Scene 15¶
Option 2 it is — and yes, that makes perfect sense.
If Mara is the atelier’s steel (standards, structure, consequence), then Lauren can be the felt lining: still tough, still competent, but warmer in delivery. That contrast will stop the whole women’s competence network from collapsing into “one voice.” It also makes Mara’s dryness more powerful, because it’s a choice, not the default ambience of the world.
Sarah then becomes useful as a third flavour: sharp, brisk, slightly combative — not warm, but not “Mara-clone” either.
Below is your Scene 15 (the cleaned version I gave), now with Option 2 stitched on as a final button.
Scene 15¶
✨ Ladders ✨¶
[Publish]
Scene 15 — “Ladders” (Celeste POV)*
By the third day, Charlie stopped looking like a guest.
He moved through the atelier as if the place had finally given him rails: cut, stitch, test, record — repeat. The rhythm took the tremor out of him, not because the work became easy, but because it became legible. He could be useful without having to invent a personality around it.
Mara didn’t praise him. She rewarded him with continuity.
The three blocks lived on the wall now — traced paper over brown card, corners clipped, waistlines marked with blunt authority. Each had its own small forest of notes in Mara’s hand: MOVE TIE POINT 12mm, ADD SECONDARY ANCHOR, WATCH TOP EDGE TORQUE, UNDERARM GUARD?
The templates were beginning to look less like experiments and more like tools. On the corkboard beside them, I’d pinned my research the way Mara liked things pinned: not like inspiration, like evidence.
WORKING STAYS: WHAT THEY COMPROMISE, I’d written at the top.
Under it, three museum-clean photos of garments that weren’t a compromise. Underarm guards that looked like someone had finally admitted armpits exist. Straps that told the truth about lifting. Edges reinforced the way you reinforce anything you intend to keep using.
Mara had read the board once, silently. Then she’d taken a pencil and added her own captions, more brutal than mine:
ABRASION IS REAL. LIFT IS REAL. WEAR IS REAL.
Charlie had stared at those words for a long time, as if they were permission.
Now he was at the fitting mat again, not hidden or staged, standing where the floor tape made the world measurable while Mara tightened the lacing with the quiet patience of someone tensioning a rig. He wore the mock-up over his T-shirt: Mara insisted the first truth should never be theatrical.
“Arms up.”
He lifted.
The top edge behaved: not perfectly, but honestly. It shifted and then settled, like a tool that had learned where it belonged.
“Reach forward.”
He reached.
The diagonal crease appeared, but softer now, less accusing. The load had been persuaded into a better route. Charlie’s jaw loosened a fraction. He didn’t smile — he never smiled during tests — but he looked less like he was waiting to be caught out.
Mara stopped and stepped back.
“Ledger.”
Charlie went to the table and wrote. I watched his hand, the way it no longer apologised on paper.
The door opened while he was still writing.
Lauren.
She came with her usual tote bag slung over a shoulder, keys in her hand, and the calm face of someone who had learned which problems were solved by volume and which were solved by structure. She took in the room in one glance — the templates, the ledger, the corkboard with my pinned references — and her eyes narrowed, not with suspicion, but with appraisal.
“Mara.”
“Lauren,” Mara replied, as if she’d been expecting her.
Lauren set the tote on the table and unzipped it. Out came a roll of twill tape, a packet of grommets, and a small envelope that looked like nothing until you remembered how much of Wardrobe’s authority lived in small parts.
“I brought the hardware,” Lauren said. Then, without softening her voice: “And I assume this is the part where you tell me what you need from me.”
“It is.”
Charlie had gone very still. At that moment he looked as if his mother represented the outside world walking into Wardrobe without asking permission.
“We’re building a block,” Mara said. “Returning-to-work. Real labour. Real distribution. Different tolerances.”
Lauren nodded once, as if Mara had simply named something she’d carried for years.
“And you want a baseline,” she said.
“Yes.”
Lauren glanced at Charlie, and the glance was both maternal and professional: I see you, and also: I will behave properly. She turned to Mara.
“Please tell me your conditions.”
Mara answered like policy, not like reassurance.
“Scheduled. Factual. No commentary. No unscheduled access. If you’re in the room, you’re in the work.”
