The Seamstress | La Costurera
"A master seamstress creates a wedding dress and falls for the bride who doesn't want to marry the groom"
The Seamstress
La Costurera
She came to me for a wedding dress. She left with something else entirely.
"I want something traditional," she said at our first fitting. "My fiancé likes traditional."
"And what do you like?"
"Does it matter?"
Her name was Paulina, and she looked like she was walking toward an execution, not a wedding.
"You don't seem happy," I observed during our third appointment.
"I'm fine."
"Your body tells a different story." I adjusted the bodice. "Every time we talk about the wedding, you tense here." I touched her shoulder. "And here." Her lower back.
"You read bodies?"
"I dress them. It's the same thing."
She started telling me things during fittings. How she'd dated him since college. How her family expected this. How the wedding had grown from small to enormous without her input.
"Do you love him?" I asked.
"I'm supposed to."
"That's not an answer."
The dress became my masterpiece. Weeks of work, every stitch made with her body in mind. She was beautiful in it—devastating.
"You're crying," I said when she saw herself in the mirror.
"Happy tears."
"Those aren't happy tears."
She broke down. Told me everything. The pressure, the expectations, the feeling of drowning in someone else's life.
"Don't marry him," I said.
"What?"
"Don't marry someone who makes you cry in a wedding dress."
"It's not that simple."
"Love is always that simple. The circumstances are complicated. The love shouldn't be."
She didn't marry him. The dress hung in my shop for months—a monument to a wedding that never happened.
Then she came back.
"I want to buy the dress," she said.
"For what?"
"For the wedding I actually want."
"Who's the lucky person?" I asked.
"I'm hoping you'll tell me."
The shop went quiet. Just us and the dress and a question that changed everything.
"I don't date clients," I said.
"I'm not a client anymore. The wedding was canceled."
I altered the dress. Made it less traditional. Made it ours.
"Are you sure?" I asked before our courthouse wedding.
"I've never been more sure of anything. You saw me when no one else did. You told me the truth when everyone lied."
"I just read bodies."
"You read mine perfectly."
The seamstress—where fitting clothes becomes fitting lives, and the right dress finds the right love.