“Gave,” I said. “Past tense. Transfer of possession. Without asking me.”
He looked at the table for a moment. “And now she wants you to do the alterations.”
“Yes.”
He picked his fork back up. “Okay,” he said, which is not nothing. It means: I understand why you’re upset. I’m not going to minimize it. And I’m also not going to make it worse by flying off the handle on your behalf before you’ve figured out what you want to do.
That is roughly the version of Ben I married. He has his flaws, and I’ll get to some of them, but that particular quality — the capacity to say “okay” and mean it as a form of witness — is one I have come to depend on in ways I didn’t know I needed when we got married.
## The Dress Itself
I started the dress in January of the year Ben and I got engaged, which means I started it before I was engaged, because I had been carrying the design in my head for years before that.
I work as a technical designer at a small apparel company. I’ve been there eight years. My job is translating design sketches into construction packages — graded specs, seam allowances, stitch counts, interlining placement. I know garments from the inside out. I know where they go wrong and why. I know the difference between something that looks beautiful on a hanger and something that actually works on a body.
For my own dress, I wanted both.