Chapter 3

Sophie swept onto the church steps before I could pull my name fully into the light. Four hundred guests turned toward her, lifting phones above bright hats and bare heads, and she dropped the skirt over my hands.

My mother’s uneven stitches trembled along the hem.

“Hannah, move.” Matthew kept his voice low, but the guests nearest us heard. “They’re taking the family photographs.”

“I’m showing your family what you gave away.”

I caught the lining again and raised it past Sophie’s knee. A white silk patch covered the place where my name had been embroidered. Blue thread held the patch by six long, loose stitches, and an ornate S curled across it.

Sophie pressed her bouquet against the lining. “That says Sophie.”

“It’s basted over my name.” I hooked one of the blue threads with the tip of the scissors I still carried. “Lift it.”

The photographer lowered the camera. People on the first two steps leaned sideways to see around Matthew. Behind them, the rest of the guests began to whisper.

Matthew caught the loose patch before I could cut it free. “That is an old scrap label. Hannah added it because she couldn’t stand seeing Sophie praised.”

“I embroidered my full name inside this dress while my mother worked on the hem.”

“Stop making a scene.”

“You made the scene when you put my dress on someone else and called it hers.” I pulled the silk patch until one blue stitch snapped. The H beneath it appeared, small and crooked because I had sewn it beside my mother’s bed.

A guest raised a phone closer. Another asked, “Did you make the dress, Sophie?”

Sophie peeled a bruised petal from her bouquet and tucked the bare stem behind the ribbon. “The design is mine. Matthew gave me an unfinished family dress, and I transformed it.”

My mother and I had finished every seam. We had covered the buttons together at her kitchen table. On the last night she could sit upright, she had asked me to wear the dress so she could mark the hem. I had stood barefoot on three cookbooks while she stitched each white flower into place.

I stepped down one stair, spread the skirt across the stone, and pointed the scissors at the shaking line of stitches.

“My mother’s hands made that hem. She missed every third stitch after the medicine made her fingers numb. I left them because I wanted her hands with me when I walked into church.”

The phones turned from Sophie’s face to the hem.

Matthew moved between the guests and the dress, but the skirt was too wide for him to hide. “Hannah never wore it. It sat boxed up for years. Sophie made it worth something.”

I cut the second blue stitch.

The patch sagged. HAN showed beneath the monogram.

Sophie gripped the bouquet ribbon and wound it around two broken stems. “Cover that before the exhibition photographs.”

“What exhibition?”

Her eyes stayed on the loosened patch. “This dress was selected to headline a bridal design exhibition. Today’s photographs are for the opening display.”

A woman near the rail said, “As whose design?”

Sophie lifted her chin toward the cameras. “Mine. My first original design.”

The guests stopped whispering. The silence reached farther than any shout could have. I cut a third stitch, then held the scissors out where every phone could record them.

“I won’t damage my mother’s dress. I’ll remove the lie one thread at a time.”

Matthew took the scissors from me, but he could not put the blue stitch back. The white patch hung from Sophie’s waist, and the first half of my name showed above the hem my mother had sewn.

Sophie turned on him. “You said there was nothing inside that could prove it belonged to her.”

Matthew looked from my name to the phones surrounding us. For one breath, he seemed less afraid of losing me than of losing the story he had sold.

Then he faced the guests and raised his voice.

“The Heritage Bridal Gala opens in thirty days.”