Then The Violet Hour happened—a streaming darling about clever people in bad times—and Los Angeles opened its jaw and swallowed him whole.
We broke up like adults, cried like teenagers, and promised each other holidays that never lined up.
“Tell me you can fit him in,” Laurence went on, amusement bright as a blade. “He’s being very pleasant about it.”
“Pleasant,” I echoed, because among Brits that was code for one prosecco away from tears. I set the clipboard down and wiped chalk from my fingers. “Find Chris—he’s doing the Emmys tuxedo. Take Eddie to the Mirror Room and tell him I’ll be right there.”
“On it.” Laurence pivoted, then remembered himself. “He asked for you specifically,” he added, casual as a cat stretching in a sun patch.
“Of course he did.” I kept my face composed; my heart did a small, disloyal hop. “Mirror Room in five.”
Laurence vanished.
Maya’s eyes were wide, the blazer briefly irrelevant. “Eddie Gray,” she mouthed, as if the syllables themselves were a dessert.
“Contain yourself,” I said, mostly to amuse her. “He puts his trousers on one leg at a time.”
Maya laughed, delighted and scandalised. “Is he nice?”
“He’s very good at being looked at,” I said, half-teasing, half true. “And kinder than he needs to be. It’s a killer combination.”
“I’d pass out,” Maya confessed. “Like, genuinely swoon.”
“Please don’t,” I said, stepping in to pluck a last pin from the lapel. “I’ve spent an hour getting this blazer to telegraph ‘I woke up competent,’ and it doesn’t pair well with fainting.”
She stifled another giggle, then sobered under the lights. “How is it, then?”
I let the mirror answer first. The jacket skimmed and structured in equal measure, a 1970s whisper without the appearance of a costume. “Good bones,” I said finally. “It says what we want it to say.”
“Which is?”
“Hire me, promote me, underestimate me at your peril.”
“Sold,” Maya said, satisfaction warming the word.
I slid the clipboard onto the worktable and scribbled Send to sample room with updates—urgent. “We’re through for today,” I told her. “Go rescue your milk from the golden retriever.”
“Bless you,” she said, carefully stepping off the platform. “And Arthur?”
“Yes?”
“Tell Eddie I loved him in the episode with the hallway monologue.”
I smiled. “He’ll pretend to be embarrassed and then he’ll glow for the rest of the day.”
“Iconic,” Maya breathed, and vanished.
The room exhaled when she left. The chatter of the atelier filtered through the door—steamers hissing, shears whispering through cloth, the busy purr of machines, a tailor’s low oath in a language my grandmother would have pretended not to understand.
Bolts of fabric leaned like polite columns along the wall: moss crepe, a sober pinstripe, a shot-silk that misbehaved when you praised it.
On the board, the collection’s palette—ink, bone, oxblood, a single belligerent marigold—looked like a clean sentence with one exclamation point.
I stepped into the corridor. Clarence Atelier on a Monday was a busy place: interns ferrying clothing samples on padded hangers, Chris’s laugh breaking out like champagne somewhere down the hall, pattern paper crackling under a cutter’s hands.
We’d christened the fancy fitting room the Mirror Room ages ago—capital letters earned by the floor-to-ceiling glass that made stars blush and stylists weep.
I turned into the hallway and headed for my reunion with Eddie.
Halfway there, I paused at my office, where I’d left my phone facedown on a stack of lookbooks.
A quick, traitorous glance—no new messages.
I wasn’t expecting any, not really, and yet the blank screen made my stomach dip.
Bryce’s name might have lit it. It didn’t.
I tucked the phone into my pocket, just in case.
I pushed through the last stretch of hallway, and Chris emerged from the sample room with a bundle of teal silk draped over his arm. He spotted me and waggled his brows.
“Found our swan,” he said. “He’s ready for his tragic death on the red carpet.”
“No swans dying on my watch,” I said.
Chris cackled and swanned off.
At the Mirror Room door, I smoothed the front of my shirt. It was ridiculous that my pulse climbed like a teenager’s, but there it was. I blamed the mirrors, the Emmys, and Eddie Gray’s mouth, which had once made the rest of the world disappear.
Laurence opened the door before I reached for it, perfectly timed as always. “He’s decent,” he murmured, which in Laurence meant “he’s armed with charm.”
“Any sign of weight gain?” I whispered back, wicked.
“Of course not. Now go in before he has a nervous breakdown.”
I slipped inside.
Through the forest of reflections, I caught Eddie’s profile as he turned toward me—chin up, eyes bright, smile tucked at the corner like mischief waiting for a cue. For a fraction of a second, the years collapsed into a single breath, and I was twenty-one again.
“Hello, stranger,” he said, and the room forgot to be a room and became a stage. Chris breezed in as if the room had been waiting for applause, measuring tape draped around his neck like pearls and a pincushion cuffed to his wrist.
“My darling swan,” he announced to Eddie, “arms out, chin up, try not to fall in love with me while I measure.”
Eddie obliged, stepping onto the platform, laughter already at the corners of his mouth.
