INTRODUCTORY NOVELLA BEFORE BOOK 1
One Button Short
The Cutting Room Lost and Found
Forty buttons. One empty space. A new job coming apart at the seams.
After twenty-five years in alterations, Inez Barral knows how to make clothes fit. Finding her own place at Spindle Street School of Fashion is proving harder. Her new lending counter has a form for everything—except the judgement she has spent a lifetime learning.
Then a donor’s treasured pink moth button disappears while being prepared for a window display. Student Kit Leung has a remarkably similar button on their cuff. For some people, that is all the evidence they need.
Inez is not convinced. With head of safety Gloria Kent insisting she write everything down, and a notions shop across the street offering more than sewing supplies, she begins tracing the button’s journey. But knowing a stitch from a slip-up is one thing. Learning when to ask a question instead of making an accusation is quite another.
As neighbours gather around a new mending table, can Inez recover the missing treasure and stop a small loss from doing lasting harm?
Read the opening ↘A FIRST LOOK INSIDE
Chapter One
The lending counter at Spindle Street School of Fashion had a form for everything except the thing Inez Barral was good at.
She laid them out on the counter at half past eight, after the steel grille had gone up with a shriek and stuck at knee height and then, after some negotiation, gone the rest of the way. There was a white form for borrowing and a yellow one for returning. There was a green one for returning late and a blue one for returning damaged, and a pink one, which she held up to the window to read, headed LOSS OF ITEM (BORROWER-REPORTED). Every one of them had boxes. Name, student number, item code, condition out, condition in.
None of them had a box where she could write this hem has been let down twice and will not take a third time without showing. That was the sort of thing she knew by looking. It was, she had assumed, the reason they had hired her.
Taped to the cash drawer was a welcome note on cream card. Inez, welcome to the counter! We’re so glad to have your hands. H. Voss, Director of Collections.
She read it twice, and the second time something under her breastbone let go a little. It was a nice note, and she folded it into her apron pocket, where it crackled every time she leaned over to reach the low pigeonholes, which was often.
For twenty-five years Inez had made other people’s clothes fit, first in a back room on West 36th Street and then in a better back room on Madison. On Monday the school had put her in charge of the things it lent. Anything that left the building crossed this counter first, which she had now been told three times. She had also been shown the RETURNED stamp, twice, by a work-study student who moved very fast. She could not find the stamp, and she could feel the warmth of that climbing the back of her neck, as if the work-study student were still standing there with his watch.
End of excerpt