“What has happened to it,” I said.
“The cuffs are being let out,” my mother said. “Rosa is working on it.”
“The embroidered cuffs.”
“She’s being very careful.”
“Have they cut anything.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“There was a small section that needed to be taken apart to resize.”
I got out of the car. I stood in the parking garage. Someone walked past me and I didn’t look at them. I was calculating, in the technical designer part of my brain that never really turns off, what “a small section that needed to be taken apart to resize” actually means in relation to silk thread botanical embroidery that I had stitched by hand over nine months.
It means a cut. Once you cut embroidered threads at a seam line, you cannot put them back. The threads loosen. The motif partially unravels at the edge. You can stabilize it, you can do a repair, but you cannot make it what it was before. The information is gone from the fabric. The specific hours I spent on that particular inch of cuff are gone with it.
I went to work. I don’t remember much about that day.
## That Evening
Ben was home when I got there. I told him the whole thing, standing in the kitchen, and to his credit he listened to all of it before he said anything.
“Okay,” he said, when I was done. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to get the dress back.”