Chapter 1
I was doing poverty math the day my life fell apart.
To be fair, my life had already been falling apart for most of the twenty-six years I’d been alive, but that particular Tuesday was the day it fell spectacularly, conclusively to pieces, and it really all started in the checkout lane at the grocery store.
“No.” Make a huge vat of cheap spaghetti and eat out of it for the next week of dinners—that was my go-to when it was a real death march till payday.
“Hmm.” She gave me a certain look, ringing up all that pasta. A look I was used to. “You know, I used to eat spaghetti like there was no tomorrow, and goodness, but my hips showed it!” A flick of her eyes at my lower half. “Then I went Paleo and those pesky pounds just fell off.”
I gave her a thin smile, swiping my debit card.
Paleo, right. See how much fresh meat and fresh veggies thirty-six bucks will buy you, lady.
Maybe starches stuck to these hips but at least they were cheap—or sometimes, if I got lucky at the coffee shop where I worked, free.
If I could take home a few stale bagels and muffins at the end of my shift today, maybe I could avoid another shop until Friday.
The sheer waste of what got thrown away every day at the shop still astounded me after a childhood spent fighting six or seven foster siblings for every piece of toast at breakfast.
“Just a few lifestyle changes is all it takes,” the cashier kept yammering. “Maybe you should think about it, dear.”
“Think about what? Not being fat?” I popped my eyes open wide, all overdone Disney-lashed innocence.
“You know, I never thought about it until now. Not once. My God, what have I been doing? Praise the Lord, my eyes have been opened!” I gave her my widest, sweetest smile, preparing to pick up my sack of groceries and sashay out swinging my ample ass like a bell. A perfect exit.
“Your card has been declined,” she said frigidly.
And that’s how it all started.
The sky was spitting icy flecks of early April sleet, and I had a feeling I was going to be late to my shift at the coffee shop, but I’d had a text last night about the possibility of some data entry work, so I cut down the lower end of Newbury Street and shifted into a jog until I found myself staring up at the display window of Brummell’s.
It was a place I liked to cruise for the eye candy: a little jewel box of a shop specializing in exquisite hand-stitched custom costumes featured by an increasing number of fashion blogs and YouTube influencers.
You never knew if the mannequin in the big bay window would be sporting a Belle Epoque ball gown embroidered with blue-green beetle wings, a silvery replica of Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel outfit from Lord of the Rings, or a Bomkai saree starred with tiny mirrors, but it was always going to be jaw-dropping.
Today it was a frothy white gown with drooping shoulders and enough tulle to tent a big top. The shop owner was putting the last touches on the mannequin, adjusting a towering brown wig decked in crystal stars, and as he straightened to give me a wave through the glass, I felt my stomach flutter.
(I don’t cruise Brummell’s just to ogle the clothes.)
“Hey there, Alix,” Beau called, opening the shop door and aiming one of his easy cheek-creasing grins down at me.
He was decked out like a Jane Austen hero today, wine-red frock coat and brocade waistcoat and tall riding boots, everything fitting like a glove.
The owner of Brummell’s, and the hands behind every stitch on that gown in the window as well as that coat on his back. “You got my text. Come on in—”
“Can’t, I’m late for work.” I bounced up the stairs to at least come in under the blue-striped awning and out of the sleet. “But I can do data entry for you whenever you need me. How many hours?”
“Four or five, sometime next week? I haven’t entered in any of my receipts for months.”
“Beau, do not tell me you got my beautiful, organized QuickBooks account into a mess. I left it absolutely pristine.”
He looked shifty. “It’s been two years . . .”
“That long already?” I had to think back.
He’d been just getting the shop off the ground and had hired me to get his accounts set up online.
For a week I’d had the pleasure of working out of Beau’s back room, tabulating receipts and trying not to stare too obviously.
It was tough not to stare at Beau Sato-Jones, and not just because he dressed like an extra from Bridgerton.
