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“Yes.” He stands up, his head almost scraping the low, pressed tin ceiling. “That’s what’s wrong with it.”

“That’s the point of the dress, you dolt.”

“Fuck that. It’s a machine for making you smaller.” He comes over and stops maybe two feet away, and he doesn’t touch me, but he sneers down at the garment like it offended him. “You can’t breathe in it. You’ll sit down by ten o’clock and by midnight, you’ll be working out whether you’re allowed to eat anything. Am I wrong?”

Obviously, he isn’t, which is why I stay quiet.

“You’ve put on three things, and each of them has disrespected you. Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t allow that?”

“I think you are once again being a wee bit dramatic about⁠—”

He holds up three fingers. “One covered you. One hid you. One constricted you.” He turns to Ekaterina and barks, “Find me something that shows her.”

Shows her.

Shows. As in, does not cover. Does not hide. Does not squeeze me into a shape that isn’t mine.

My whole adult wardrobe is built on the exact opposite idea. Cardigans in July. Aprons over everything. The entire purpose is to stay invisible, so that no one says the thing about myself that I already know to be true:

That I’m not good enough.

I’m not as skinny as Vivian. Or as pretty. Or as carefree.

I’d rather stay out of sight than be reminded of those failings. Now, this green-eyed menace has come barging into my life, and he wants to take that away from me. Tonight, in front of whoever’s going to be wherever we’re going.

I feel my hands start to drift up toward my stomach, but I make them stop. That’s another bad habit. Touching my imperfections won’t make them go away.

But surely showing them off won’t, either?

“I have one thing,” Ekaterina replies slowly. “In the back. Not finished. Cut for a bride who changed her mind about everything, including the groom.”

Kane nods, eyes bright. “Bring it.”

She shuffles off. And for a short span of time, it’s just the two of us.

I’m standing in a corset dress on a scuffed floor under a bare bulb.

Until the thing my family put in me twenty years ago comes right up out of my throat before I can stop it.

“You know,” I say brightly, “it’s okay if this one doesn’t work out. Ekaterina can only do so much with the raw material she’s working with. It’s like trying to gift wrap a beanbag chair, right?”

Usually, that kind of self-deprecating barb would get a laugh. I’ve trotted out similar lines before to defuse the awkward tension in rooms just like this.

But this time, it’s met with a silence so cold it takes my breath away.

Kane goes very still. Then he turns his head toward the back of the shop.

“Ekaterina. Would you wait outside, please?” He’s polite, but there’s no mistaking a command when it comes from his lips.

She stops in the doorway with a garment bag over her arm and looks at him, then at me, then nods and scurries off, leaving the bag on a hook on the wall.

The door with the frosted glass clicks shut behind her.

Then Kane turns to tower over me.

“I told you,” Kane says.

“Huh?”