Lauren’s face didn’t change, but her shoulders loosened: the relief of hearing clearly-articulated competence.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m not here to watch. I’m here to build something that doesn’t punish women.”
That was the first time Charlie looked up properly. He looked at his mother as if he had never heard her say anything of that sort in his life before. Mara lifted her chin toward the ledger.
“Charlie,” she said. “New page. Same headings. Add body type.”
Charlie’s pen hovered. His throat moved. He looked at Mara like he was asking permission to direct a grown woman. Mara didn’t even glance at him.
“It’s allowed.”
Charlie swallowed. Then he looked at Lauren.
“Movement,” he said. “If you’re willing. Same list.”
Lauren nodded once. “Of course.”
Charlie wrote:
ATTEMPT 2 — BODY TYPE: RETURNING-TO-WORK (BASELINE)
He didn’t decorate it. He didn’t apologise for it. He just wrote it as fact.
That was when Sarah arrived.
She came in with the particular energy of someone who never asks whether she’s welcome. Her accent carried the UK cleanly — sharp edges, no apology. She took one look at Lauren at the table, then at Charlie, then at Mara, and her mouth made a shape that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Oh,” she said. “We’re doing this today, are we?”
Mara didn’t look up. “We’re doing work every day.”
Sarah’s eyes flicked to the policy line at the top of the open ledger page.
“Still with the rules,” she said, casual as a pin. “All this managing, this... protection.”
Charlie’s shoulders rose, and I saw the old reflex trying to return: the instinct to get smaller before anyone could make him. Mara’s voice cut across it.
“Don’t.”
Charlie froze.
Sarah lifted a brow. “I’m not being unkind. I’m being realistic. If he wants to work in a women’s world, he can face women’s challenges. Front-facing. No special cover.”
Lauren’s gaze landed on Sarah with a calm so controlled it was almost polite.
“And who made you spokesperson for ‘women’s challenges’?” Lauren asked.
Sarah snorted. “Oh, come off it. Women manage. They cope. We don’t need—”
Mara set the reed boning down with a soft, decisive click.
“You’re confusing coping with virtue,” Mara said dryly.
Sarah opened her mouth. But Mara wasn’t done.
“And you’re confusing governance with weakness.”
Sarah’s expression sharpened. “Governance.”
Mara nodded toward the ledger and then, with a small tilt of her head, toward my corkboard.
“See that board?” she said. “That’s not comfort. That’s evidence.”
Sarah glanced, and her mouth tightened as she took in the blunt pragmatism of garments built for bodies that moved.
“Underarm guards,” Mara said. “Because abrasion exists. Straps because people lift. Reinforced edges because things wear out. Women solved problems by making rules and building tools. They didn’t ‘cope’ for sport.”
Sarah’s jaw worked. Her eyes flicked back to Charlie: properly this time, as a worker in the room, not a test case for her opinions. Her lips tightened.
“So what,” she said, voice flatter, “we wrap him in cotton wool forever?”
“No,” Mara said. “We train competence like we train anything else: by repetition and standards.”
Sarah’s chin lifted. “That’s what I’m saying. He can’t crumble the first time someone looks at him funny.”
Mara’s gaze held hers for a long beat, and then she nodded once... grudgingly, because it was fair.
“Fine,” Mara said. “But we don’t train resilience by ambush.”
The room went very still: not tense, just attentive. Mara turned to Charlie.
“Come here.”
He startled — that instinctive fear of being summoned for judgement — and then he obeyed. He stepped to the table. Lauren stayed where she was, not hovering, but present in the way a seatbelt is present: you don’t notice it until you need it, and then you’re grateful it was always there. Mara put her hand on the ledger.
“You understand this truth,” she said. “The garment fails. You write it. We fix it.”
Charlie nodded. Mara’s voice didn’t soften. It simply shifted into reality.
“Here’s another truth. When the work leaves the room, people will notice. Some will act normal. Some won’t.”
Charlie’s fingers tightened around his pen. Lauren didn’t rush to comfort. She simply stayed quiet, and that quiet said: You can stand in this. Mara went on.
“You cannot choose what other people are. You can choose what you do when they are that way.”
