Chapter 7 - A Name Written on a Work Shirt
Becca remembered Rosa visiting Suds Satin in the cooperative's early years with a woman named Margaret Clark. They'd met when Margaret was a part-time seamstress and single mother. The two women had repaired uniforms at night, sitting in the back room over instant coffee while Emma, then barely ten, did homework at the folding table.
"I remember the coffee," Emma said. "And a woman who always brought oranges."
Becca smiled sadly. "That was Rosa. She said fresh fruit was the one expense nobody could argue her out of."
Emma leaned against the washer. Her mother had always told stories about customers but seldom named them. When Margaret grew ill, she stopped sewing and Emma took extra weekend shifts elsewhere. After the funeral, she'd put most of her mother's things in a plastic storage bin and left it unopened. Grief had made every object feel heavy.
"What did Rosa ask my mother to keep?"
"I don't know. She said Margaret was the only person who understood how to mark a uniform so you could tell which lot it belonged to after the label was cut off."
Emma thought about the tiny stitches inside Rosa's coat. Her mother used to mark repairs with one colored thread hidden beneath a seam. It let her prove which work she'd done when contractors tried to deny payment. The practice wasn't mysterious. It was how a woman with no lawyer documented her labor.
At Emma's apartment, she and June opened the storage bin together. There were photographs of school plays, recipe cards, buttons sorted into old prescription bottles, and Margaret's sewing journal. Its pages were filled with measurements and ordinary notes: sleeve shortened, button replaced, client paid late. Near the back was an entry dated six years before Rosa's death.
ROSA B — BLUE WORK SHIRTS — 28 PIECES. THREAD UNDER LEFT HEM. DO NOT ACCEPT REPRINTED LOT TAGS.
Emma photographed the page. Beside it was a receipt for twenty-eight shirts purchased from a small uniform supplier. Margaret had attached a fabric swatch to the journal: navy cotton crossed by a single orange thread. Emma remembered the shirts. Rosa used to deliver a stack to the laundromat every month, and the workers wore them when they collected hospital bedding.
"What does it mean?" June asked.
"It means the people who made the uniforms could tell a real batch from a fake one." Emma pointed to the note. "The supplier's labels could be replaced. My mother's stitch couldn't, not unless someone knew it was there."
She called Mara, who obtained the journal with Emma's consent and asked the former workers whether any shirts remained. Denise had kept hers. Mrs. Alvarez had saved two as gardening clothes. Theo still wore one while delivering blankets because, he said, it was the best shirt he'd ever owned.
At the precinct, investigators compared the garments with photographs taken after the fire. The employee roster claimed forty-six workers on the final Tuesday shift. But the supplier had made only twenty-eight shirts, and the payroll files showed that the extra eighteen names were added three weeks before the warehouse burned. Some belonged to real people whose identities had been used without permission. Others couldn't be verified at all.
"Phantom employees," Mara said. "A way to move wage money."
"Then the fire wasn't only about an exit," Emma replied. "Somebody needed the warehouse books gone before people saw who wasn't actually working."
Mara did not confirm a motive. She arranged interviews, requested supplier records, and asked the fire investigators to look again at the origin photographs. Emma went back to work, because invoices and rent didn't stop for an investigation.
That Friday, Suds Satin lost its largest institutional contract. The client wrote that publicity and uncertainty made continued service commercially impractical. Mr. Kapoor sat at his desk with both hands over his face. Four workers were scheduled for shifts that now no longer existed.
"Adrien offered to cover payroll," Kapoor admitted. "I told him I needed to ask you first."
Emma considered. "We can't let him quietly become our employer. But there may be a way to make a bridge loan transparent, with a written contract and no claim on the business. June knows someone who works with small-business relief. Ask her."
June helped them compare options. A neighborhood mutual-aid group raised enough to cover two weeks of wages, and a credit union provided a short-term loan after reviewing a recovery plan. Adrien made a donation to the mutual-aid fund through an independently administered process. Emma did not learn the amount and told June she didn't want to. She cared that workers were paid and no one could demand obedience in return.
The next day, the public story changed. A local paper interviewed Mrs. Alvarez and Denise. Their faces appeared beside an explanation of the duplicate ticket system. The headline was about the workers, not the mafia boss. Emma bought six copies and left them by the register for anybody who wanted one.
That evening, Adrien came in wearing a plain coat, without security in sight. He asked if she could talk after her shift. She said she had fifteen minutes.
"My mother knew yours," he said when they were alone. "I found a photograph. They're laughing over a washing machine. My mother is holding an orange."
Emma could picture it. She had a sudden, painful urge to hear both women arguing about whose coffee was worse.
"I wish she'd told me," she said.
"Mine hid an entire financial mess from me because she thought she could fix it before I knew."
"She told you in the end. You just didn't get the letter."
Adrien looked at her with the same pale intensity he'd worn the night they met. "I don't want to use her death to excuse what I did while I was alive and in charge."
"Then don't," Emma said. "Give Mara what she asks for. Be where you say you'll be. And leave the workers' story to the workers."
He nodded. "All right."
Her phone vibrated before he could leave. Mara had sent a photograph from the original fire file. A worker's shirt lay beside the warehouse office door, scorched but recognizable. The left hem was visible, orange thread against navy cotton.
May you like
Emma zoomed in. There was no name on the collar, but the size and stitching told her it belonged to one of the original twenty-eight workers. A handwritten evidence label read UNIDENTIFIED GARMENT — STORAGE AREA.
The door beside it was Rosa's office, not east storage. Someone had placed or mislabeled evidence in the old investigation. For the first time, they had a specific item that could test which of the two locations investigators had treated as the scene of Rosa's death.
