Turn 6 of 13

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

You stand before the wardrobe with both hands gloved now, the rose blouse half-fastened across your chest, and you feel the rightness of this partial state. The transformation has begun on both sides, no longer asymmetrical, and your body has learned something about patience that your mind is only now catching up to.

Your phone has been silent for two days. Ronan's absence feels deliberate, a withdrawal that troubles you more than his warnings did. You find yourself studying the photograph of Vivienne more carefully, searching her face for some sign of what she became, whether she chose it or was chosen. Her gloved hands in the picture are folded exactly as yours rest now, and you wonder if she stood in this same light, wearing these same gloves, feeling this same uncertainty about whether to continue.

The ivory slip hangs in the wardrobe's centre, and you let yourself look at it directly for the first time. It is simpler than the other garments, less adorned, and that simplicity feels like a destination. The silk would fall straight from shoulder to knee without seam or fastening, and you understand suddenly that it is the last thing, the thing that completes what the gloves and blouse have prepared. You are not ready for it. The knowledge sits in you like calm water.

You reach instead for a narrow belt of braided silk, the colour of old gold, that hangs beside the slip. It is small enough to seem safe, to seem like continuation rather than conclusion. You thread it through the loops of the blouse, which you now see were always meant to carry it, and you fasten it at your waist with hands that move with growing certainty. The blouse still does not close fully, but it holds its shape differently now, gathered and purposeful, and when you turn before the mirror you see a silhouette emerging that is neither quite yours nor quite Vivienne's.

Your father calls as you are studying this stranger in the glass. You answer without thinking.

"I'm coming to the house," Ronan says. No greeting, no preamble.

"Tomorrow. Don't be wearing anything of hers when I arrive." He ends the call before you can respond, and you stand with the phone dead in your gloved hand, understanding that something has shifted in him, some deadline reached. The belt at your waist feels suddenly like a commitment, a visible answer to a question he has not asked directly, and you know you will not remove it before he comes.