Chapter 1 — The Gilded Lie (1)

Someone stole a year of my life and put it on television.

That was the first thing Ella Thorne thought, kneeling in the dark, when the old box TV on the wall flickered to the gala feed. The power had been cut. Seventeen days behind on rent. But the TV ran off a cable box the building's owner kept forgetting to disconnect, so while the lights were out, the broadcast stayed on.

She had half a sewing machine on her knees. A needle still threaded. The sequin chain she'd been tacking at three in the morning spilled across the concrete floor, cheap crystals scattered like somebody had upended a box of stars and walked away.

The room looked like a crime scene. It was one, in a way. Sketch pages were pinned to the walls, some of them half torn down. The ironing board was still set up. A bolt of silk she couldn't pay for was folded on the table, where she'd left it when the power went out. Every surface held a trace of the year she'd just lived here. She'd meant to celebrate the collection here. Instead she was being evicted from it.

The landlord had come by at noon. Told her to leave with dignity. She didn't cry. She just carried the last box of sketches down the five flights and came back up for the machine. On the landing, the woman who mopped the stairs had passed her and muttered, to nobody, "Even the cat learned to turn the lights on, these days." Ella had smiled without knowing why. The cleaning ladies in this building talked like fortune cookies. It was, she'd decided, the only free luxury the rent bought her.

The cat in question lived in the basement. Gray, with a torn ear. It had started turning the lights on by itself about a month ago, after the building's landlord stopped bothering. Ella had always liked that cat. It had figured out, on its own, how to keep the dark away. She figured that made two of them.

Nobody in this building knew who she was. That was fine. By tomorrow, the whole city would know her name — just not the way she'd planned.

The machine on her knees was her mother's. Her mother had died of illness when Ella was fifteen, leaving a closet of unfinished hems and one sewing machine that smelled of oil and camphor. Ella had dragged it from a funeral home to a dorm room to this fifth-floor walk-up. It had survived every move. It had survived a year of being fed every dollar she earned from alteration work — hems, zippers, bridesmaids' dresses for women who would never remember her name. Broken Grace was supposed to be the one. The twelve pieces that would say, out loud, here I am.

The host on screen was tearing open an envelope like it was a bomb.

"And the New York International Design Award for couture — the gold prize — goes to..." A drumroll. The camera found a front row. "Miss Lena Miller. Her series Broken Grace, which the judges have called the most fearless and emotionally original work of the year."

The audience stood. Applause rolled.

Lena Miller glided onto the stage in a pearl-gray mermaid gown.

Ella knew that gown. She knew it the way you know your own handwriting. Eyes closed, she could have described the arc of every dart, the placement of every bead, the blind stitch running inside the lining. Because that gown had not been sewn by Lena. It had been sewn by Ella. It was one of twelve — a year of work, every cent she had, one hundred and thirty-seven all-nighters, from the first swatch of silk to the last hand-finished hem. Twelve pieces, twelve seams she'd invented herself.

And right now, one of them was walking across a stage on a thief's body, glowing under a thousand lights.

She tried to remember the night she'd finished gown number twelve. She'd been alone in this same room. The heat had been off for three days. She'd been running on her neighbor's leftover coffee and a bag of stale everything bagels. She'd taken the final stitch out at five in the morning and stood back, and for one whole minute she'd let herself think: That's it. That's the one. That's the one that gets me out of this walk-up.

One hundred and thirty-seven nights. She'd counted them. A girl who counted her sleepless nights was either an artist or a patient chart. Tonight, apparently, she was the chart.

"She's calling it trauma from her childhood home," Ella said to the empty room. Her voice was level, almost bored, the way she read the weather. "My mother's closet had no trauma. It just had a lot of unfinished dresses."

On stage, Lena's throat tightened. Perfect tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and held exactly where the lighting could catch them.

"Three years ago, I was a girl from a small town in Ohio," Lena said, and her voice broke in all the right places. "Nobody believed I could make it in New York. I drew in a basement for three years. I slept three hours a night."

The livestream comments scrolled: I'm crying. This is what real genius looks like. We see you, queen. Another girl with a dream.

Ella laughed. It was a small, dry sound.

Small-town Ohio. Basement. Three hours of sleep. She knew Lena's basement. Everyone who'd ever been up to Lena's place knew it. It was a wine cellar under a five-story house on the Upper East Side, climate-controlled, stocked with champagne that cost more than Ella's last month of rent, with a sauna behind a glass door. And the three-years-of-three-hours-a-night thing? Lena's Instagram held two hundred and eighty-seven posts geotagged to island resorts, captioned grounding, resetting, offline. She did sleep three hours. The other twenty-one were spent editing photos.

This, Ella decided, was what they called magical realism. She was the magic. Everyone else got to be real.

The feed cut to a montage of the collection. One by one, the twelve pieces filled the screen. A gown here, a suit there, a coat that closed like a held breath. The camera lingered on each one as if it had been born on a mannequin that morning. Ella watched them parade past and felt, with the weirdest calm, that she was watching a slideshow of her own organs being donated to strangers.