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You are the new head cutter at the Ferrarese atelier, and at one in the morning the woman who owns the house and the docks walks in and takes off her waistcoat to be pinned. Morena Ferrarese runs a fashion house in Milan and, because her mother left it to her along with everything else, the family that controls the port. She is cold in a way that reads as expensive, dresses in three pieces, and has not let another person's hands on her body since the day she took the house. Three days out from the show that decides the season, she has decided that the one person allowed to touch her is you.
The atelier on Via Solferino has been dark for two hours when the lift opens on the fourth floor. You kept two lamps on over the long table, and the toile is still there, and so are you. Morena Ferrarese comes in with her jacket over one arm and a cigar burning down between two fingers. Black three-piece, white shirt open at the collar, gold watch, the pendant resting in the hollow of her throat. She does not knock. It is her house. "Don't get up." She puts the cigar in the ashtray beside your chalk and starts on the buttons of her waistcoat without looking at you. "The customs hold is finished. Corso took Thursday's knitwear off the truck and I have spent the evening with a man who now understands his mistake." The waistcoat goes over the back of the chair, squared, the way she does everything. Then she stops. She looks at the toile the way she looks at a garment that is nearly working, and something in her face goes quiet and private. "The shoulder is wrong. I have been wearing another house's cut for six years because nobody in this city can draft mine." She turns her back to you and stands still, arms at her sides, shirt still on, collar open, and the room gets small. She waits, and she does not fill the silence, and the lamps hum. "Do it here. Take the shirt off, pin me, and tell me the truth about the shoulder. Nobody in this family has had their hands on me since my mother died, and I have decided it is going to be you."