Scene 12¶
Scene Twelve — “The Ledger” (Celeste POV, full prose draft)
Mara didn’t announce the new system. She simply put it on the table one morning as if it had always existed.
A ledger.
Thick. Hard cover. The kind you could drop and have it land with authority. It sat between the pincushion and the shears, beside the tin of chalk. On the first page, in Mara’s angular hand, were headings and lines, already ruled.
GARMENT: DATE ISSUED: WEAR-TESTER: NOTES (MOVEMENT / STRESS): FAILURE POINTS: FIX APPLIED: RE-TEST: SIGNED (MARA): SIGNED (CELESTE):
I ran my finger down the columns and felt, absurdly, the relief of it. The whole room would be calmer now. Fewer frantic, vague sentences. Fewer people saying it just tore as though fabric did things for fun. Mara watched my face without asking what I thought.
“What’s the rule?”
She tilted her head toward the far curtain rail. It had been newly fixed, properly anchored now, no longer sagging like an apology.
“Rule is,” Mara said, “guesses aren’t data.”
She looked past me. Charlie came in quietly, as always, like he’d learned how to make his presence unobtrusive without making himself invisible. A bundle of twill under one arm, a roll of paper under the other, hair still damp at the edges as if he’d left the house in a hurry. He saw the ledger and stopped. Because he understood what it meant. Mara slid it toward him with two fingers, like a forewoman pushing a job sheet across a bench.
“Write,” she said, eyes on him directly.
Lucy passed behind him, glanced at the headings and made a small sound of approval, like a woman watching chaos finally get pinned down. Charlie set his bundle down with careful hands. He didn’t touch the book at first, studying instead the headings, his eyes moving fast, absorbing structure like it was a language he was fluent in.
“You want me to log the failures?”
“I want you to log the truth,” Mara said. “And I want your name on the page when you’re satisfied it’s repeatable.”
His throat moved: a swallow, the faint tension he got when something was about to be formal. When he had been held to the work, and allowed to own it. He picked up the pen.
“Start with the stays,” Mara said. “The working set. The set you ‘delivered last time’.”
I watched him write. His handwriting wasn’t pretty, but it was exact. Like stitching that might not be decorative, but it would hold through a season and then another.
GARMENT: Working stays, linen canvas, whalebone substitute (reed/synthetic baleen), size test 2 WEAR-TESTER: Charlie Rossignol MOVEMENT / STRESS: bending, reaching overhead, lifting tray, stair ascent / descent FAILURE POINTS: seam stress at left side-back, binding roll at top edge, grommet pull at waist tie point
Mara leaned over his shoulder, close enough to read without making it personal.
“How did it feel?”
Charlie paused with the pen just above the paper.
Not how did it feel, in the way people said it when they wanted a story. Mara meant the thing itself: pressure, pinch, drag, creep. He answered like he was reading off a diagram.
“Too much load goes to the left tie point,” he said. “That’s why the grommet starts to oval. If you redistribute tension, by either moving the tie or adding a secondary anchor, then the binding won’t try to roll, because it won’t be fighting the torque.”
Mara’s mouth did a small, satisfied curve that wasn’t a smile so much as a verdict.
“And?”
“And the seam at side-back is... it’s underdesigned for repeated bend,” Charlie added. He tapped the page lightly. “Not wrong for... standing. But if you want a working garment, you need the seam to expect work.”
He didn’t say woman work. He didn’t say I understand women’s bodies. He didn’t mansplain any of the embarrassing conclusions blokes force into the air when gender was nearby. He just described load paths.
Mara straightened.
“Celeste,” she said, without looking at me, “this is why we don’t trial on staff first.”
“Yeah, I know,” I rejoined. My voice came out lighter than I intended, because it was almost funny now... how obvious all this was, in hindsight. “We’d been doing it backwards.”
She finally looked at me then, eyes sharp.
“We weren’t doing anything. We were letting it happen.”
That was Mara. She could turn a whole week of chaos into a single sentence and make you feel embarrassed you’d ever accepted it. Charlie kept writing, pen scratching.
FIX APPLIED: move tie point 12mm; add secondary anchor tape; reinforce side-back with felled seam + narrow twill tape; adjust binding cut on bias
He stopped again. His fingers tightened slightly around the pen, and I recognised the moment: the place where competence collided with the other thing: the thing he didn’t speak about. He didn’t want to be dramatic. That was his discipline. But the discipline had seams, too. Mara waited. She didn’t rush him. She didn’t soften. Finally, he said, very carefully,
“We’re still doing... the fitting under the curtain, yeah?”
Mara’s gaze didn’t flicker.
“Nothing has changed.”
“And the door stays locked,” he added, quickly, as if he regretted asking at all.
“Yes,” Mara said again. “And the log stays factual. No one discusses it like it’s entertainment.”
Charlie nodded once.
He wrote RE-TEST and then stopped, as if the word itself asked for a calendar.
I watched him, and I felt something in my chest shift into place. Something utilitarian, even scalable: the sense of seeing an interface, and realising it could scale. If we could keep him safe from being turned into a spectacle, if we could keep him inside the logic of the work, then the whole atelier could expand without losing its centre.
Lauren arrived not long after; she rapped once and came in. Practical, carryiing a box of notions and a roll of interfacing like she was delivering supplies to a site office. Her eyes landed on the ledger immediately.
“Ah,” she said. “You’ve made it official.”
Mara didn’t bother with pleasantries.
“We’ve made it measurable,” she corrected.
Lauren looked at Charlie, then at the curtain rail, then back to Mara, reading the room the way an adult reads a room: fast, with the parts that mattered.
“And he’s signing off?”
“He is.”
Lauren put the box down, opened it, and slid a handful of reinforced grommets onto the table.
“Use these,” she said to no one in particular. “If you’re doing working garments, stop pretending decorative hardware can take load.”
Charlie stared at the grommets. Then, so imperceptibly I almost missed it, his shoulders loosened, because his mother spoken the language of the work. Mara watched the exchange like she was watching two subcontractors finally agree on a specification.
“Good,” she said. “We’re past guessing.”
Lauren glanced at me. A quick look — adult to young adult.
“And you,” she said, “you're keeping it professional. Aren’t you?”
I held her gaze.
“I am,” I said. “Professional’s the point.”
She nodded, like she’d ticked a box. Charlie put his head down and wrote:
SIGNED (CHARLIE)
Mara took the pen from him when he was done. She signed her name with a thick, decisive stroke.
Then she pushed the ledger toward me.
My turn.
I signed, and the ink looked oddly serious on the page, as if the act itself had weight.
And just like that, the atelier took one step away from being a clever little pocket of women doing miracles in private, and one step toward being a system that could withstand daylight and strangers.