I Made His Wife’s Dress Now I’ll Marry Another Chapter 22
“Paolo Bellini,” I said.
Julien didn’t ask for an explanation.
Fifteen years ago, Whitmore still had an old sample factory in New Jersey. One weekend, I snuck inside to practice on a sewing machine. A short in the wiring set a stack of interfacing in the aisle on fire.
Smoke sealed off the exit. The hem of my skirt got caught in the machine. I was too terrified to do anything but cry.
Paolo was the cutting supervisor back then. He sliced through my skirt with his shears, wrapped me in a fire blanket, and got me out through a back window. In the process, he inhaled too much smoke, and a falling metal frame crushed his right hand. He was never able to do fine cutting again.
After he was discharged, he gave me a sewing needle threaded with a thick red thread.
“If it won’t sew, cut it loose,” he’d told me. “No living person should get trapped by a piece of clothing.”
After the fire, the family wrote the accident off as equipment failure. They never admitted the aisle had been blocked with excess stock. Paolo refused to sign the settlement’s confidentiality clause, and his rehabilitation payments were delayed for half a year. My mother secretly paid one of the bills for him. That was probably why, years later, he was still willing to send word to me.
A few years after that, Grandfather fired him for exposing illegal subcontracting at the factory. I never saw him again.
“Are you going?” Julien asked.
“Yes. But first, the hospital has to confirm this exchange chain comes with no conditions.”