Chapter Seventeen — Sienna #2
The key sticks the way it always has, a problem I have never had two hundred spare dollars to fix. I shoulder the door open and stand in the dark a second before I find the switch.
The mattress on the floor dips in the middle, an old bruise that never healed right.
The radiator clicks twice and goes quiet, the only proof anyone in this building still pays for heat.
A photo of my mother and me at some long-forgotten birthday is taped to the fridge.
Corners gone soft and grey from three years of steam.
This apartment has never once pretended to be anything other than what it is. That's probably why it's the only place in this city that's never once let me down.
I set the duffel down by the door, right where I used to set it every night before I started leaving it at his place instead.
Against the far wall, plastic sheeting covers the dress form.
Underneath is the gown I started two years before any of this happened.
Ivory silk pinned to canvas in pieces that still don't quite talk to each other.
A bias-cut bodice I drafted for nobody. A skirt cut from a bolt I bought with birthday money because I wanted one thing in my life that existed only for me.
Not a commission. Not a prototype. Not a concept for a client who'd change their mind six times before the fitting.
Mine.
I cross the room and pull the sheeting tight at the corners. Like sealing a casket.
I need it covered. Looking at it tonight means looking at the version of me who still believed that someday she'd have somewhere to wear it. That version needs a few days underground before I can stand to look her in the eye again.
I don't bother with dinner. My hands ache in that bone-deep way they only do after a sixteen-hour day with shears. Tonight it just means I spent sixteen hours building something I walked away from before it ever got the chance to be real.
I sit on the floor with my back against the radiator and listen to the building breathe around me, because apparently that's a thing I do now in any apartment, his or mine.
Forty-four floors up, the silence is the kind money buys. Total. Padded. Expensive enough that you forget the city outside is still running.
Down here the city never actually stops. A truck reverses two blocks over with the same beeping that's been part of my hearing since I was a kid. A couple argues on the stoop below my window, then laughs about it thirty seconds later like nothing happened.
This used to be the only sound I knew how to fall asleep to. Tonight it just makes the apartment feel louder and lonelier at once.
My phone buzzes against the floorboard. A missed call, then a voicemail, from a number with a Milan country code.
I almost let it sit. Then habit wins, the same habit that's kept me working since I was twenty-two: never let a voicemail from a textile contact go unheard, no matter what's falling apart around you at the time.
It's Renata, from the Como mill that stopped taking my orders eighteen months ago. The same week three other suppliers did exactly the same thing for reasons nobody bothered explaining back then. Her voice is fast and warm, apologetic in the way people get when they want something from you.
She saw the photos from the runway. She wants to talk about reopening the account. She says my name twice, like it's worth repeating now that it's attached to a dress the internet hasn't stopped talking about.
Eighteen months ago my name in a supplier's mouth meant a risk nobody could carry anymore. Tonight it means an opportunity she wants first in line for.
Same name. Same woman, sitting on the same cracked floor in the same dead-radiator apartment. The only thing that changed is a hundred thousand strangers seeing one dress under the right lights at the right time.
I call her back and she picks up on the second ring.
"Sienna. Sienna. I saw the photos from the runway. Everyone is talking."
"Renata." I set a takeout menu flat on the floor in front of me. "Good to hear your voice."
"The red gown. The structure, the way it moved. I said to my husband, this is someone who understands fabric. Not trends. Fabric."
"Thank you." I uncap a pen. "I always appreciated the Como charmeuse. Before everything."
A beat. The kind that holds an apology she's not going to say directly. "We would like to reopen the account. If you are interested."
"I'm interested. What are your current minimums?"
We go through it. Order quantities, lead times, a rough timeline for fall delivery. I take notes on the back of the takeout menu because I don't own a notebook that isn't already full of sketches for a wedding I'm apparently no longer planning to have.
"You sound well," Renata says, before she hangs up.
"I am," I tell her.
I lay down the phone. The apartment has never been quieter.
The industry wants me back. He never once tried to keep me. That thought stays with me longer than I'd like.
I open Izzy's thread. Type four words. Delete them. Type three instead.
Got home safe.
Three dots appear almost immediately.
You made it. Good.
I stare at that for a second.
Yeah.
Sienna.
Just my name. She learned that from him. The single word that means she already knows and she's waiting for me to catch up.
Go to sleep, Iz.
Call me tomorrow. I mean it.
I set the phone face down on the floor. I get up only because my legs have gone numb against the floor, not because I've solved anything.
I move past the dress form on my way to the switch. I don't lift the sheeting. I don't talk myself into one more look at a future I clearly built on the wrong foundation.
I turn off the light.
The dark in this room looks exactly like the dark behind my ribs right now. I tell myself that's a kind of comfort, that being safe and being alone have finally turned into the same thing.
I don't believe a single word of it.
I lie down on the mattress that dips in the middle anyway, because tired wins arguments that grief can't. Somewhere uptown, forty-four floors above a city that doesn't know either of our names yet, a small black fob sits on cold marble exactly where I left it.
Nobody's picked it up.
Not yet.