The Editor in Chief – Part 1: The Fitting Room

The atelier was silent: mannequins in a row like pale sentries, bolts of silk on every shelf, a long mirror, a rail of half-finished gowns. Cassandra had sent everyone home at eight and ordered a pot of black coffee to be left on the cutting table.

She was forty-six, editor-in-chief of a glossy magazine, cool and immaculate, with a famous raised eyebrow. He was thirty-four, her husband and her former assistant, who had admitted one night, in the dark, that the raised eyebrow had been the beginning of everything for him.

At the cutting table she placed a sheet of cream stationery between them. House Rules. His limits and hers: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, no photographs, no one else. The word was Retake.

"Say it."

"Retake."

"If you say it, I put down the pins. We have coffee."

"Yes, Madame."

"Not yet." She slipped on a long black coat, a pair of tinted glasses and a ring of silver pins on her wrist, and her whole face changed. Her voice dropped cool and clipped. "Pierre. The feature you delivered was unacceptable."

"I'm sorry, Madame."

"You will be." She pointed to a low podium in front of the mirror. "Stand there. Arms out. Do not look at me. Look at yourself."

He stood on the podium, arms wide, facing the long glass. She walked a slow circle with a measuring tape trailing from her hand. She adjusted his shoulders with a fingertip. She tilted his head a quarter inch. She said nothing at all, and he watched himself in the mirror and saw a man at ease for the first time in a month.

"Are you content?" she asked.

"Content, Madame."

"Good. We shall begin the fitting."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Final Cut.