Chapter 2 - The Shadow of the Stitch
Z
The wind off the asphalt felt like cold needles against my face as I walked blindly down the suburban sidewalk. The sun was dipping low behind the pines, painting the Ohio sky in bruise-like shades of violet and crimson. Every step felt heavy, burdened by the echo of my daughter’s door slamming, a sound that seemed to shatter the fragile peace I had spent months trying to build. My chest throbbed with a familiar, suffocating ache—the grief that had settled into my ribs the day Mason died, now compounded by the agonizing realization that I might be losing Hazel, too.
I found myself standing in front of Eli’s garage before I even realized my feet had carried me there. The structure sat tucked behind his family’s two-story house, its small window glowing with a pale, steady yellow light that cut through the dusk. It was the only light on the entire street that seemed alive.
I approached the side door slowly, my sneakers making no sound on the damp grass. Through the dusty glass, I saw him. Eli was bent over a large, battered wooden worktable, his shoulders hunched, his pale face illuminated by a single adjustable desk lamp. The room was cold—I could see his breath puffing into tiny white clouds—but he hadn't put on a jacket. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, exposing arms crisscrossed with tiny blue veins and fresh red needle pricks across his fingertips.
Spread across the table was a sea of shimmering silk, lace, and stiff boning. But what caught my throat was what lay beside his elbow: the printed pages of Hazel’s private pain that I had texted him days ago. They weren't just sitting there; they were annotated. Eli had taken a red pen and drawn intricate lines, curves, and patterns directly over the cruel words written by those high school girls. He was translating her torture into measurements, transforming her scars into a blueprint.
I knocked softly on the glass. Eli flinched, dropping a pair of heavy tailor’s shears with a sharp clatter against the concrete floor. He turned, his dark eyes wide and bloodshot, ringed with dark circles of exhaustion. When he recognized me, the tension drained from his shoulders, replaced by a weary nod. He unlatched the door and stepped back to let me in.
The air inside smelled of machine oil, starch, and the faint, dusty scent of old fabric. "Mrs. Mave," he said, his voice raspy from lack of sleep. "Is she... did something happen?"
"She caught me calling about shoes," I said, leaning my back against the closed door because my knees felt too weak to support me. "She screamed at me, Eli. She told me Mason’s death took her with him. She told me to stop trying." I buried my face in my hands, fighting back the sob that threatened to tear through my chest. "Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m just trying to fix my own broken heart by dragging her into a dress she doesn't want."
Eli didn't answer right away. He walked back to his table, picked up the shears, and gently laid them beside a bolt of deep, midnight-blue lining fabric. "She wants to go, Mrs. Mave," he said quietly, his tone absolute. "She just doesn't want to go as the girl they made her think she is."
"Eli, look at you," I whispered, reaching out to touch his arm. His skin was freezing. "You haven't slept in three days. Your mother told me you missed your exams. If this fails, if she refuses to put it on, or if those kids at school say something awful..."
"It won't fail," he cut in, his eyes snapping to mine with a fierce, quiet intensity I had never seen in him before. "You don't understand what they did to her after Mason died. You saw the journal, but you didn't hear the hallway comments. You didn't see Chloe Vance and her friends laughing when Hazel dropped her books in the cafeteria two weeks after the funeral. You didn't hear them say that Hazel was using her brother's death to get attention because she was too plain to get it any other way."
A cold, burning rage ignited in the pit of my stomach. "They said that?"
"They said worse," Eli replied, his jaw tightening until a muscle leaped beneath his skin. "And Hazel believed them. She took every awful thing they whispered and swallowed it whole until it filled her up. That's why she stopped eating. That's why she hid in that room. She thinks if she makes herself invisible, they can't hurt her anymore."
He picked up a piece of cream-colored silk. Run softly along the edge was a thread of pure gold, hand-stitched in microscopic, elegant lettering. I leaned in close, squinting through the dim light.
"What is that?" I gasped.
"It’s the text from her journal," Eli whispered, running his calloused thumb over the delicate embroidery. "Every insult, every cruel word Chloe Vance and the others wrote or said. I’m embroidering them into the inner seams of the gown. On the outside, nobody will see it. It will just look like an intricate, golden vintage lace trim. But on the inside, right against her skin, those words will be trapped in the stitches. She won't be hiding from them anymore. She'll be wearing their cruelty like armor. She'll be stepping on it."
Tears spilled over my eyelids, hot and fast. "Eli..."
"Don't tell her," he urged, his hands trembling slightly as he set the fabric down. "If she knows, she'll panic. Just get her to the living room on Friday night. Tell her whatever you have to tell her. I'll bring the dress."
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"And if she locks the door?"
Eli picked up a brass key from the edge of the workbench—the spare key to our back door that Mason had given him three summers ago when they used to build treehouses in the woods. "Then I'm opening it myself."
