The Seamstress and The Billionaire

The sun came up slow over Clover Ridge the way it always did in late summer, like it was in no particular hurry to light up a town that had not changed much in thirty years. It crept over the flat stretch of farmland on the edge of town first, painting the cotton fields gold and amber before it even touched the rooftops of the houses lined up along Sycamore Road. By the time the light finally reached the Harmon house, a small white wood-frame sitting at the far end of the road with a porch that leaned slightly to the left, Callie Beth Harmon had already been awake for two hours. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the bedroom she shared with her younger sister Elise, her back against the foot of the bed, a sketchbook open across her knees. The pencil in her hand moved with a kind of quiet confidence that the rest of her life did not always allow her. On the page, a dress was taking shape. It had a structured bodice with seam lines that curved in a way Callie had been thinking about since she spotted a photograph in a torn magazine she found at the laundromat three weeks ago. She had torn the page out carefully, folded it twice, and tucked it inside the back cover of her sketchbook where she kept all the things that moved her. She was nineteen years old and she had three sketchbooks just like this one hidden under a loose floorboard beneath her side of the bed. Behind her, Elise shifted under the thin cotton sheet and made a small sound before going quiet again. The room was modest in the way that most things in the Harmon house were modest. Two twin beds pushed against opposite walls, a single dresser with a cracked mirror balanced on top, a window with no curtain because Callie had taken the fabric two summers ago to practice sewing a blouse. The blouse had turned out well. She still wore it. Callie set her pencil down and looked at what she had drawn. She tilted her head slightly, the way she always did when she was deciding if something was working or not. Her eyes, a warm shade of brown that her Nana June always said looked like sweet tea held up to the light, moved slowly across the sketch. She picked the pencil back up and added a small flare at the hem. Better. From down the hall came the familiar sound of Nana June's bedroom door opening, followed by the slow shuffle of slippers across the hardwood floor. A moment later, the smell of coffee began to drift through the house and Callie felt her shoulders relax the way they only did in the early morning, before the day had a chance to get heavy. She closed the sketchbook, slid it under the bed, and stood up. The kitchen was small and the overhead light had a flicker that Earl Harmon had been meaning to fix for the past four months. Nana June was standing at the stove in her house robe, a faded blue thing with yellow flowers on it, stirring a pot of grits with one hand and holding her coffee mug with the other. She was seventy one years old and had the posture of a woman who had decided a long time ago that the world was going to have to deal with her exactly as she was. "You were up drawing again," Nana June said without turning around. "Good morning to you too, Nana," Callie said, reaching past her to grab a mug from the cabinet. "Don't good morning me. I heard that pencil scratching at five in the morning. You know what that sound does to my nerves." "You sleep like a rock. You didn't hear anything." Nana June turned around and pointed the wooden spoon at her. "I heard everything. I hear everything in this house. I heard Elise sneaking a biscuit at midnight last Tuesday and I heard your brother Aria trying to convince himself out loud that he did not fail his math test." She turned back to the grits. "What were you drawing?" Callie poured her coffee and leaned against the counter. "A dress." "Mhm." Nana June's voice was unbothered. "Same dress you been drawing since you were twelve or a new one?" "A new one." "Good. Means you're still thinking." That was the thing about Nana June. She never told Callie to stop. She never told her the sketching was a waste of time or that fashion was something other people did in other places. She also never made promises she could not keep or painted a pretty picture over a hard truth. What she did instead was keep the conversation short enough that it did not break your heart but long enough that you knew she was paying attention. Earl Harmon came into the kitchen at half past six looking the way he always looked in the morning, tired around the eyes but steady on his feet. He was a tall man, broad across the shoulders, with hands that had been roughened by years of working odd jobs around Clover Ridge. He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down with the careful movement of a man whose back gave him trouble but who would never say so out loud. "Morning, Cal," he said. "Morning, Daddy." He looked at her the way he sometimes did, a quiet look that carried more in it than he ever put into words. Callie knew