“You never deserved to wear something this beautiful anyway!” Ren sneered, scissors gleaming in her hand. Five hours before my wedding, my ivory silk gown hung shredded beside the bridal-suite window, handmade flowers dangling like torn skin. My throat tightened; my hands went numb. My sister smiled at my devastation. But she’d overlooked the other garment bag in the corner...

The powder room was located at the end of the covered breezeway that connected the mill to the old wheelhouse—a quiet, drafty corridor where the sound of the river rose through the floorboards like distant thunder.

I did not go there to find Ren; I went there because the bone crochet hook in Nadine’s kit had left a tiny, sharp burr on the inside of the eighth button, and I needed to turn the loop with a pair of tweezers from my vanity case.

I turned the corner into the stone vestibule.

Ren was not weeping.

She was standing before the antique gilt mirror over the copper basin, her phone propped against an empty water carafe, adjusting the ring light she had brought in her vanity case. She had unpinned her hair, letting it fall around her shoulders in loose, glossy waves, and was in the process of applying a fresh layer of gloss to her lips.

On the small wicker bench beside the basin lay her calfskin bag.

Sticking out of the open zipper, wrapped hastily in an embroidered linen guest towel she had taken from the basket, were the German tailoring shears.

I stopped in the doorway. The faille skirt brushed the stone jamb with that unmistakable, heavy *shhh-shhh*.

Ren’s eyes met mine in the mirror.

She did not startle. She did not drop the gloss. She capped it with a slow, deliberate twist, turned around, and leaned back against the copper basin, crossing her ankles.

“Still playing the grand duchess?” she asked. Her voice was flat, devoid of the theatrical sweetness she had used in front of my mother. “I suppose you think that old museum piece makes you look like one of them.”

I looked at the shears in her bag. The carbon steel tips were visible through the hemstitched linen.

“Why did you take them from the wastebasket?” I asked.

Ren gave a short, ugly little laugh. “They’re Mother’s scissors. Why should I leave them in the trash just because Callum’s old-money dragon wanted to make a point?”

“They’re my scissors, Ren. Dad gave them to me when I passed my contractor’s licensing exam. He bought them at the hardware supply in Sylva in 2014.”

Ren’s lip curled. “Everything has to have a little history with you, doesn't it? A little story to make it special. The little girl who works so hard, the little girl who earns everything herself. You make me sick, Lyra. You really do.”

She pushed herself off the basin and stepped toward me, her heels loud on the flagstones.

“You’ve been playing the martyr since we were six years old,” she said, her voice rising, vibrating with that raw, ancient grievance that had nothing to do with silk or weddings and everything to do with the simple fact of my existence. “Sitting in the corner with your books and your savings bonds, looking at me like I was stupid because I wanted pretty things. You think you’re better than me because you can swing a hammer and balance a ledger. You think Callum loves you because you’re *sensible*?”

She stopped eighteen inches away.

“He’s going to get bored of you in six months, Lyra. Men like that don't want a project manager for a wife. They want someone who has some blood in them. He’s going to look at you sitting across the table with your spreadsheets and your sensible shoes, and he’s going to remember that he could have had someone who actually knows how to live.”

I looked at her face—the perfect skin, the carefully tinted mouth, the small, hard eyes that had never once looked at another human being without calculating their utility.

“You tried to ruin my wedding dress, Ren,” I said.

“And you found another one,” she countered immediately, her chin lifting. “You always do. You always land on your feet, and then you look at me like I’m the one who did something wrong. You think you’re so tough, don't you? Let’s see how tough you are when Callum realizes his family thinks you’re just the girl who fixes their floors.”

She reached down, picked up her bag, and made to push past me into the breezeway.

I did not step aside.

The doorway was thirty inches wide. The heavy faille skirts filled it from jamb to jamb, six panels of four-ply silk backed by steel boning and sixty years of mountain dirt that had been cleared by Arthur Vance’s grandfather.

“Excuse me,” Ren said, her voice turning sharp.

“The scissors, Ren.”

“They’re in my bag. Get out of my way.”

“Take them out and put them on the table.”

“I’m not touching your filthy scissors—”

I reached out, took the calfskin strap of her bag in my left hand, and twisted it once around my knuckles.

Ren gasped. “Let go of that! That bag cost eight hundred dollars!”

“The dress you cut cost four thousand,” I said, my voice dropping into that quiet, level tone I used when a masonry crew wanted to leave an unbraced retaining wall before a thunderstorm. “The scissors cost eighty-five. Dad bought them with money he made surveying sixty acres of swamp in Cherokee County. You’re not taking them to Charlotte to cut ribbons for marketing displays.”

I didn't yank. I simply held the strap with the forearm strength I had built over twelve years of lifting slate samples and transit tripods.

Ren pulled back. The leather creaked. She looked at my face, her own features twisting into that ugly, panicked fury of someone who has finally met an object that does not yield to a scream or a sulk.

“Mother!” she shouted toward the breezeway. “Mother, she’s attacking me!”

Nobody came.

The river was loud beneath the timbers. Down on the porch, the band had just begun to play—a slow, swinging version of an old swing standard, the horns bright and brassy against the evening air.

“Put them on the table, Ren,” I said again.

Her eyes darted to the dark corridor behind me, then to the heavy, unyielding line of my shoulders. She realized, with a sudden, humiliating clarity, that there was no audience here. There was no mother to appeal to, no cousins to witness her victimization, no Callum to be embarrassed by her scene.

There was only her elder sister, four inches taller, twenty pounds heavier, wearing an iron dress and holding her eight-hundred-dollar bag by the throat.

With a sharp, vicious jerk, Ren reached into the bag, pulled out the linen-wrapped shears, and slammed them onto the copper basin.

The heavy steel rang against the metal with a sound like a pistol shot.

“There!” she spat, her chest heaving beneath the cream Reformation dress. “Take your stupid, peasant tools! Take your old woman’s dress! Take your boring, small-town life! I hope you choke on it, Lyra. I hope you choke on every single second of it.”

I let go of the strap.

She stumbled back half a step, straightened her cardigan with shaking hands, and shoved past me into the breezeway, her heels clattering frantically against the chestnut floorboards until the sound was swallowed by the roar of the turbine and the swing of the band.

I turned to the basin.

I picked up the shears. The steel was cold against my palm. I unwrapped the linen towel, laid the shears flat on the marble shelf beneath the mirror, and looked at my own face in the glass.

The veil had slipped back an inch. I reached up, adjusted the silver comb, and smoothed the heavy, cream-colored faille over my hips.