Read Chapter 5: The Phantom Brother

The morning light through the atelier’s tall windows was thin and merciless, the kind that exposed every flaw in thread and temper. Elise had pinned the midnight blue wool bodice to the mannequin for the third time, stepping back to squint at the drape along the shoulder seam, when a knock rattled the delivery door.

“I’ll get it,” Isabelle called from the office doorway, already moving before Elise could protest. The younger woman had taken to hovering, not quite helpful, not quite in the way—a presence Elise couldn’t shake without seeming ungrateful.

Voices murmured in the corridor. Then Isabelle reappeared with a slender woman behind her, perhaps thirty, with dark hair pulled back in a severe knot and hands clasped at her waist like a supplicant.

“This is—” Isabelle hesitated, glancing at a scrap of paper.

“Camille Roche,” the woman said, stepping forward. Her gaze swept the atelier with an odd mixture of nostalgia and assessment. “I saw the notice in the window. The one asking for seamstresses.”

Elise set down her pins. The notice had been Julien’s idea, printed and posted despite her protests that she didn’t have time to train anyone who didn’t already know the house’s standards.

“You’ve worked in couture?” Elise asked.

“Before the war.” Camille’s voice was steady, but her fingers twisted in her apron strings. “I was here, actually. At this house. From ’38 until the occupation.”

Elise felt the temperature of the room shift. Isabelle had gone still by the door.

“Here?” Elise repeated. “I don’t recall your name among the previous staff.”

“I was under the first Madame Lefèvre, before you came on as pattern cutter.” Camille’s chin lifted slightly. “I apprenticed in the finishing room. Mostly buttonholes and hem tape. But I learned the house style—the way she cut a sleeve on the bias, the weight of the underlinings.”

It was true that Elise had only joined the house in ’46, having learned her trade elsewhere. She couldn’t verify or deny a finishing-room apprentice from a decade past.

“You have references?” Elise asked.

Camille hesitated. It was barely a breath, but Elise caught it.

“I worked for several houses after the war,” Camille said. “Chez Aubert, briefly. And I was at La Samaritaine’s workroom until it closed. But my best reference—” She paused again, and something flickered in her eyes. “Your brother. Pierre. He vouched for me. He worked here too, you know.”

The words landed like a physical blow to Elise’s chest. The air left her lungs.

“I don’t have a brother,” she said flatly.

Camille blinked. “But I—I remember him clearly. Pierre Moreau. He worked in the stockroom before the occupation. He was the one who told me about this position. We corresponded during the war, and he wrote that he’d returned to Paris in ’43. I assumed you were his sister. The name, you see.”

Elise’s hand moved instinctively to her apron pocket, where the silver thimble pressed against her hip. Her fingers closed around its cool weight.

“Pierre Moreau is dead,” she said. “He died in 1944. In Lyon.” She heard her own voice as if from a distance, flat and uninflected. “He was my brother. And he never worked in fashion. He was a printer’s apprentice.”

The silence stretched. Camille’s face drained of color.

“I must have been mistaken,” the woman whispered. “I’m sorry. I’ve confused him with someone else. Forgive me.”

She turned and was gone before Elise could respond, the delivery door swinging shut behind her.

Isabelle stood frozen. “Elise, I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“I don’t.” Elise turned back to the mannequin, her fingers finding the pins again. “Not anymore.”

The words were a door slamming. Isabelle took the hint and retreated to the office, but Elise could feel her curiosity through the wall like a draft.

Pierre had died of influenza in a Lyon boarding house, not in the war as so many others had. He’d been nineteen, sick and exhausted from a year of evading the STO labor drafts, and their father’s betrayal of the business had already sent the family into ruin. Elise had buried him alone, because their mother couldn’t bear to travel, and she had never spoken of him since.

The idea of Pierre working in this atelier, among these bolts of fabric and spools of thread, was so absurd it made her want to laugh. Pierre had no more interest in fashion than he had in opera. He’d wanted to be a journalist, to write about politics and injustice, not hemlines.

