Page 47 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
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The end.
Chapter Nineteen
Phoebe wasn’t sure if Sophy was going to show up for work the next day. In fact, she hoped that she wouldn’t, but she was there on time, face looking like a bulldog chewing on a slow worm, as Mildred, most confusingly, used to say.
‘I’m back on managerial duties,’ Phoebe announced once everyone, even Anita eventually, was assembled. ‘Normal service has been resumed, except Anita if you keep being late, Iwilldock it from your wages.’
She still wasn’t any closer to figuring out how that could be done, but Anita didn’t know that and Phoebe needed to establish her absolute authority once more.
Maybe that was why Bea raised her hand. ‘Permission to speak.’
Phoebe gave a gracious nod of her head. ‘Permission granted.’
‘I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just a member of staff, but I do manage the shop’s socials . . .’
‘And you do a very good job,’ Phoebe said because she wasn’t just there for the nasty things in life like punishing Anita for her poor timekeeping or crushing Sophy’s ridiculous notions. When someone was worthy of praise, she was happy to give it.
‘That video that someone took of you yesterday, it’s doing really big numbers, so like, maybe, this is just a suggestion – I wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do – but perhaps youbeing on the shop floor isn’t a great idea,’ Bea said, with a cringing smile. She held out her phone to Phoebe, who took it gingerly.
She’d already seen it yesterday and she really didn’t want to rewatch herself in all her full-nostrilled glory reading the riot act to Sophy, Anita and Bea. But, even with a night to sleep on it, though Phoebe hadn’t done much sleeping but kept reliving the scene with Freddy that had followed, she still thought they deserved all her fury. But taken out of context by . . . Phoebe checked the numbers with a jittery little heart flip . . . over fifty thousand people on TikTok, she just came across as slightly demented.
Actually, a lot demented.
‘I have quite a lot of things to do in the atelier, anyway,’ Phoebe said, even though she didn’t. She clapped her hands. ‘Now, let’s get to work. Please don’t get any ideas about rearranging the dresses according to decades or fabrication.’
There was a stony silence. Sophy’s features were set so tight that it looked painful. Cress wouldn’t make eye contact with Phoebe. Anita was sullen and sulky, but that was just a normal Tuesday morning for Anita, and Bea still looked as if she wished the floor would swallow her up.
It set the tone for the rest of the day.
The atmosphere in the shop was horrible. Despite whatsomepeople thought, Phoebe wasn’t without any feeling. She didn’t like working under these conditions but everything she’d done was in the best interests of the dresses. It always was.
So, she was happy to spend the day in the atelier. It helped that she had a bride come in for a first fitting, but even she seemed to pick up on the fact that the relations between Phoebe and Cress were as frosty as the ground first thing on these November mornings.
Once the bride had gone, Cress stalked off back to her workroom (Phoebe hadn’t even known that Cress knew how to stalk) and Phoebe was left to do an inventory of the designer dress room, not that it really needed inventorying.
Usually the dresses calmed her but when Phoebe wasn’t thinking about how everyone she worked with hated her, and how strangers on the internet who didn’t even know her hated her, she thought about how Freddy hated her.
But before he’d hated her, apparently, he’d loved her. Not that he’d told Phoebe that and even if he had, she wouldn’t have known what to do with the information.
Certainly, she’d never done anything to make Freddy love her. On the contrary, she knew she was hard work for very little reward and she often wondered why Freddy had stuck around for as long as he had.
But even if it wasn’t love, what she and Freddy were . . . had been . . . nice. Phoebe had never had time for relationships before Freddy. She couldn’t really see the point of them but somehow Freddy had just fitted into her life. Probably because he had the patience of a saint. That was what Johnno always said about Freddy, because if Phoebe was high maintenance then Johnno was . . . beyond even high maintenance.
He lived his life in a state of chaos. Missed appointments, lost weekends, the time that he’d been on his way to the bank with a week’s takings and had left them on a park bench. Freddy had been there to sort it all out.
Which was why Johnno had always said that Freddy had the ‘patience of a cathedral full of saints. You’ve got a good one there.’
‘I haven’t got anything,’ Phoebe had said. ‘I don’t have Freddy and he certainly doesn’t have me. People don’t belong to each other.’
‘Whatever you say, kiddo.’ Johnno had grinned and that had been the end of that.
And now it was the end of Freddy and Phoebe. It had been a whole day since she last saw him and she was going to have to get used to days, weeks, months, without him.
Maybe, in time, they’d be able to have some kind of working relationship but right now, when Phoebe thought of how Freddy had looked at her the day before, his hands shoved in his pockets, his eyes and voice cold, it made her shiver.
This unhappy train of thought was completely derailed by a terrible sound.