Charlie swallowed. “What... do I do?”
Mara looked at him as if the question was the beginning of adulthood.
“You keep working,” she said. “You keep your facts straight. You don’t perform. You don’t bargain. And you never disappear.”
Sarah let out a short breath. “That last one’s going to be hard one... for him.”
Charlie blinked. Sarah shrugged, unapologetic. “I’m not being nasty. I’m being useful.”
Lauren’s mouth twitched — the smallest sign of amusement — and then she looked at Charlie.
“You don’t have to be fearless,” Lauren said. “You just have to keep your head in this room.”
Charlie stared at the ledger, at his own handwriting. It was evidence too: that he’d done something awkward, repeatedly, and survived the feeling of it.
“I can do that,” he said quietly.
Mara flicked her head down in a nod, once. “Good.”
She tapped the movement list pinned near the fitting mat.
“We do it in rungs,” she said. “A ladder.”
Charlie frowned. “A ladder.”
Mara’s eyes were steady. “First rung: you can be seen working. Second: you can be spoken to while working without losing your hands. Third: you can answer a stupid comment without trying to become a different person.”
Sarah exhaled. “Fourth rung: you tell them to get stuffed.”
Mara’s eyes flicked to her. Sarah lifted a shoulder.
“Politely, if you must.”
Mara didn’t smile, but something in her face loosened: the slightest concession that Sarah had landed in the right register at last. Then she reached for the mock-up again.
“All right,” she said. “Back to the proof.”
They didn’t make it an event. Mara laced. Lauren stood where she was told. Charlie watched the lines in the cloth as if they were a map he could learn to read in any weather.
And I watched the watching.
Lauren watched the garment, not the boy. Sarah watched the room, and I watched Sarah watching, observed the moment her disdain failed to find a foothold because there was no weakness being performed for her to kick.
Mara didn’t look up.
“First rung.”
And Charlie lifted his arms.
On Lauren’s warmth (quick craft note, because you asked)¶
Yes: keeping Lauren a touch more conversational is a smart way to differentiate her from Mara without making her “soft.” Warmth can be competence delivered with human cadence — she can say “please,” she can ask rather than command, she can phrase things in a way that includes rather than orders, and she can still be utterly consequential.
If you want, in Scene 16 we can lean into this contrast even more: Mara will set the next rung clinically; Lauren will give Charlie a tiny, warm, practical line that helps him actually do it.
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Scene 15¶
Older Version¶
Older Version - Keep for comparison
Scene 15 “Proof” (Celeste POV)
By the third day, the curtain didn’t feel like a secret.
It felt like equipment.
Charlie moved in and out of it without that earlier stiffness, the one that made his shoulders sit too high as if he were bracing for judgement. The lock clicked, the ledger opened, the chalk marks went on, and the atelier did what ateliers do: it ate time and turned it into something that held.
He stopped asking permission for the work and started asking questions about the work.
“Do we want the waistline higher for this one?” he asked once, tapping a paper template with the blunt end of a pencil. “If we keep it where it is, it’s going to hinge under bend.”
Mara didn’t praise. She corrected.
“Not higher,” she said. “Different distribution. Don’t fix by shifting the whole garment. Fix by changing where it takes load.”
Charlie nodded. Then he did what he’d learned to do here: he wrote it down, because nothing was real until it had been made measurable.
I watched the three base blocks become less like sketches and more like tools.
NYMPH settled first — predictable in its own way, twitchy about pressure points, quick to punish sloppy stiffness.
WELL-NOURISHED YOUNG LASS took longer — not because the body was “difficult,” but because lazy patterns always assumed they could cheat: they’d hold a silhouette standing still and then betray you the moment you lifted your arms.
RETURNING-TO-WORK MUM hovered in limbo because it wasn’t a mannequin category. Not really. The category had history in it — years, breath, muscle, softness, fatigue, resilience.
Mara didn’t like “category” when the category was a person.
She didn’t say that.
She said, “We need proof.”
And then the proof arrived in the form of Lauren Rossignol carrying a lunch bag and a list.
She came in as she always did now: not apologising for existing, not asking for romance from the room. Practical. Clear-eyed. The sort of adult who had decided that dignity was something you did, not something you begged for.