And yet—Camille had known the name. Moreau. Pierre. Known that Elise was his sister.

From her apron pocket, the thimble seemed to grow warmer.

Elise shook herself and returned to the blue wool. The fitting was in thirty minutes, and the bodice still pulled at the shoulder.

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The model arrived on time, which was the only thing that went right.

Her name was Odette, and Julien had arranged her through an agency that handled showroom work. She was tall, with the sharp cheekbones and hollow cheeks that had become fashionable since Christian Dior’s New Look swept the city. She stood in the center of the workroom wearing the muslin toile Elise had draped yesterday, arms slightly lifted for inspection.

Elise circled her slowly, her stomach sinking.

The shoulders were wrong. The muslin pulled across Odette’s back in diagonal creases that no amount of pinning could ease. The dart placement—which had been perfect on the mannequin—sat a full centimeter too far inward, distorting the line of the bodice.

“She’s too narrow,” Elise murmured, more to herself than to anyone.

“I beg your pardon?” Odette said, her voice cool.

“Your frame. The mannequin was padded for a broader shoulder. The pattern doesn’t translate.” Elise pinched the fabric at Odette’s shoulder blade, frowning. “I’ll need to adjust the toile, perhaps re-drape the entire upper block.”

Julien appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. “Problem?”

Elise didn’t look at him. “The muslin needs reworking. It’s fine—I can do it tonight.”

“You don’t have tonight,” Julien said. “You have fittings scheduled for the next three days. The newspaper announced the showing; invitations go out Wednesday. If the first garment isn’t wearable by the end of the week, we have no collection.”

Elise turned on him, pins still clutched in her fist. “Do you think I don’t know the timeline? I’m the one who promised six pieces in three weeks, remember? You were ready to sell the fixtures and close the doors.”

“And you’re the one who promised results,” Julien said evenly. “I’m just reminding you that promises have costs.”

Odette cleared her throat delicately. “Shall I… stay? Or is this something you need to discuss privately?”

Elise forced a breath through her teeth. “Stay. I’ll work with what I have.” She pulled the pins and let the muslin fall from Odette’s shoulders, catching it before it hit the floor.

“But we’ll need someone to fit the second toile as well,” she added, almost to herself. “I can’t afford to have the same problem twice.”

She moved to the cutting table and laid the muslin flat, her hands finding the seams. The puckering was obvious now—the bias cut at the underarm too aggressive, the seam allowance too narrow. She’d been rushing. The silver taffeta’s absence had thrown off her entire plan, forcing compromises in proportion and line.

“What we really need,” Elise said quietly, “is a proper tailor. Someone who’s done this for thirty years and doesn’t need to think. Someone who knows pattern drafting in his sleep.”

Isabelle appeared in the office doorway. “There was a tailor who worked for Marguerite Vasseur,” she said. “Before the war. He’s retired, but I think he’s still alive. Monsieur Aubert—he has a shop near the Palais Royal.”

Elise stopped. The name stirred something in her memory. Devaux had mentioned it too—a tailor who’d worked in the great houses before the occupation.

“Will he come back?” Elise asked.

“Only if you ask him well,” Isabelle said. “And from what I’ve heard, he’s particular. He doesn’t work for just anyone.”

Julien’s eyes narrowed. “Another expense we can’t afford.”

“I’ll convince him,” Elise said. She slipped her hand into her apron pocket, and her fingers brushed the thimble again. “I have something that might help.”

Isabelle tilted her head, her gaze sharpening on Elise’s pocket. But she said nothing.

Elise looked at the ruined muslin in her hands, at the thin winter light through the windows, at the cold reality of three weeks dissolving into days.

And somewhere in the back of her mind, Pierre’s face rose unbidden—not as he’d been in the hospital bed, gaunt and feverish, but as he’d been in childhood, laughing at some joke she couldn’t remember anymore.

A seamstress who claimed he’d worked here. A thimble that belonged to a vanished legend. A father who’d hidden Jewish families with borrowed fabric.

The threads were tangling, and Elise had no idea how to unravel them.