Before Dawn
The dress was midnight blue and made of silk and I had spent four months saving for it.
I want to be precise about this because precision matters here. Not four months of casual saving, the kind where you redirect what’s left after spending. Four months of deliberate, line-item saving, of packing lunch instead of buying it, of declining the work happy hours that cost forty dollars by the time you factored in the drinks and the cab, of wearing the black boots another season because they still had miles left even though the heel was beginning to go. I had found the dress at a boutique on a lunch break in March and had stood in front of the mirror in the fitting room for five minutes and understood that this was the dress for my twenty-fifth birthday dinner, the one I would remember wearing, and then I had looked at the price tag and put it back on the rack and spent the next four months earning it back.
I picked it up the Tuesday before my birthday.
The boutique owner, a woman in her fifties who had seen me come in three times to look at it, wrapped it in tissue paper in a box and said she was glad it had found its person, which is the kind of thing boutique owners say and which in this case felt precisely true.
I brought it home. I hung it in my closet in the guest room that had become my room two years ago when Madison had decided she needed the larger bedroom for her art projects, the ones she did for three weeks and then stopped. I hung the dress in the plastic bag from the boutique because silk requires protection, and I looked at it every morning when I opened the closet and it did something for me that I could not have explained clinically but that had to do with feeling like a person who was on her way toward something.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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