Small black linework mark on the side torso

Near the side seam, under a fold where the cloth gathered at the waist, she found a line of black thread, fine as a hair, running through the lining in a stitch she did not recognise. It was not a repair. It was a marking stitch, the kind her grandmother used to tack a hem so a child could find the right side in the dark. It ran a short way, stopped, then picked up again at a sharper angle, as though whoever made it had paused to decide something.

She spent an hour with a magnifier and her tea going cold, tracing it. Three stitches, a gap, then a knot. Her apprentice, Priya, leaned over her shoulder and said it looked like a stave of music with the notes missing. Ada said nothing. She thought of the letter in her mother's button tin, a list of directions to a house in Hebden Bridge that neither of them had ever visited.

She took the strap in a quarter inch, as asked. Then, because the note had said nothing else, she unpicked the knot, read the thread and sewed it back in the same place, so the line would still be there for anyone who came looking. The gown went out on Thursday, sparkling and exact, and nobody in the hall ever noticed the line at all.