Daniel’s shoulders relaxed. That relief hurt more than the ultimatum.

Chapter 2 — Maggie

My name is Margaret Carter, though nearly everyone who’s known me longer than a few minutes calls me Maggie.

For almost forty years, I designed wedding dresses — not the factory gowns hanging under fluorescent lights in department stores, but dresses that began as pencil sketches on tracing paper and ended beneath cathedral ceilings, courthouse chandeliers, garden arches, and oak trees wrapped in lights.

I understood silk by touch. I could tell whether satin would wrinkle before I cut it, how much structure a bodice required, how to hide a zipper beneath delicate lace, how to restore a grandmother’s veil without removing the history that made it special.

My first sewing machine stood on a folding card table in the corner of a rented apartment on Chicago’s northwest side. I was twenty-one, newly married to Thomas Carter, working days in a bridal salon and altering gowns at night for women who found my name through church bulletins and handwritten cards taped inside neighborhood beauty shops.

Thomas worked in procurement for a regional textile company — patient, funny, never bothered that I often out-earned him during wedding season. When I landed my first major commission, I bought us a new refrigerator.