Chapter 162

• When the email came through, I almost missed it. It had landed in the general inbox for the boutique, sitting between a supply invoice and a spam offer for wholesale hangers. I was scrolling half-mindedly, looking for a shipping confirmation, when the subject line caught my eye. It was short and polite, just a few words that didn’t give much away, but something in the phrasing made me click.
• The message was from a small but well-respected craft foundation in Kyoto. They said they had been following my work quietly for some time. They wrote about the way I handled fabric, the pace of my process, and how they felt it carried a certain respect for the material that aligned with their own philosophy. At the end of the message, they invited me to collaborate with one of their most senior artisans, a man named Hoshino, whose work in traditional silk dyeing was known far beyond Japan.
• I read the email twice. Then I read it again. It felt too delicate to skim over, like it needed to be absorbed slowly. I had never met Hoshino, but I knew his name. Years ago, I had seen one of his silk panels in a museum in Milan. It had been unlike anything I had ever touched. The dye had not just settled into the fabric, it had lived inside it, so that even under different light, the colors shifted and deepened instead of fading.