Up close he was the same impossible creature he’d always been—Paul Newman if Paul had learned Pilates and irony.
The light loved him. It slid along his cheekbones, caught in his lashes, turned him into the most expensive thing in the room without him even trying.
“I’ve put on half a stone,” he confessed, grimacing, as Chris looped the tape around his ribcage.
“Where, your elbows?” Chris guffawed. “Breathe. In… and out… there we are.”
He swatted at Chris, laughing. “You’re vile.”
“Vile and accurate.” Chris squinted at the tape. “Thirty-eight and a whisper. Not a dram of drama.”
“Tell that to my wardrobe,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’ve got the worst case of nerves in my career. I’ve never received a nomination before, and now I’m nominated for Best Actor. It’s obscene.”
“Obscene is the right word,” Chris said, sliding the tape to his waist. “Because it makes people misbehave. Thirty-two. Turn for me—hips. Lovely. Thirty-six and a smidge. Worst case of nerves, hmm? Have you tried champagne?”
“I tried a meditation app,” Eddie said. “It told me to unclench my jaw. I didn’t know I had a jaw.”
“You’ve got two,” Chris said. “One for the press, one for your exes.”
Eddie flicked a glance at me with a grin that said, caught. I busied myself with the clipboard, pretending to note numbers while actually noting the way his mouth tipped up more on the left. Old habits.
Chris, who loved gossip the way orchids love humidity, lowered his voice theatrically. “Is it true you’re dating Marcus Hale, then? Or shall I send a strongly worded letter to Hello! magazine?”
Eddie groaned. “Not anymore. Now I’ve only got eyes for my one true love—Percy.”
“The chihuahua?” I asked, because Percy had more followers on Instagram than most indie films.
“The very same. Men? Never again. Women? Not while they’re famous.” He cocked an eyebrow. “The dog, at least, doesn’t do an interview about it.”
“Arms down,” Chris said. “Shoulders back. You’re going to float, not walk.” He measured across his back, then down his spine to the small of it. “Nape to floor, glorious. And bicep, hold—mmm, fourteen. Perfect for a sleeve that says ‘award-winning’ without trying too hard.”
He stepped back, admiring Eddie like a sculptor approving a block he’d personally quarried. Then, breezy as a breeze, he tossed over his shoulder, “Speaking of dating, our Arthur is.”
Both Eddie and I said at exactly the same time, “Who?”
We caught each other’s eyes and laughed, the sound bouncing around the glass like a remembered kiss. Eddie’s smile softened, grew private, and for a moment I felt young again, brittle with possibility.
Chris waggled his eyebrows. “The American ambassador. Bryce Lewis.”
Eddie blinked, blank in that charming way actors are when you say anything not on a call sheet. “Should I know who that is?”
“No,” I blurted, feeling the heat in my cheeks and hating it. “We’ve only recently met, and nothing serious has come of it—”
“Yet,” Chris sang, cutting a flourish in the air with his tape.
My phone buzzed in my pocket—one decisive minor earthquake. Both of them looked at me as if I’d just pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
“Well?” Eddie said, eyes bright. “Is that him?”
I pulled it out, thumb suddenly clumsy, and there it was, neat and heartbreakingly plain:
I had the day from hell. Can we meet tonight? I could really use the company.
My pulse skipped the way it does when a horse goes from trot to canter without asking permission.
“Read it out,” Eddie demanded. “Go on.”
“We are not teenagers,” I said, stuffing the phone back into my pocket.
He pouted shamelessly. “If we can’t be teenagers in front of mirrors, when can we?”
I sighed and gave in, because he’d always been very good at winning small wars. I read it aloud. The words sounded different in the air—more vulnerable, somehow, as though they’d taken off their coat.
Chris clapped once. “Go.”
“Go where?” I said, though I knew precisely where.
“To him,” he said, as if I were slow. “I saw you two at the embassy reception. Chemistry you could bottle and sell at Selfridges. You lit up like a chandelier. So did he.”
Eddie’s eyes did a wicked little sparking thing. Trouble. I knew that look. “Oh, we’re definitely meeting him.”
“We?” I echoed, feeling my hackles rise and then immediately smoothing them, because this was not the hill to die on. “Eddie—”
“I want to see if he’s good enough for you,” he said, half-tease, half-test. “I’ll be kind, I swear.”
I pictured a quiet table, low lights, the warm weight of a hand over mine; traded it for Eddie’s star-wattage and Chris’s delighted commentary. Alone would have been better. Alone would have been honest. But when Eddie got a notion, he was like a terrier—adorable, implacable, teeth set.
It would be harmless enough, I thought to myself. A drink. Ten minutes, and that’s it. Then, I would whisk him away so we could be alone. And perhaps a genuine star would impress Bryce.
“I’ll have to ask him first,” I said, schooling my voice into lightness as I typed a reply. “He’s had a day from hell, apparently.”
“Then we’ll make it heavenly,” Eddie said, beaming at his reflection. “Won’t we, Chris?”