The stitching was exquisite, delicate and precise, executed with a level of care that spoke of enormous skill and enormous love, though the hem had frayed a little with age.
It was beautiful.
It was also, somehow, unbearably sad, in a way I could not yet name, as though the fabric itself held sorrow in its threads.
“What is this?” I whispered, my voice small in the quiet room.
And Arthur turned from the window, and I saw that his own eyes were wet, and he began, softly, to tell me the true story of the man I had married, a story that began forty-five years before, in a city I had never associated with him, with a family he had never once mentioned.
Chapter 7 — Lily[]
“Forty-five years ago,” Arthur explained softly, “Julian was a master tailor in Chicago.
One of the finest in the city.
He lived a quiet, happy life with his first wife, and his five-year-old twin children.
