“Mom.” I’d thought about what I wanted to say. “I’m going to tell you some things and I’m not asking you to respond to them right now. I’m asking you to listen.”
Pause. “Okay.”
“The dress is mine. I made it. I stored it at your house temporarily with a clear agreement that it was temporary. I gave Elise permission to look at it for inspiration, and I sent you a text that said exactly that. I did not give you permission to offer it to her, and I did not agree to any of this.”
“I know you feel that way.”
“I’m not describing how I feel. I’m describing what happened.”
She was quiet.
“I’m also not going to finish the alterations,” I said. “And I want you to understand why — not because I’m trying to punish you, but because what you’re asking is for me to use my labor to complete a transformation of my own work that I never agreed to and that has already damaged it. That’s not something I’m able to do.”
“The damage is a small thing.”
“The damage is two inches of hand embroidery that I spent hours on, in a keepsake I will have for the rest of my life. It is not small to me.”
Silence.
“Elise needs a dress,” my mother said, and her voice had shifted. Not defensive now. Smaller. Something I recognized as real distress. “She loves this one. She’s been planning around it.”
“I understand that. And I’m genuinely sorry she’s in that position, because it isn’t fair to her. But the person who put her in that position was you, not me.”