I had six days to save my future, almost no money to do it, and a family that wanted me to fail.

By noon, the house was empty. Vanessa had taken Brianna to a boutique spa in downtown Charlotte to prepare her skin for the local press appearance, leaving behind a sink full of dirty smoothie glasses and the persistent scent of expensive hairspray.

I slipped down the stairs, every joint in my back aching from six hours hunched over my Singer machine. My hands were stained faintly crimson from the cheap dye in the thread I was using.

Before I could leave the house, I needed one thing from Vanessa’s private sanctuary: the industrial rotary cutter she kept locked in the craft room she never used. Vanessa liked having things—she owned an eight-hundred-dollar dress form she used exclusively as a hat rack, and sets of German-engineered titanium shears she bought just to say she owned them.

The craft room door was locked, of course. But Vanessa used an old interior mortise lock that yielded to a bobby pin within thirty seconds.

The room was pristine, smelling of cedar chips and unearned luxury. There, sitting on the mahogany worktable, was the dress form—and pinned to it was my sapphire gown.

Seeing it under the overhead LED lights knocked the breath out of me. Brianna had already tried to alter it. She had hacked off two inches from the delicate organza shoulder straps with kitchen scissors, trying to lower the neckline to show more cleavage. The raw silk was fraying wildly, weeping fine threads down the bodice. She had glued plastic rhinestones along the collar with a hot glue gun, leaving cloudy, yellowish globs that ruined the clean, botanical curve of my embroidery.

They hadn't just stolen it. They were murdering it.

A part of me wanted to tear it off the dummy, pack it into my bag, and run. But where? The police wouldn't care about a dispute over a dress between stepsisters; my father would back Vanessa to keep peace in his fragile, debt-ridden life, and Julian Thorne—the competition director—was Vanessa’s second cousin. If I showed up with a damaged gown and an accusation, I’d be disqualified before I reached the lobby.

*No,* I thought, gripping the edge of the mahogany table until my knuckles turned white. *Let her wear that mutilated thing. Let her stand under the high-definition lights of the Grand Ballroom with hot glue melting down her chest.*

I didn't touch the sapphire dress. Instead, I took Vanessa’s titanium rotary cutter, three packs of heavy-duty leather needles, and a spool of black industrial-strength upholstery nylon from her drawer. Then I grabbed my mother's leather jacket from my room, shoved everything into a canvas tote, and slipped out the back door into the humid North Carolina heat.

I walked three miles to the industrial district on the edge of town, where the old textile mills had either rotted into brick dust or been converted into budget warehouse outlets. My destination was a narrow, un-airconditioned basement shop called *Abernathy’s Mill Ends*.

The bell above the door gave a dull *clink*. The shop smelled of machine oil, dust, and decades of forgotten cotton. Behind the counter sat Mrs. Abernathy, a woman in her late seventies with hands like dried oak roots and eyes that missed nothing.

“You’re late, Carter,” she rasped, not looking up from a ledger she was balancing with a yellow pencil. “Scrap bins were cleared this morning. Whole bunch of students from the arts magnet picked it clean for their senior portfolios.”

“I don’t need the scrap bins, Mrs. Abernathy,” I said, setting my tote on the counter. “I need stiffening. Heavy-weight horsehair braid, or whatever you have that acts like it. And I have twenty-two dollars.”

The old woman peered over the rims of her glasses, her gaze drifting to my bruised wrist, then to the dark circles under my eyes, and finally to the way I held my canvas bag like it contained an organ meant for transplant.

“Twenty-two dollars won’t buy you three yards of proper horsehair, girl. Not with inflation, not in this shop.”

“Then what do you have that nobody wants?” I leaned across the counter. “Give me the salvage. The stuff that’s too stiff, too coarse, or dyed the wrong shade. Give me the rejects.”

Mrs. Abernathy stared at me for five long seconds. Then she grunted, pushed herself up from her stool, and limped toward the dark back room where the ceiling pipes sweat into plastic buckets.