She set the lunch bag down.
Then she placed a piece of paper on the cutting table.
It was typed.
I leaned forward and saw the heading:
RETURN-TO-WORK REQUIREMENTS — LAUREN R.
Underneath, bullet points.
- Standing all day
- Frequent forward reach
- Lifting (small loads, repeated)
- No pinching at underarm / upper rib
- No bruising at hip crest
- Lacing must hold without constant adjustment
- Must be breathable and washable
Mara stared at it for a moment as if someone had just tried to hand her a contract.
Lauren met her gaze calmly.
“You said you needed proof,” Lauren said. “I’m offering my body as the proof. And I’m offering it with conditions.”
Charlie, who had been at the ironing board, froze so completely he looked as though someone had flicked his power switch off.
Mara noticed. Of course she did.
She didn’t look at Charlie. She looked at Lauren.
“What conditions?” Mara asked.
Lauren didn’t glance at the curtain, because she wasn’t performing concern. She was being a mother with a brain.
“Same privacy protocol,” she said, steady. “Same schedule. Same no-surprises rule.”
Mara’s eyebrows rose a fraction.
“And,” Lauren added, “no one speaks about my son like he’s a spectacle. Not in my presence, and not when I’m gone.”
The room held its breath.
Mara’s mouth tightened — the closest she came to respect when it wasn’t pinned into a sentence. She took the sheet and read it again, slower, as if assessing whether the paper itself could bear load.
Then she said, “Fair.”
Charlie’s voice came out unexpectedly thin.
“Mum,” he said, and there was the old flicker in it — don’t do this for me — as if he assumed any adult intervention was either rescue or shame.
Lauren turned to him.
“This isn’t for you,” she said, and her tone didn’t allow argument. “It’s for me. I’m the category. I’m the data point.”
He stared at her, baffled by the simplest kind of maternal competence.
Lauren didn’t soften. Softening was how people let themselves get talked out of what mattered.
She looked at Mara again.
“If you’re building a block for women like me,” she said, “then I’d like it to be built on a woman like me. Not on a padded mannequin and optimism.”
Mara nodded once.
“Good,” she said. “Then we do it properly.”
The fitting was scheduled for after lunch. It ran like a procedure, not an event.
Charlie stayed behind the curtain because he had to do the exact work that made the garment truthful: marking stress lines, feeling where load pooled, adjusting channels, making the tweaks that turned a clever pattern into something that could carry a day.
Lauren treated the whole thing like a professional appointment. No jokes. No awkwardness. No turning it into a mother-son moment.
When the lock clicked and she stepped out again, she didn’t glance at Charlie like he’d done something strange or shameful.
She said, “It pinches here,” and tapped her own rib area. “Only when I reach forward. That’s important.”
Mara’s eyes sharpened.
Charlie was already writing.
FAILURE POINTS: upper rib pinch under forward reach; slight gaping at top edge when bending; lacing tension drifts after sustained movement
Lauren looked at the ledger, then at Mara.
“That’s the first time I’ve seen my body written down like it’s a machine,” she said.
Mara didn’t miss a beat.
“It’s not your body,” Mara replied. “It’s the garment’s behaviour on your body. Don’t confuse the two.”
Lauren’s mouth twitched — a near-smile.
“I like you,” she said, dryly.
Mara snorted once, which was as close to laughter as she allowed in her shop.
They were on the second iteration when Sarah arrived.
Sarah’s voice came before Sarah did — that sharp UK cadence like a blade that had been polished too well.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, stepping into the room with a bundle of linen slung over one shoulder, “are we still doing the little cloak-and-dagger thing?”
Charlie, who had been trimming tape, went very still.
Mara didn’t look up from the stays on the table.
“Mind your tongue,” Mara said.
Sarah’s eyes flicked to the curtain rail, then to the locked door, then back to Mara as if she were assessing a ridiculous superstition.
“What I mind,” Sarah said, “is that we’re treating him like porcelain.”
Mara’s head lifted. Slow. Deliberate.
“He’s not porcelain,” Mara said. “He’s staff.”
Sarah snorted. “Then treat him like it.”
The room tightened.
