Size Six Only

The sales assistant looked me up and down the way you'd assess a stain on a sofa, then delivered the sentence with a smile so polished it could have cut glass.

"I'm afraid the designer pieces only run to a size six. There's a plus-size shop two blocks down — they'll have something more… suitable."

I kept my face pleasant. I've had a lot of practice at that particular smile. "Suitable," I repeated. "For a dress. Not, say, a horse."

Her smile flickered. Behind me, Sophia made a sound like a kettle deciding whether to boil.

We were in the kind of boutique where the air smelled of lilies and money, where the hangers were spaced a precise three centimetres apart and a single gown cost more than my mother's car. I had come here because Tyler had told me to wear a dress — no details, no explanation, just that infuriating certainty of his — and because Sophia had insisted that if I was going to be dragged to some mystery event, I would at least look like I'd chosen to be there.

Now I stood in a corridor of silk I wasn't allowed to touch, being politely shown the door.

"Two blocks," the assistant added, helpfully. "They're very good with… curves."

"Curves," Sophia said, stepping forward. "She's not a road, Amelia."

The assistant's name badge said AMELIA in letters that had never once been shouted at. She drew breath to reply, and at that exact moment the boutique door swung open and the temperature of the room dropped by several degrees.

I knew the sound of that stride before I saw him. I'd heard it in the east wing corridor, in the garden at midnight, in my own head at three in the morning when I couldn't sleep for wanting to hear it again. But the man who walked in wasn't William.

He was older — silver at the temples, a coat that had been cut for him and no one else, the kind of face that had signed things that mattered. Two men in dark suits peeled off to flank the entrance. The assistant's whole body changed shape, shoulders pulling back, smile snapping into position.

"Mr. Kingsley," she said. "We weren't expecting—"

"My fault entirely. I was early for a meeting with William, and I thought I'd step in." He glanced around the shop, then at Sophia, and his face warmed. "Miss Duca. Your brother's kept me waiting in worse places than this, I'll say that much."

Then his gaze landed on me, and on Amelia's hand still half-raised in the direction of the door.

"Is there a problem?"

"None at all, sir. I was just explaining to the young lady that—"

"She was explaining," Sophia said sweetly, "that Nicole isn't thin enough to spend money here."

The silence that followed had weight. Mr. Kingsley looked at Amelia for a long, unhurried moment, the way you'd look at a ledger that didn't balance.

"Amelia," he said. "How long have you worked for this house?"

"Four years, sir."

"And in four years, has anyone ever taught you that the customer decides what suits her, and you decide only whether we have it in stock?"

Amelia's mouth opened and closed.

"Fetch the manager."

She went. She went quickly, and she didn't look back at me, and I found I couldn't enjoy it. There's no victory in watching someone be small. I know what that feels like from the inside.

The manager arrived in under a minute — a wiry man with the hunted eyes of someone who has just heard his own name over a tannoy. Mr. Kingsley didn't raise his voice. That was the worst part. He simply explained, in the tone of a man closing an account, that a member of his staff had insulted a guest of the Duca family, and that he would not be keeping her on.

"Sir, if I might—"

"You might not." He turned to me, and the coldness went out of him like a light switching off. "I apologise. That should never have happened in a shop bearing my name."

Amelia left with her coat over her arm and her chin up, and I stood there feeling sick and grateful in the same breath.

The manager, eager to bleed goodwill, produced something he'd been saving for a private unveiling — a gown in deep forest green, unfinished in the hem, not yet photographed for anyone. "It's a sample," he said. "One of one. If the young lady would permit us to fit it…"

The fitting room was the size of my old bedroom. Silk whispered over my shoulders, cool and heavier than I expected, and when the assistant — a different one, soft-spoken, who pinned the hem without ever once looking at my body like it was a problem to be solved — stepped back, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror.

The girl in the glass had a waist. She had shoulders. The green made her eyes look like something worth writing about, and for one unbearable second I didn't recognise her, and then I did, and my throat closed.

*This is what he'd see,* I thought. *If he ever saw me properly.*

The curtain rings scraped back.

William stood in the doorway of the fitting area, and the two shop assistants behind him had gone the colour of the unpainted walls. He didn't seem to notice them. He was looking at me, and his face — that closed, carved face that half the city was afraid of — had gone strangely still.

"Nicole."

"You're not supposed to be back here."

"I was meeting Kingsley. He said my sister was in the shop." A pause. "He didn't mention you'd be wearing that."

My face burned. "It's not finished."

"It's finished enough." He stepped closer, and the assistants melted away like they'd been given a signal I hadn't heard. "There's a charity gala on Saturday. The Ainsworth Foundation. I'm expected to attend, and I'm expected to be bored." His grey eyes didn't move from mine. "Come with me."

The word *no* was already in my mouth. It's always there. It lives there.

"I can't."

"You can."

"William—"

"Nicole." He said my name like it was the whole argument. "I'm asking."

And that was the problem, wasn't it? Not the gown, not the shop, not the assistant with her size six and her two blocks. Him. Standing in a fitting room he had no business being in, asking me to walk into a room full of people who would look at me exactly the way Amelia had — and asking as though he couldn't imagine the answer being anything but yes.

Sophia's head appeared around the curtain. "Oh, *finally*." She took in the gown, then William, then me, and grinned like a cat with a plan. "Say yes. Please say yes. My brother is the most socially acidic man in London — he once made a duchess cry over the canapés. If you don't come, I'll have to sit next to him all night, and I've already done my hair."

"Sophia."

"Also," she added, "he's boring. Deeply, tragically boring. You'd be doing a public service."

William looked at his sister with the expression of a man reconsidering a bloodline.

I thought about the messages I'd deleted. The voice notes I'd sent at midnight, the ones where I'd said things I'd never say out loud, to a man who'd never seen my face. I thought about the fact that he was standing three feet away, and he still didn't know he was looking at her.

*Yes* would be a lie I couldn't take back.

*No* would be a door I couldn't reopen.

"All right," I heard myself say.

William's mouth curved — barely, but it curved — and something in my chest cracked open a little wider.