Chapter 6: Nightjar

I told my chief of staff to stall.

Tell him the owner is abroad and will meet him in two weeks, I typed, on the fire stairs, with Sean's chickpea smell drifting out of the kitchen.

My chief of staff wrote back: And the ad slots?

I typed back: Stay off his network. All of it.

Then I went inside and ate dinner.

Sean had made a stew with chickpeas and lemon.

Cal said he could take it or leave it, and then ate three bowls.

Lou said it was the best thing he had eaten all week.

Sean went quiet and pleased, and cleared the table so fast it wobbled.

After supper I sat on the floor of my closet and took out my sketchbooks.

The rubber band around the sketchbooks had survived the sidewalk.

I had six of them, full of coats and dresses and a hundred ways to hang a collar.

I had been drawing since I was nine.

At fourteen I had learned to cut a pattern from library books and an old sewing machine in the attic.

At fifteen I had put my first coat on the internet under a name that was not mine.

The name was Nightjar.

It was a small label.

It sold out in nine minutes every time.

I had never told anybody, because nobody in my family would have taken it seriously.

Someone knocked on the door frame.

"Hey," Sean said. "You got a sec?"

"Sure."

He looked at the sketchbooks, and then at the half-finished sleeve on my knee.

"Whoa," he said. "You sew."

"A little."

"That's not a little." He crouched. "That's a welt pocket."

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