Threads Of Second Dawn by Iris Lockewood Promotional audio excerpt ยท Chapter 2: Facade and Thread ================================================ Tuesday came in on a low tide of grey, the kind of light that made every color in the shop look honest and a little tired. Lila unlocked at seven and found a folded note under the door, Noah's handwriting, quick and slanted: Meeting with Patrice moved to two. Morning is ours. Bring the muslin you love most. He had signed it with a single letter, N, like a man rationing vowels. She chose the bolt with the loosest weave, the one that told the truth about light faster than any other cloth in the shop. By the time he arrived, coffee in hand, two cups because he remembered, she had already pinned a length of it across the mannequin's shoulder to see how morning sun would move through it later in the year. "You started without me," he said, not a complaint. "I started for me. You get to watch." He watched. That was new, him standing still with a cup instead of a pencil, letting her hands do the explaining. When the mannequin shifted the light three degrees, he made a small sound, almost a laugh, purely professional. "That's the transom," he said. "That exact fall. I've been trying to draw it for two days and you just showed it to me for free." "Nothing in this shop is free. You're paying in coffee." Mrs. Okafor arrived at eight sharp with a christening gown that had waited forty years in a cedar chest, lace gone the color of weak tea, seams brittle at the shoulder. She set it on the counter like a relic and did not apologize for the smell of camphor. "My daughter had it. Now her daughter," Mrs. Okafor said. "Can you save it or should I stop hoping." Lila spread the gown flat, turned the shoulder seam to the light Noah had just praised, and read the fabric the way Mei taught her, patience before scissors. "The lace holds. The lining doesn't. We rebuild the lining, keep every original stitch we can." "How much history survives that." "All of it that matters. None of it that would have torn on the day." Mrs. Okafor's eyes went bright and she busied herself with her purse so no one would have to comment on it. Noah, to his credit, found something urgent to measure on the far wall until she composed herself and left with a promise to return Thursday. "You do that a lot," he said once the bell had stopped swinging. "Do what." "Give people permission to keep the parts worth keeping and let go of the rest without making them feel like they failed." "That's just alterations." "That's architecture too. I only ever learned to tear down or preserve. Nobody taught me the middle." "Mei used to say a good seamstress and a good surgeon do the same job. Cut only where the body already wants to open." He wrote that down on the back of his own hand in pencil, which struck her as either the most romantic or most ridiculous thing a grown man had done in her shop in years. Possibly both. They ate lunch standing at the cutting table again, becoming a habit neither of them named. Noah unrolled a fresh sheet and showed her a version of the facade where the transom curved to match the exact bow of the front window, no straight lines pretending the building was newer than it was. "You're drawing the lean into the design instead of hiding it," she said. "I finally understand why you keep telling me to measure the wall twice. It's not paranoia. It's respect." "Little of both."