บททั้งหมดของ The wife I swore I’d never be : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

ANITA POV The jacket had been sitting in my mind for three weeks. Finished. I had solved the shoulder and, since then, I had drawn it six more times from different angles, different fabrics, different bodies. Each version cleaner than the last. Each one telling me the same thing—that this was not a sketch anymore. This was something that wanted to exist in the world. I knew the difference. I had always known the difference. A sketch is a question. What I had now was an answer. I sat at the kitchen table on a Wednesday morning with the sketchbook open and my coffee going cold and looked at the most recent version for a long time. Then I opened my laptop. I told myself I was just looking. Just checking. Like looking something up without committing to what you find. I searched a name. Cheng Textiles. A supplier I had used in university… a small import company that brought in West African textiles that nobody else in the city stocked at the time. Mr Cheng ran it

ANITA POVSaturday morning I told Donald I was going to the market.Not a lie exactly. The warehouse was on the east side and there was a market two streets down and I had been to both before. I said it the way I said most things to Donald… flat, unremarkable, offered as information rather than a request for permission. He was at his desk with his coffee and his laptop and he nodded without looking up.I drove across the city with the window down and the radio on low and the address in my phone and something in my chest that I was deliberately not examining too closely.Cheng Textiles was exactly as I remembered. A warehouse front with a modest sign and two large wooden doors that were already open when I arrived. Inside it smelled like fabric and cedar and something faintly chemical that I associated with the dye room at the back. The light was good… high windows, natural, the kind that showed you what a fabric actually was rather than what it wanted to be.Mr Cheng was at the back c

Anita povHelen had a studio above a print shop on Calloway Street.Three rooms.Good light.A long table she used for client meetings and mood boards and everything in between.She had texted me the address two days after Verity Street and I had saved it without telling anyone I had done that.Thursday morning I told Donald I was having lunch with Priya.I drove across the city with the fabric parcel in the backseat and the sketchbook in my bag.Helen was already there when I arrived.Coffee made.The long table cleared.She had printed three images and pinned them to the corkboard on the wall — not my work, reference points.A coat from 1994.A jacket from a small Parisian label nobody outside the industry had heard of.A photograph of a woman on a street somewhere, no label, no context, just the way she stood in what she was wearing.I looked at them for a moment.“Tell me who she is,” Helen said.“Who?”“The woman who wears Sorrel.”She sat down.“Not demographics. Not age range.

ANITA POV I had drawn it forty-seven times. Now it existed. A plain box. No label. Helen had arranged everything through the sample maker and I had paid in cash and given a collection address …a post office box she had opened under Sorrel’s name two weeks earlier. She had left it on my passenger seat that morning in the car park behind Calloway Street and driven away without ceremony. I drove home with it beside me and did not open it until Donald left for the office. Then I sat at the kitchen table and looked at it. Then I opened it. The jacket was wrapped in tissue paper. I lifted it out and set it on the table and stepped back. It was exactly as I had drawn it. Not close. Not almost. Exactly. The shoulder sat precisely where I had placed it in every version of that sketch. The seam line resolved the way I had solved it at two in the morning in front of the dressing table mirror. The lapel broke at the right point. The back fell clean. I had drawn

ANITA POV Priya was already at the table when I arrived. She had ordered bread and was tearing pieces off it — the same thing she always did when she had been waiting longer than was comfortable and did not want to say so. She looked up when I came through the door. Her eyes moved across my face before I had even sat down. “You look different,” she said. I pulled out the chair. “Hello to you too.” “No I mean it.” She was still looking. “Something is different about you.” “I got a haircut.” “You did not get a haircut.” She tore another piece of bread and set it down without eating it. “It is something else. You are holding yourself differently. You look like someone who has been somewhere interesting and has not told anyone yet.” I picked up the menu I had memorised three years ago and looked at it anyway. The waiter came. Priya ordered without looking at the menu because she had memorised it the same year I had. We had been coming to this place since before D