He had a face forged somewhere among Japan, Pakistan, and South Africa, and I guarantee you’ve seen it on Instagram: Beau’s shop handle, @beaubrummellsofboston, had north of half a million followers, all panting to see Beau lounging in supple Victorian pinstripes, Beau strutting in Sun King silver coat and embroidered stockings, Beau lotus-positioned in a yukata of hand-painted cotton with flying cranes .
. . I cleared my throat, getting rid of the delectable mental image.
“How about next Monday? I’m off from the coffee shop on Mondays. ”
“Deal.” He leaned against the doorjamb, smiling as though I were an old friend and not just an acquaintance to say hello to whenever he caught me window-shopping his mannequin displays. “You still flogging away at that place on Boylston?”
I mimed throttling myself. “Unless I got lucky and it burned down in the night. How’s the girlfriend—Isabelle?”
“Ysabel, with a Y. Broke up with me, went off to LA to be a model.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Maybe you can get back together with your ex, what was his name? The one with the cheekbones, dropped by twice when I was getting you set up on QuickBooks?”
“Deryk, also with a y. Went to LA with Ysabel.”
“Next time date somebody who can spell,” I advised.
“Okay there, Alix-with-an-i.” He laughed, not looking too heartbroken.
He was probably consoling himself with one of the endless beautiful clotheshorses that paraded in and out of his Instagram reels: doe-eyed girls with endless legs, handsome boys with even more endless lashes.
“When are you going to let me make you a dress?”
“When I win the lottery, Beau.” Everything in that store would have been out of my reach even if the $36 in my bank account had been sporting a couple more zeros.
Everyone knows that if you need a Marie Antoinette costume for the Versailles Masked Ball or an Outlander wedding gown for a high-end Halloween party, you shop the racks of Brummell’s on Newbury Street or mail-order off its sleek blue and silver website .
. . but only if you have a few thousand to spend.
Definitely out of reach for someone whose brain was stutter-stepping sickly with the words card declined, card declined.
I shoved those stomach-churning words away, gesturing at the window mannequin in the huge white gown. “Queen Victoria?”
“Empress Sisi. A replica of the gown she wore in the 1865 Winterhalter portrait, and let me tell you, appliquéing all those silver foil stars by hand was a bitch,” Beau said candidly.
“Worth the effort. It positively scintillates.”
“You and your vocabulary. You’d make a killing at Scrabble, czarina.” His nickname for me since I’d originally introduced myself two years ago as Alix-with-an-i. Very Romanov empress of you, he approved. I like it, czarina.
“Hey now, ordinary life does not offer enough opportunities to use words like scintillates.” I had whole lists of words I’d picked up from books that I was just waiting for a chance to use—always with a little feeling of triumph whenever I checked one off.
“What scrumptious sumptuous splendiferous thing are you whipping up on that sewing machine next?”
“Got a special commission to finish. After that, I was thinking a replica of the emerald-green dress in Atonement—”
“Please tell me you will at least read the Ian McEwan book and not just copy the dress from the movie!”
“What do you take me for, a himbo? I do have a library card, as you know.”
I did know. The only reason Beau had hired me two years ago was because we’d bumped into each other quite literally at the Boston Public Library—he’d been very nice when I tripped and spilled half my water bottle over his stack of historical fashion books.
One spirited argument later about the best costumes in movies versus the best clothes described in books, and I’d been hired to do his data entry.
“Haven’t seen you at the BPL lately,” I continued.
“I’ll be there later this week. Some YouTube influencer rented the garden and the Abbey Room out for her twenty-fifth-birthday bash.
I doubt anyone there will pick up a book, but it’ll be swank.
You should come—there’ll be a whole group of us, we can squeeze you in under the velvet rope.
We’re heading out to Vox II afterwards for cocktails—”
“Maybe some other time.” I wasn’t going to go on one of those self-deprecating, Oh, I’m not worthy of him inner monologues that the heroines in bad books always seem to do when a beautiful man looks their way, but I was a realist: I didn’t have the legs, the time, or the budget to hit the town with Beau Sato-Jones and his flock of swanlike friends at $24 per artisanal cocktail. Maybe in another life.
“Don’t you dare tell me you don’t have anything to wear, because you’ve still got my IOU. At least I hope you do.”