that look. It was the one that showed up whenever he was thinking about her mother. Rosie Harmon had been gone for eleven years. She died on a Tuesday in October when Callie was eight years old, and the thing Callie remembered most about that day was not the crying or the neighbors filling up the living room with casserole dishes. It was a sketchbook her father had placed in her hands that evening without explanation. Inside the front cover, in her mother's handwriting, were two words written in blue ink. Keep going. Rosie Harmon had wanted to be a fashion designer. She had sketched her whole life, filling notebooks with ideas that never made it past Clover Ridge. She met Earl at nineteen, loved him completely, and poured everything she had into the family they built together. But she never stopped sketching either. Not until she could not hold a pencil anymore. Callie had inherited the sketchbooks. All seven of them. She kept them wrapped in an old pillowcase at the bottom of her closet and she had read through every single page so many times that she knew which sketches her mother had loved the most based on how many times she had gone back to refine them. It was her mother's dream first. That was the part Callie never said out loud to anyone except Elise, who was too young to fully understand but old enough to listen without making it a big thing. The dream of leaving Clover Ridge. The dream of going to New Harlow, the kind of city that showed up in magazines and television programs and seemed to exist in a different atmosphere entirely from a town like this one. The dream of attending the Harlow Institute of Fashion and Design, which was the kind of school Callie had looked up so many times on the library computer that the librarian, Mrs. Poole, had once asked her if she was planning to apply. Callie had laughed that off. The tuition alone was more than her father made in two years. After breakfast, Aria came stumbling into the kitchen with his shirt on inside out and Elise followed behind him trying to fix it while he swatted her hands away. Callie watched them from her seat and felt the familiar tightness in her chest that came with loving people you could not fully protect. Aria was fifteen and trying very hard to act like nothing bothered him. Elise was thirteen and felt everything so deeply it sometimes came out sideways. Their cousin Arabella, who had been living with them for the past two years after her own mother moved out of state chasing something she never caught, sat at the end of the table eating her grits in silence with the calm expression of someone who had made peace with complicated things at a very young age. These were the people Callie got up for every morning before the sun finished rising. She rinsed her mug, tucked her sketchbook into her bag, and started getting ready for a day that would ask everything of her and give back just enough to keep her going. She had two jobs waiting for her. The Whitfield house was on the north end of Clover Ridge, set back from the road behind a long gravel driveway lined with oak trees that had been there longer than anyone in town could remember. The house itself was large and white with black shutters and a wraparound porch that Margaret Whitfield kept furnished with expensive outdoor seating that no one ever actually sat in. Callie had been cleaning that house three days a week for the past eight months and she knew every room in it, every preference Margaret Whitfield had about which products were used on which surfaces, and exactly which hours Victoria Whitfield was most likely to make her presence known. Victoria was twenty years old and had the particular kind of confidence that came not from anything she had built herself but from knowing that everything around her had been built for her. She was pretty in a sharp way and she had a voice that always sounded like she was slightly disappointed in whoever she was speaking to. She had looked at Callie exactly once in eight months. It was the kind of look that measured and found lacking in the same second. Callie had looked back without blinking and then gone back to cleaning the baseboards. That evening, when the Whitfield house was done and her back was aching from scrubbing the kitchen floor, Callie changed in the bathroom of the gas station on Route 9 and walked three blocks to The Dusty Spur. The bar was loud by eight o'clock and Boss Pete, who was a compact man with a permanent scowl and a mustache that had seen better decades, was already irritated about something before Callie even tied her apron. "You're four minutes late," he said. "I'm two minutes early," Callie said, checking the clock above the register. He pointed at her. "Don't get smart with me, Harmon." "Wouldn't dream of it, Pete." She slid behind the bar, pulled her hair back, and got to work. This was her life at nineteen. Split down the middle, poured into two jobs, held together by a family she loved and a dream she had nearly convinced herself was somebody else's story. Nearly.