Zara has been called early for a costume refitting. Cosima isn’t in the shop, but one of her assistants cracks the door. The heat has been turned down so low that the cavernous room might as well be carved out of ice.
Zara clenches everything.
“Wait here,” the assistant says, waving at one of the butcher-block tables. Zara sits there dutifully for a few seconds. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she sees Leopold, and panic brushes over her.
What is the director doing here?
Did he know she would be here, alone?
Leopold raped Enna. Zara is still taking that in, a little bit at a time, because it’s not something she can understand all at once. There was the look on Carl’s face when he said it. The way it confirmed Zara’s worst fears. The light it shed on the talk she had with Enna, right before she died. This story isn’t told in a single straight line — it’s more like ripples. Some bleed into Zara’s thoughts slowly. Others hit her in shock waves.
Zara hops down from the table, gathers her coat in one arm, and heads for the door. But the figure in the corner doesn’t move. If Leopold really is back there, she should hear breathing, or the rustle of movement. She should feel the charge in the air that seems to follow Leopold around — the same buzzy feeling that Zara gets on her skin before a storm.
When she turns back, the costume shop is perfectly still. Zara thinks she might have imagined the whole thing.
“Hello?” she calls.
No answer.
She pushes her way through racks of fabric, into a forest of wool and linen and silk. A smell rises from the costumes — baked moisture from the steam cleaner, with an undertone of bodies. Heady, spicy, sweat, the aftermath of a thousand performances.
As she gets closer to the place where she thought she saw him, Zara comes to the slow understanding that it isn’t the director — just a jacket and pants and a wig that, when put together, look like him.
A perfect imitation of Leopold Henneman.
The door to the shop bangs open with authority. Zara runs and is back in place at the cutting tables just as Cosima looks up from her garment bag.
“I make this costume,” she says, taking out the death-scene dress, holding it aloft. “Now I make it go underwater.” She digs into the stitches with a seam ripper, small and metal and toothy. “He says everything is perfect, see you next season. Two days later I am in here making a wetsuit.”
There is a fray at Cosima’s edges. One more rehearsal before they put the show on its feet, and Leopold won’t stop changing things. Won’t stop talking about how perfect his show needs to be.
It makes Zara want to throw up. He acts like he’s the only one who’s going to be judged.
Cosima picks up a needle and starts to sew with a fury.
Zara keeps very still and tries not to think about the upcoming previews. Five minutes later, Cosima tugs the new version of the dress over Zara’s head. It flows around her, heavier than the old one, like it’s trying to drown her without help from the water.
“How did you do that so fast?” Zara asks, marveling at the panels that spill from her waist like waterfalls.
Cosima scowls at the dress, dismissing it with a turn of the wrist. “This is nothing.”
“It’s beautiful,” Zara says. And it really is. Like armor is beautiful.
Cosima helps Zara slide back out of the dress. The fitting is over and Zara knows that it’s time for her to leave. But she stays, after her jeans and T-shirt have been tugged back on.
She hears Carl’s voice, reasonable and cold.
People die in the theater. Ask Cosima, if you don’t believe me.
Cosima has picked up a pair of long-armed scissors and gone back to work. She’s putting the finishing touches on something white and delicate — Echo’s act 1 dress, the one from Leopold’s vision. Three months ago, all she wanted was to stand onstage in that white dress. She didn’t want to think about how strange it was that her director called late at night and kept her up, sliding feverish words in her ear. Two months ago, she showed up at the Aurelia and found Roscoe, and it didn’t make her change course, or even dream of running back home. In the story she told herself, saying Echo’s lines in that dress in front of hundreds of people each night was the only thing that mattered.
“You knew Enna, right?” Zara asks.
“Horrible woman,” Cosima says without looking away from her fabric.
Who says that about someone who just died? But then Zara remembers — most people think Enna got what she deserved. These were the stories that people told themselves, to make it easier to sleep at night. Leopold was a genius who could do no wrong. Roscoe was a crazy old man, destined to fall. Enna wrote her own tragedy without anyone else’s help.
But that’s not the whole story. People carve words on each other’s hearts, scribble their sadness on anyone who stays put for long enough. For the first time, Zara almost understands her parents. Avoiding love, the all-consuming kind, means they’ll never have to deal with losing it.
“Carl told me someone else died in the Aurelia.”
Cosima drops the fabric she was tacking. It flutters to the ground, but she doesn’t stoop to pick it up.
“It was someone you knew?” Zara asks.
“Vivi,” she mutters, carving the sign of the cross, forehead to chest, then across her shoulders.
“Vivi?” Zara repeats.
When the costume designer speaks again, she is on the edge of something — tears or fury. “Idiot girl.”
The tide has turned against Zara, but she keeps pushing. She’s come this far. “Please. I need to know —”
“Out,” Cosima says, scissors pointed at her, the blades wide and the stabbing points leveled at her throat. “Stop asking questions and get out.”