Groom's Rich Mother Had the 72-Year-Old Seamstress Arrested for Stealing Her Brooch — Then the Wedding Dress Tore 10 Minutes Before the Vows

Glass

Agnes put the brooch back in its velvet box and closed the lid.

"Thank you, Mrs. Whitmore. I know where it goes now. You should keep it with you until the wedding."

"I thought you needed it for the loop."

"I need the place, not the brooch. The place is marked." Agnes tapped the chalk on the muslin. "I'll build the loop into the bodice. You'll bring it the morning of, and I'll fix it on in two minutes."

Sloane tucked the box into her purse without another word. She did not seem to remember Agnes at all, and Agnes was not surprised. In 1988, Sloane had stood on the box by the window for two fittings and never once looked down at the woman with pins in her mouth.

Nicky changed out of the muslin and went to the bathroom to fix her face. Sloane gathered her keys. The three hundred-dollar bills were still on the corner of the table.

"Your money," Agnes said, and held them out.

Sloane took them, and Agnes followed her down the front steps to the sidewalk, where a white Range Rover sat half on the curb in front of Fiorella Dacosta's house across the street.

Agnes could have said nothing. She thought about that later, many times. She could have let a rich woman's heirloom be whatever it was and minded her own hems.

But she had been raised by a mother who said that if you saw a man's coat on fire, you told him, even if he was a man you didn't like.

"Mrs. Whitmore," she said quietly. "A word, before you go."

Sloane turned with her key in her hand.

"The pearls on that brooch are glass," Agnes said. "The center stone, I'd want a jeweler to look at. But the pearls are glass. I'm sure of it."

Sloane's face did not move. That was the first thing Agnes noticed. Most people, told their fifty-thousand-dollar heirloom is fake, will gasp or argue or laugh. Sloane Whitmore simply stopped, like a clock somebody had put a finger on.

"I don't know what you think you saw," she said.

"I'm not saying anybody did anything wrong. Things go out for cleaning. Clasps get fixed. Somebody at a shop could have switched them years ago, and you'd never know." Agnes kept her voice low and even. "But you said it's insured. If it was me, I'd have the insurance man look at it before the wedding, while there's time. That's all."

"Have you said this to Nicoletta?"

"No."

"Don't." Sloane opened her car door. Her voice was perfectly pleasant. "You've been working with costume beads for fifty years, Mrs. Ferraro. I imagine everything looks like glass to you."

She drove off. The Range Rover's back tire rolled over the curb going down and left a black smear on the granite.

Agnes stood on the sidewalk until Nicky came out to find her.

"What did she say to you?"

"Nothing worth repeating," Agnes said, which was true.

The next week, things began to slide.

On Tuesday, the wedding planner, a brisk young woman named Kendall Ashgrove, called to ask for "a photo of the gown in progress, for Mrs. Whitmore's peace of mind." Agnes sent one. On Wednesday Kendall called again to ask what kind of silk it was, and what the silk cost per yard, and whether Agnes carried any kind of insurance on her workroom. Agnes said the workroom was a kitchen, and the kitchen was insured the way kitchens are.

On Thursday Sloane drove Nicky to Boston.

"She said it was just to look," Nicky said that night. She sat at the kitchen table in her scrubs, after a twelve-hour shift in the pediatric ICU at Hasbro Children's, too tired to take her shoes off. "She said every girl deserves to try on a real gown once. And then she bought one."

"Bought one."

"Fourteen thousand five hundred dollars. It's hanging in her front closet in Barrington. As a backup. In case." Nicky laughed in a way that had no laugh in it. "In case of what, Agnes? In case you drop dead? In case I come to my senses?"

Agnes poured her a glass of milk, because some things do not change when a girl turns twenty-nine.

"And Rhys?"

"Rhys says his mother is his mother, and she'll calm down after the wedding." Nicky rubbed her eyes. "He loves you, you know. He thinks your dress is going to be the most beautiful thing anybody's seen. He just doesn't know how to stand in front of her. Nobody in that family does."

Agnes sat down across from her. On the table between them was the old blue cookie tin where Agnes kept her buttons, four thousand of them, collected over fifty years from every coat and dress and christening gown that had passed through the house.

"Nicky," she said. "What else did she say?"

Nicky didn't answer right away. She picked a button out of the tin, a little mother-of-pearl one, and turned it over.

"She asked me some questions about you," she said finally. "In the car."

"What kind of questions?"

"Whether you have money trouble. Whether you live on Social Security. Whether you'd ever been in trouble." Nicky looked up. "She asked if you'd ever had any problems with the police."