“Hazel. Open the door. Please.”
“I’m not going to prom, Mom.”
“Honey, we can find something. We can sew something ourselves, we can—”
“Mom. Stop.” Her voice sounded exhausted. “I’m not going. Please just stop trying.”
I pressed my forehead against the wood and cried as quietly as I could.
I had already buried one child.
Now it felt as though the second was slipping away beneath the crack under the door, and I had no idea how to hold on.
I sat there until my legs went numb. Until the hallway light changed. Until time no longer seemed to matter.
Eli’s Plan
Several days later, someone knocked at the front door.
I opened it wearing yesterday’s clothes.
Eli stood on the porch holding a small notebook against his chest. He looked nervous. But he also looked determined.
That was new.
“Mrs. Mave. Can I talk to you out here?”
I stepped outside and closed the door behind me.
“Is Hazel okay? Did she text you?”
“No, ma’am.” He took a breath. “I need her measurements.”
“Eli, what—”
“Prom is in two weeks. I can do this. I know how that sounds. But I need you to trust me. And I need you not to tell her anything. Not one word.”
I stared at him.
Seventeen years old. Bitten fingernails. Holding a notebook as though it were a legal contract.
“Eli, you have never made a dress like this in your life.”
“No, ma’am. I haven’t.”
“Then how—”
“I just need you to say yes.”
I almost refused. I had every reason to.
But there was something in his eyes that felt steadier than anything I had seen in a year.
“Yes,” I whispered.
That night I stood at my kitchen window and watched the light in Eli’s bedroom burn long after three in the morning.
I wondered what I had just agreed to.
The Light in the Window
Soon, that light became my clock.
Midnight. Two o’clock. Three.
While the neighborhood slept, Eli kept working.
On the third day, his mother called.
“Mave, his fingers are sore,” she said. “I wrapped them in cold bandages, and he unwrapped them. He missed a chemistry test.”
“Should I stop him?”
“I don’t think anything could,” she said quietly. “He’s been at that machine since he could reach the pedal. You know that.”
I did know.
I remembered watching her hem curtains while six-year-old Eli handed her pins from a magnetic dish and asked why thread had numbers. At ten, he filled the margins of spelling homework with dress sketches. At thirteen, he altered his own jackets on her old Singer machine.
After hanging up, I rested my forehead against the cool glass.
Two weeks felt impossible. It also felt like a countdown toward another disappointment I would somehow have to absorb for my daughter.
Meanwhile, Hazel continued to sink.
She stopped coming downstairs for breakfast. She wore the same gray hoodie for three days. When I knocked on her door, she answered in single syllables.
And I kept lying.
“I’m just running errands,” I would say.
In reality, I was buying ivory silk thread from the craft store using shopping lists Eli texted me.
Discovering the Real Enemy
On the fourth day, I went into Hazel’s room to change her laundry.
Under her bed, I found another notebook.
A newer one. Sophomore year.
The handwriting was tighter. Angrier.