I felt Charlie’s attention go inward — the old disappearing act hovering at the edge of him. His hands stayed busy, but his face went blank in that way that wasn’t calm. It was armour.
Sarah saw it and misread it, because Sarah was very good at reading confidence and very bad at reading quiet.
“You want to work in a woman’s world?” she said, aiming her words not at Mara but toward the curtain as if that were where the weakness lived. “Then you face a woman’s challenges. Front-facing. Like the rest of us do.”
Mara’s voice cut through the air like shears.
“Enough.”
Sarah didn’t stop.
“What, are we supposed to pretend nobody will ever notice?” she pressed. “You think the world won’t talk? You think the women out there won’t have an opinion? If he’s going to do this—”
Mara slammed her palm flat on the cutting table.
Not hard enough to be theatrical.
Hard enough to be final.
“You don’t get to turn my shop into a stage,” Mara said. “Not for your principles and not for your entertainment.”
Sarah’s cheeks coloured. “It’s not entertainment. It’s reality.”
Mara held her gaze.
“You want reality?” Mara said. “Reality is: women don’t owe the world access to our bodies. Reality is: this is a workplace, and we decide what’s private here.”
Sarah’s jaw tightened. “And reality is: he won’t get that privacy out there.”
Mara paused.
For a fraction of a second, she looked... thoughtful. As if Sarah had accidentally hit a nail head-on.
Then Mara said, quietly, “That’s the part you’re right about.”
Sarah blinked, surprised she’d earned any ground at all.
Mara’s voice stayed level.
“But the conclusion you draw from it is wrong.”
Sarah folded her arms. “Is it?”
Mara nodded once.
“Yes,” she said. “Because you think the lesson is exposure. You think we toughen him by taking his privacy away.”
Mara’s eyes flicked to the ledger. Then to the curtain. Then, for the first time, to Charlie.
Charlie didn’t look up. He was still trimming tape with such precision it was almost violent.
Mara continued.
“The lesson,” she said, “is that the world will talk, and he will learn to stand anyway. With his head up. With his work behind him. With women who don’t let mockery pass as truth.”
Sarah’s mouth opened, closed.
Mara looked back at her.
“If you want to help,” Mara said, “you can help us build language and procedure for the day he’s confronted. Not take away the one thing that lets the work stay clean.”
Sarah stared at Mara for a long second.
Then she said, begrudgingly, “You’ve wrapped it in velvet.”
Mara’s response was immediate.
“No,” she said. “I’ve wrapped it in policy.”
That evening, Mara did something she almost never did.
She called a meeting.
Not with the room.
With Charlie.
And she didn’t do it alone.
“Lauren,” she said, without looking at her, “you’re staying.”
Lauren didn’t flinch. “Of course.”
Charlie looked up then, startled — the reflex of someone who assumed any meeting about him would be a reprimand.
Mara pulled three chairs into a rough triangle. No one sat behind a desk. No one held the high ground.
When Charlie sat, his hands folded tightly in his lap as if he were trying to keep them from betraying him.
Mara sat opposite him.
Lauren sat beside him — not touching, not hovering, but close enough to be a presence, not a shield.
Mara didn’t soften her voice. She didn’t need to.
“I was over-protective,” Mara said.
Charlie’s eyes widened.
Lauren’s expression didn’t change. She waited, because she trusted Mara to be precise.
Mara continued.
“I protected the privacy,” she said. “That stays. That’s not negotiable.”
Charlie’s shoulders loosened a fraction. A breath slipped out of him that he hadn’t meant anyone to hear.
Mara saw it. Of course she did.
“But,” Mara added, “I protected you too much by pretending the world won’t see what you’re doing here.”
Charlie’s throat moved.
“I didn’t—” he began.
Mara held up a hand.
“Don’t explain,” she said. “Listen.”
He shut his mouth.
Mara leaned forward, forearms on knees, gaze steady.
“This atelier will grow,” she said. “If it grows, people will notice. They’ll ask. They’ll gossip. Some will mock. Not because you’ve done anything wrong. Because mockery is how small minds handle things they can’t categorise.”
Charlie sat very still.
Lauren’s hand moved — not to touch him, but to set her own palm on her knee, grounding herself. A mother preparing to hear her son be told the truth.
