The New Lock Clicked While My Blue Thread Waited Inside

The key stopped halfway into the lock. I tried it once more, then looked through the glass at my own kettle.

Petra stood beside it, pouring tea into my cup.

I knocked.

She opened the door as far as the chain allowed.

“We need a cleaner division of duties, Simone.”

“Then let me in. We can write one.”

“I already did.”

At fifty-two, I had brown skin, gray curls cut close at the sides, and a small white scar across my left thumb. I was a theatrical wigmaker, and that scar came from a ventilating needle I had dropped twenty years before.

I remembered clients by their hairlines. A widow's peak brought back a tenor. A low, square brow brought back a woman who played kings. Names sometimes slipped away. The places where lace had to disappear never did.

I was a mixed-race Black and white American woman, born in Connecticut. My parents had helped carry the first shelves into this room. I had never thought I would need to prove I belonged behind its door.

Behind Petra, our two apprentices stood at the worktable.

“Morning, Lara,” I said. “Ben.”

Ben looked down.

Petra Novak was a slim woman with a sharp blond bob, pale skin, and red glasses she wore on a chain. She was forty-eight, Czech American, and good at standing where a camera would find her.

Three years earlier, that had seemed useful. I could knot six hairs through lace finer than a screen door. Petra could get a theater manager to answer an email.

We had formed Ellis-Novak Wig Works LLC in New London. Half hers, half mine.

“Tell them what you told me,” Lara said quietly.

Petra lifted her chin.

“Simone handled washing and upkeep. I'm responsible for the artistic business.”

Ben's face went pink.

I looked past him at the shelves.

Eighty-four fitted wig blocks waited there. Some were carved wood. Most were cork under pale cloth. Each held the shape of a particular head, with padding built up by hand. Blue cotton thread secured every number tag.

I always tied the knot at the back.

“You told them I was the woman who washed the hair?” I asked.

“There is dignity in care work.”

“There is. You should try doing some.”

She pushed a folded page through the gap.

It was headed INTERNAL ROLE ADJUSTMENT. Under my name, she had typed Part-Time Maintenance Contractor.

“Where is my signature?”

“This is notice.”

“Where is the member vote?”

“You can't keep stopping growth over little forms.”

A truck rattled toward the ferry docks. Wind came up from the Thames and lifted the corner of her notice. I held it flat against the door.

“Keep the blocks dry,” I said.

She laughed.

“They're in my shop.”

There it was. Not our shop. Hers.

I put the notice in my bag and walked away before she could see my hand shake.

At home, I did not call a locksmith. I took a gray document box from the top of my coat closet.

It held the papers I never stored near rinse water.

The oldest receipt showed $27,600, paid in 2016 to June Haskell, a retired wigmaker in Norwich. Her eighty-four fitted blocks had filled my borrowed van. I had sold my small sailboat and emptied most of my savings to buy them.

June had watched me tie blue thread around the tags.

“Why that color?” she had asked.

“I can find it when a black thread falls on the bench.”

“Good. Make things easy to find.”

The next folder was dated 2022.

Petra had wanted every block listed as a business contribution. I had refused. We could both use them, but I would keep owning them.

She had finally signed our numbered Consignment and Temporary Use Agreement, C-017. Its first page called it a loan for workshop use. No sale. No transfer. No pledge. Schedule A listed every number, from BX-001 through BX-084.

There were photographs, too.

Petra had called those excessive.

I laid her new notice beside her old signature.

Then I called Franklin Cho.

“Did she lock you out?” he asked.

“How did you know?”

“She just offered me a tour of her expanded holdings.”

Franklin was sixty-three, a Korean American costume archivist who handled old silk in immaculate white gloves. He could spot a replaced button across a room. He also enjoyed a certain kind of trouble, provided all the labels were correct.

“Did she mention my holdings?” I asked.

“She mentioned a unique fitting collection. Rather often.”

I sat down.

His archive had spent months planning a six-week rental for a touring theater company. Sixty period wigs, fitted and supported through the run. The proposed price was $64,800.

Thirty-six of those wigs needed profiles already built into my blocks.

“Don't approve anything tonight,” I said.

“I haven't approved anything.”

I heard paper move beside his phone.

“But Simone, there is something else.”

He sent me a photograph of a proposed contract.

Petra had signed beneath a line that promised clear ownership of every listed fitting tool.

Stapled behind it was a lender's inventory, with all eighty-four of my numbers.