Read Chapter 8: The Missing Model

The morning of the press showing arrived with a sky the color of dirty linen, and Odette did not come.

Elise stood in the fitting room at seven, the midnight blue gowns hanging in a row like soldiers awaiting inspection. The champagne silk caught the weak light. The nipped-waist jacket—her triumph, her gamble—sat on its mannequin like a promise. She had pinned the hem of the final skirt herself at two in the morning, hands steady despite the exhaustion that clawed at her edges.

At eight, she sent Isabelle to Odette's pension.

At nine, Isabelle returned alone, face pale. "Her room is empty. The landlady says she left three days ago. Paid through the end of the month, but didn't say where she was going."

"Three days?" Elise's voice came out sharp. "She fitted perfectly on Tuesday. She was here Wednesday for the final adjustment. She said—" She stopped. Odette had said very little, actually. Had smiled, nodded, turned when asked to turn. Elise had been so consumed by the seams, by the drape of fabric over bone, that she hadn't asked a single question about the woman wearing her work.

Julien appeared in the doorway, the morning paper folded under his arm. "Models are like cats," he said. "They wander."

"She didn't wander," Elise said. "She disappeared."

He raised an eyebrow. "Semantics. The showing is tomorrow. We need a body that fits the samples. I have a client—Madame Delacroix's youngest. Similar frame. She's done small presentations for her mother's charities. She could learn the walk in an afternoon."

Elise turned to face him fully. "You want to put a banker's daughter who models for charity in front of the press to sell a collection that is supposed to revive the house of Vasseur?"

"I want to put someone in the clothes," Julien said, and his voice carried an edge she hadn't heard before. "We have the loan. We have the fabrics. We have the deadline. What we don't have is a runway model. Ideals don't drape, Elise. Bodies do."

"The fitting failed because Odette's frame was different from the muslin. We adjusted the patterns to her. Another body means another round of adjustments we don't have time for."

"Then we pin her into the clothes and pray."

Elise's jaw tightened. She would not pray. She had stopped praying in Lyon, in the winter of '43, when the letters from Pierre stopped coming and her mother had knelt at the kitchen table, rosary beads clicking like hail on glass, and God had not answered.

"If you want to sell the house to Clarisse by default," she said, "keep talking about charity models and pinned hems."

Julien's eyes flickered. Something passed across his face—not anger, exactly. Recognition. He opened his mouth, closed it, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked like a man who was not sure of his next move.

Isabelle cleared her throat. "I found something." She held out a small leather suitcase, scuffed at the corners, the clasp tarnished. "Behind the salon. In the storage alcove where we keep the old display busts. It was wedged between them, half hidden."

Elise took the suitcase. It was surprisingly heavy. She set it on the cutting table and worked the clasp open. Inside: a worn gray cardigan. A toothbrush in a leather case. A photograph of a young man in uniform, smiling crookedly at the camera. A tube of lipstick, mostly used. And beneath it all, a folded sheet of paper, creased so deeply it threatened to split along the folds.

She unfolded it. The handwriting was neat, almost schoolgirlish:

*If I am found, tell Marc that I kept the promise. Tell him the packages reached Lyon. All of them. Tell him I have no regrets.*

*— O.*

Elise read it twice. Then a third time, the words settling into her like stones into water.

Lyon. Packages. The Resistance moved people and documents through Lyon. Through her brother's city. Through the city where Pierre had died—or hadn't died, according to Camille Roche, who had claimed to know Pierre at the atelier, which was impossible. Everything was impossible. Everything was a thread she couldn't follow to its end.

"This changes things," she said quietly.

Julien stepped closer, reading over her shoulder. His breath caught. When he spoke, his voice was different. Softer. Almost human. "If she was Resistance, and someone is looking for her—"

"Then she's hiding," Elise said. "And if she's hiding, she didn't disappear out of spite or laziness. She disappeared because she had to. And if she's sick or hurt or alone somewhere—" She shut the suitcase. "I'm going to find her."

"You don't know where she went."

"No." Elise grabbed her coat from the hook by the door. "But she's a woman with Resistance connections who needs to disappear in Paris without being noticed. There are only so many places that will take someone like that without questions."

Isabelle's eyes widened. "Les Halles. The flophouses near the market. They take anyone, no questions asked."

Julien stepped into her path. "The showing is tomorrow. If you chase ghosts through the worst district in Paris, you risk everything we've built."

Elise looked at him. The unfinished jacket gleamed on its mannequin behind him, silver-threaded memories and a new silhouette that promised the future. The bank's loan. Monsieur Aubert's skill. Her father's debt. The weight of the thimble in her pocket.

"If I don't chase her," she said, "then what exactly have we built?"

She pushed past him, out into the gray Paris morning, the suitcase heavy in her hand.