Mara spoke again.
“If that happens,” she said, “you are not to disappear.”
Charlie’s eyes flicked up sharply.
Mara’s voice didn’t change.
“You’re not to go blank. You’re not to vanish. You’re not to leave the work to protect your feelings. You keep working. You keep your standards. You hold your head up.”
Charlie’s voice came out rough.
“What if they laugh?”
Mara’s response was immediate and unsentimental.
“Then they laugh,” she said. “And you learn who they are.”
Charlie stared at her, as if trying to understand how something could be both frightening and... clean.
Lauren finally spoke, quiet but firm.
“And if someone mocks you,” she said, “they’re mocking our work. They’re mocking the atelier. They’re mocking Mara’s standards.”
Charlie looked at his mother, startled again. He’d spent too long thinking mockery belonged to him alone.
Mara nodded once.
“Exactly,” she said. “We’ll have a rule.”
She reached for the ledger and flipped to a blank page.
“Celeste will write it,” Mara said, as if Celeste were present in the room through the logic of it. “But you will know it.”
Mara looked at Charlie.
“Mockery is not ‘just a joke’ here,” she said. “If anyone inside this workplace turns you into a spectacle, they’re out. That’s simple.”
Charlie’s lips parted. “Even if it’s a woman?”
Mara’s eyes sharpened.
“Especially if it’s a woman,” Mara said. “Women don’t get a pass to be cruel in a women-led space.”
Lauren’s mouth tightened with approval.
Mara continued, softer only in the sense that her words became more practical.
“And outside,” she said, “you’ll have a script.”
Charlie blinked. “A script?”
Lauren answered before Mara could.
“Yes,” Lauren said. “Because you don’t owe anyone your nerves.”
Mara nodded, grudgingly pleased.
“Three lines,” Mara said. “That’s all you need.”
Charlie swallowed.
“What lines?”
Mara lifted a finger.
“One: ‘I’m the prototyping technician.’”
Second finger.
“Two: ‘I test load paths and stress points. It’s engineering.’”
Third finger.
“And three: ‘If you’ve got a problem with it, take it up with Mara.’”
Lauren added, instantly, “And you don’t say it apologetically.”
Charlie stared at them both.
There was a strange look on his face — not anger, not relief, but something like the first time a person realises the world might not be arranged solely to humiliate them.
He nodded once, slow.
“Okay,” he said.
Mara watched him for a beat.
Then she said, almost casually, “Sarah thinks you should be able to face things front-facing.”
Charlie’s shoulders tightened again.
Mara lifted a hand.
“She’s right about one thing,” Mara said. “You can’t build a life on hiding.”
Charlie’s voice went thin again. “I’m not hiding. I’m working.”
“I know,” Mara said, and this time her voice did soften a fraction — not sentimental, just human. “That’s why I’m saying it. You’re not hiding. But your instinct is to disappear when people stare. That’s what you’ll have to outgrow.”
Lauren’s voice was quiet. “And you will.”
Charlie looked at his mother. Then at Mara.
His hands unclenched.
“Will you... still keep the curtain?” he asked, and there it was — the tiny fear that this would become a punishment disguised as “growth.”
Mara’s answer was immediate.
“The curtain stays,” she said. “Because privacy is professional. Not because you’re ashamed.”
Charlie nodded again, and this time the nod looked different.
It looked like a decision.
What this sets up¶
cleanly for the next beat
- The three blocks nearing error-free makes the atelier feel real and earned.
- Lauren’s involvement isn’t contrived: she’s literally the category, with practical needs and adult agency.
- Sarah’s confrontation forces a policy upgrade (not a melodrama).
- Charlie gets a “coming-of-age” moment that isn’t about becoming macho; it’s about remaining himself while staying present.
- Women remain the decisive forces: Mara sets rules, Lauren reinforces, Celeste codifies, Sarah pressure-tests.
If you’d like, I can write the follow-on scene where Sarah later witnesses Charlie use the “three lines” in the wild (a visitor, a contractor, a snide comment), and — crucially — she realises the difference between front-facing resilience and public access. That’s a satisfying pivot for her: she stays sharp, but she becomes part of the system instead of a destabiliser.