8. Nell
NELL
Hazel came to find me on the floor just after nine.
"He's outside again."
I looked up from the machine I was checking. "Who?"
"Your husband."
My hands went still on the tension assembly.
"He's been out there since before first shift," she said. "I told him he couldn't come in."
I looked at her. Tried to read what was in her face.
"How long?"
"Since six. Maybe earlier."
Three hours. He'd been standing out there for three hours.
"He says he'll wait."
"For what?"
"For you."
I went back to the machine. Pulled the thread through slow. Checked the spring tension like nothing had changed.
"Nell."
"I heard you."
"He's not leaving. I told him you were working. Told him you didn't want to be disturbed. He said he'd wait as long as it took."
I could feel my thumb finding the seam at the edge of my work jacket. The old canvas one I'd taken from the house. I made myself stop.
"Where is he?"
"The door. I told him he couldn't come past it."
"Good."
She looked at me.
"You want me to send him away?"
I thought about it. Thought about telling her yes and watching him leave and never knowing what he'd driven all this way to say.
"No," I said. "I'll talk to him."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
I straightened. Looked at the floor. Every machine was running and nobody was looking at me but I could feel them all watching anyway.
I walked to the door.
He was standing in the doorway when I got there.
Not inside. Not outside. Just in the frame, like Hazel had drawn a line he hadn't crossed.
And I could see what it had cost him to get there.
He looked like he'd been wearing the same coat for days. The good one, the navy wool, but it was wrinkled now and there was something in the way he was standing that told me he'd slept in it. Maybe more than once. His collar was creased wrong. There was a stain on the front I didn't recognize.
This was a man who'd built a fashion house. Who knew what a wrinkle meant. Who could read a person's day by the state of their cuffs.
And he was standing in my doorway looking like he'd been living in his car.
His hands were cut up. Fresh cuts across his palms and fingers, still healing.
Some of them recent enough that I could see they'd bled through onto his sleeves.
The kind you get from working with your hands when you haven't worked with your hands in years.
When you're making something and you won't stop even when your hands start bleeding.
I knew those cuts. I'd had them myself, learning.
There was no car outside. No driver waiting with the engine running. No Winston standing ten feet back with his phone out and his calm voice redirecting things.
He'd driven himself.
However many hours it was from New York to Ardis, he'd driven it himself. And he'd been standing outside my building since before the first shift came in, waiting for Hazel to let him as far as the door.
Not past it.
Just to it.
He looked at me and I saw him trying to find the words he'd been working on all night.
Ray Sowell came up beside me. He was holding a wrench and there was a look on his face I'd never seen before.
I put my hand on his arm.
"It's all right, Ray."
"You sure about that?"
"I'm sure."
"You want me to stay?"
"No. I've got this."
He looked at Beckett for a long moment. Then he looked back at me.
"I'll be right over there. You need anything, you just say the word."
"I know. Thank you."
He went back to his machine. But he didn't put the wrench down.
I looked at my husband.
"Nell," he said.
I waited.
"I need to talk to you."
"So talk."
He looked past me at the floor. At the machines running. At Ray standing by the third one with the wrench in his hand and his eyes on Beckett's back.
"Can we go somewhere?"
"No."
He looked at me.
"I'm working," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. I watched him take it in. The fact that I wasn't going to make this easy. That I wasn't going to step outside or go to the office or give him anywhere private to say what he'd come to say.
Then he nodded.
"All right."
He shifted his weight. I saw him wince and I knew his feet hurt. However long he'd been standing out there, it had been long enough.
"I want to fix this," he said.
I didn't say anything.
"I want to make it right."
"Do you."
"Yes."
I waited. Behind me I could hear the machines. The steady rhythm of them. The sound I'd grown up with.
"I'm going to buy the building," he said.
I felt something go very still inside me.
"Outright," he said. "I'll have the deed put in your name. Today. You won't have to wait for it. You won't have to ask for it. It'll be yours."
He said it the way a man says the winning number. The way a man says the thing he knows will fix everything.
And I stood there and let him believe he was handing me something I needed.
The loan I'd been carrying since before I married him. The one I took out with the money from my mother's house. The payment I made every month, on time, every time, for six years.
