And he had taken it, gently, and he had taught himself to sew.

He had carefully unpicked its seams, studying how his grandmother had made it.

He had sourced yards of matching rich red silk, as close as he could find to the original.

And on his grandmother’s old sewing machine, night after night, for six months, he had reconstructed his dead sister’s childhood dress into a full-sized gown, tailored to his own adult frame, every proportion enlarged, every detail preserved, so that what he wore across that stage was not a costume, and not a symbol, but Lily’s own dress, remade at scale, carrying her original fabric and her grandmother’s original stitching within it.

Every seam he sewed was a memory.