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Izzie groaned. If Sylvia owned half of the shop, she would never be able to convince a committee that keeping a dress shop open was more important than serving.

Sylvia owns half the shop.

An unwanted thought began to form in her mind, but she didn’t know what else she could do. She was desperate. She couldn’t lose Mum’s shop, not after all the years she’d put into it. Not after finally having the chance to prove to everyone that she could run it.

Izzie forced herself to walk to the shop’s telephone. She steeled herself and then picked up the receiver. After giving the operator the exchange, she waited for the call to be connected.

There were three rings on the line and then she heard her sister say, “Pearsall residence.”

“Sylvia.”

“Izzie?”

She swallowed and forced herself to say, “I need your help.”

Sylvia looked up at the front of the two-story building that contained her family’s dress shop and flat for the first time since she’d left fourteen years ago.

“I need your help.”

They were four words she never thought she’d hear her sister say, and the shock of them that morning had compelled her to respond “Tell me what I can do” before she’d even stopped to consider what it all might mean.

She glanced down, checking that her outfit still looked as pristine as when she’d left the flat. She’d put on a navy wool crepe dress, and on top of her carefully brushed pageboy she’d placed a cream hat held in place with a pearl-topped hatpin. Her coat was of inky black boiled wool, and she hesitated for a moment before pinning to it the sapphire brooch Hugo had given her for their fifth wedding anniversary. Since the weather looked cold but not particularly wet, she’d risked a pair of black suede heels that matched her structured black leather handbag, which opened with a gold clasp, and her black leather gloves.

She hoped that the clothes would hide the deep smudges of purple under her eyes. She hadn’t slept much since Hugo had returned home, instead lying as still as she could because she didn’t dare touch him. In the mornings, she’d wait until he rose and left the flat before leaving bed. When he would come home to change for his club, she would stay in the sitting room, exchanging only the simplest of pleasantries with him. She didn’t try to convince him to stay home for supper or bring her along on a night out for fear that he would reject her once again. She hated not knowing where he was or who he was with.

Every afternoon he was away, she would check his desk and count the love letters. Perhaps some women might have taken comfort in the fact that their number never changed, but she resented that they were still there, a keepsake from his affair.

Their own courtship had been too swift and all-consuming to necessitate letters back and forth. Instead, their first months had been full of flowers and treats and time spent together. Hugo would pick her up in his Frazer Nash Fast Tourer, whisking her away from the back roads of Maida Vale to the theater in the West End, supper at the Ritz, or dancing at The 43 on Gerrard Street—sometimes all three in one evening. Then there were the parties hosted by his school friends that featured lashings of champagne and caviar, wild dancing, and cavorting of all kinds. On Hugo’s arm, she’d been drunk on a kind of glamour she’d only dreamed of.

He’d carried her along with him on a wave of love and excitement that hadn’t stopped when they’d married. If anything, he’d been even more perfect, pulling her deeper into his world until, one day, she began to notice he sent her fewer bouquets. Their holidays were no longer spent mostly in bed, drinking one another in, but rather with a gathering of Hugo’s friends, who played tennis, swam, and drank with equal fervor. It was the natural way of things, she told herself, this sinking into the comfortable routine of a married couple. He was busy at his surgery, and she had plenty of things to occupy her time. They still were invited everywhere. They still made a handsome couple.

It had been enough, until she’d learned of his infidelity.

She shook her head. There was no time for that sort of thinking now. She had an appointment to keep.

Sylvia opened the door of Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions, the familiar bell jangling to announce her arrival. No one was in the front of the shop. Uncertain whether or not she should allow herself through to the back rooms, she lingered, taking in the dressmaker’s form on display. It was clothed in the same solid, dependable type of dress her mother had been turning out for years. It was the sort of thing that sold well to an older, conservative clientele, if memory served, neither highlighting nor hiding the body too much. She cocked her head to one side and decided that it was… fine. Unexciting, uninteresting, and perfectly fine.

“You’re here.”

Sylvia turned to find her sister watching her from the door to the back.

“You’ve oiled the hinges,” she said, nodding to the door. “It always used to squeak when it opened.”

“We have put some work into the place since you left,” said Izzie.

Sylvia’s heart broke a little at her sister’s sharpness. She hated how stilted every conversation between them seemed, full of weight and meaning. She felt like a general with a battlefield map, trying to figure out what each sentence might mean, how it would be interpreted and twisted to deepen her sister’s disdain for her.

She cleared her throat. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what you need my help with.”

Izzie rolled her shoulders as though preparing to do something odious. “Why don’t you come back? We can sit in Mum’s office.”

She followed her sister down the narrow passageway to the back of the shop and through the door to the workshop. The whir of the sewing machine stopped as Miss Reid looked up.

“Hello,” she said with a nod to the seamstress before glancing around with a frown. All of the other machines were empty. It was strange. She remembered the workroom as a vibrant space, filled with work and chatter punctuated by the hum of sewing machines and the snip, snip, snip of dressmaker’s shears.

Without a word, Miss Reid lifted her nose and went back to her sewing, the thrum of the machine filling the lonely space once again.

When Izzie opened the door to Mum’s office halfway, Sylvia’s stomach sank. Every surface was covered with paper. There were shoe boxes spilling over with receipts, books crammed so full that their pages no longer closed properly, and what looked like order sheets everywhere. The bookcases that had once housed neat rows of box files she’d worked so hard to order were stuffed to the brim with all manner of things.