The building I'd bought myself.
Not one dollar of his money in it. Not one dollar of his money in anything on this floor. Not the machines or the thread or the power bill or the wages.
And he didn't know.
He'd never asked. Not once in six years had he asked me how I'd paid for it. How I was paying for it. Whether I needed help.
And I'd never told him.
The whole town assumed the opposite. Assumed his money was in this building. That I'd married him and he'd bought me a mill like a man buys his wife a car.
I'd let them assume it.
Because correcting them meant saying out loud what I'd sold to buy this place. Meant saying out loud that I'd taken the house my mother died in and turned it into collateral. That I'd signed papers in a bank office with her name still on the deed and walked out with a check that wasn't enough.
I didn't tell him now.
I just stood there in the doorway with the floor behind me and my husband in front of me, offering to buy me something I already owned.
Offering to give me something I'd paid for myself with the one thing I had left of her.
And I let him see me hear it.
I didn't correct him. I didn't tell him he was wrong. I didn't give him anything to make it easier.
I just let him stand there and believe his offer was the answer.
"And I want to give you the ten days," he said. "The ones I promised you. We can schedule them now. Real dates. You can pick the dates and I'll be there. I'll clear everything. It'll just be us."
I looked at him.
I thought about the calendar notification that had come through from his office. Ten days, September 24 to October 3, marked tentative. With a note underneath asking me to pencil in what I'd like to do so arrangements could be made.
Like I was supposed to submit a proposal for my own marriage.
He was offering them to me again. The same ten days. With dates this time, he said.
Like the problem had ever been the dates.
Like I'd left because he hadn't been specific enough about when he could fit me in.
"After the wedding line ships," he said, and his voice was kind and certain and completely sincere, "things change. I'll have time. Real time. Not just a night here and there. I can give you what you need."
I heard it.
I heard every word of it.
He was asking his wife to wait.
To be patient just a little longer.
To understand that right now was complicated but after he finished making another woman's wedding clothes, after he'd cut and fitted and finished every piece of a wardrobe meant for a woman walking down an aisle toward someone else, then things would be different.
Then he'd have time for me.
And he didn't hear it.
He looked at me with those cut-up hands and that wrinkled coat and he didn't hear a single word of what he'd just said.
He never heard it.
I looked at him standing there with his cut-up hands and his wrinkled coat and his face that said he'd been working on this speech for days and I felt something that had been waiting inside me finally let go.
"Is that it?" I said.
"Nell—"
"Is that what you came here to say? A deed and a schedule and a date when things get better?"
He looked confused. Like he didn't understand why I wasn't hearing this the way he meant it.
"I'm trying to give you what you want."
"Are you."
"Yes. The building. Time with me. A real commitment."
"After the wedding line ships."
"Yes. After that, everything changes. I can focus on us. I can be here. Really here."
I looked at him. Looked at the floor behind me. Looked back at his face.
"Tell me what you need," he said. "Tell me what it would take to fix this."
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I started talking.
"At the gala," I said. "Do you remember what she said to me?"
He went very still.
"I told her the coat was my mother's," I said. "I told her Mama had sewn on a floor just like this one for thirty-one years. For a company that never put her name on anything. That never saw her as anything but a pair of hands."
I could hear my voice getting quieter. More precise.
"And she looked at me and she said?—"
I stopped. Made myself say it exactly. Word for word.
"She said, 'What a shame there isn't a more worthy tradition for you to honour. But of course, we work with what we have.'"
I watched his face.
"She told me my mother's life was worthless," I said. "That thirty-one years didn't matter. That it wasn't worthy. And I stood there in that ballroom in her coat and I heard it."
I took a breath.
"And then we got in the car," I said. "And I sat there and I waited. I waited for you to say something. Anything. I waited for you to tell me you'd heard what she said. That you knew what it meant. That you understood what she'd just done."
I looked at him.
"And you looked at me and you said, 'This is exactly the kind of tradition I'm building for the Crowe name.'"
I let that sit there between us.
"Nell, I didn't mean?—"
"March," I said.
He stopped.
"You promised me," I said. "Six years ago. The night before we got married. You promised me you'd be there with me every March. Every year. No matter what."