STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 10: Beige

Marcus chose her dress, as he chose everything.

It was laid out on the bed when she came out of the bathroom, smoothed flat, the sleeves arranged like arms folded in sleep. Beige. High neck. Long sleeves. The kind of dress a woman wore when she wanted to be forgotten at a table of powerful people.

"I thought this one," Marcus said from the doorway, adjusting his cufflinks. "The red is a little . . . loud, for a Wenthworth event."

The red was in the back of her closet, in a garment bag she had not opened since the wedding. He had not asked her to throw it away. He had simply, over three years, explained why it never seemed to be the right night.

She had worn it to the SHYNE winter show, the night the critics stood. Marcus had been in the front row, clapping harder than anyone. She understood now that he had known exactly what he was applauding, and what he would need to take.

Shyne stepped into the beige.

She was a designer. She could not help it. Her fingers found the seams before the zipper reached her ribs, and her mind did what it had always done, took the garment apart in a single glance. Cheap crêpe, badly cut. The shoulder seam sat a half inch too far forward. The sleeves were lined in a slippery acetate that had already begun to bubble at the cuff, and one lining seam had split an inch or two, so that a fold of fabric hung loose inside the left sleeve.

Whoever made this should be ashamed, she thought, with a flicker of her old professional fury. And then, very quietly: Whoever chose it should be, too.

She turned her left wrist inside the sleeve. The split in the lining brushed her skin, a loose fold of acetate deep enough to hold a folded note. She noticed it the way she noticed everything.

She looked up. In the mirror, a pale woman in beige stood with her hands folded in front of her like a girl waiting outside a headmaster's office. There was nothing in that reflection that anyone could object to. That was the point of it. It was a dress designed to be invisible.

She thought about the camel coat she had designed for her first collection, the one that swung like a bell when you walked. She thought about how it had felt to put a woman in something that made her stand taller.

She thought: He knows exactly what this does.

But Marcus was already behind her, fastening a pearl necklace at her nape with warm, deft fingers, and meeting her eyes in the mirror. "You look perfect," he said. "Smile. Pour the wine when asked. Say little. Tonight is the most important dinner of my career."

"Why?"

"Because Chad Wenthworth is finally sitting at my table."

Her hands went very still against the beige.

He leaned past her shoulder, took a tissue from the dresser, and blotted the edge of her lipstick in the mirror, once, the way a man corrects a typo. "The pearls will do," he said. "Lady Amelia notices pearls."

He had never spoken a Wenthworth's name in this house before tonight. She filed it away.

She watched, in the mirror, as her face did what it always did: arranged itself. The brows smoothed. The eyes cleared. By the time he turned to fetch his jacket, there was no one in the glass but the Perfect Wife, serene and soft and pleasant and completely hollow.

She wondered, for the first time in years, who exactly she was protecting with that expression.

She did not know that by the end of the night she would be hiding a card in her sleeve, and her husband would be holding out his hand for it.