And here was a man treating that worth as settled fact, not because she had convinced him of it, but because to him it had never been in doubt.

Afterward he came to Cosima and did something stranger than the firing: he apologized.

Not for firing the dressmaker — for having made the decision without her.

It was her wardrobe, he said, and her body, and her choice of who would dress her, and he had overstepped by deciding even a good thing on her behalf.

He asked her to choose the next tailor herself.

Cosima stood there, absorbing the almost incomprehensible experience of a powerful person handing her back a choice he could easily have kept, and understood that whatever was growing between them, it was not yet love — but it was built on something she had never once been given, and it felt, to her, like a miracle.