It was such a sweet, thoughtful thing for her to do. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it wouldn’t be the same, so I just hugged her tight. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

Last Saturday, Eleanor came over to my place around seven. She set up the board by the kitchen window, just like her father used to do.

I stayed in the living room because it was too hard for me to watch her stand in his spot.

The next morning, I got up to get ready for church. The dress was hanging on the bedroom door, looking clean and neat.

But the moment I slid my arms into the sleeves and pulled the zipper up, my whole body went rigid. I knew something was wrong before I even walked over to the vanity mirror.

The left sleeve felt tight. It was pulling against my arm in a strange, uncomfortable way, making my shoulder feel bunched up and awkward.

I walked over to the mirror and looked. The crease down the sleeve was wrong.

It wasn’t that Eleanor had done a bad job. She had pressed it perfectly straight. But she had folded the sleeve outward, the way most people would fold a sleeve.

Arthur never did that. He always folded the left sleeve inward, tucked tight against the seam, before he ran the iron over it.

Nobody alive knew that difference but me. And standing there in the morning light, looking at my reflection, the whole truth finally hit me.

You see, when I was sixteen years old, I was in a terrible car accident. My family’s station wagon rolled over on a wet road, and my left shoulder was badly crushed.

The doctors did what they could, but my left arm never healed quite right. It was slightly shorter than my right, and my left shoulder sat about an inch lower, slumped forward in a way that always made me feel terribly self-conscious.

When I was a young woman, I used to spend hours in front of the mirror, trying to find clothes that would hide it. I hated going to church or social gatherings because I felt like everyone was staring at my crooked frame.

I never talked about it with Arthur. It was just one of those things I kept locked away in my mind, a silly vanity that I was too embarrassed to bring up, even to my husband.

But Arthur had noticed. Of course he had.

By folding that left sleeve inward and pressing a sharp, custom crease into the fabric, he had quietly altered every single church dress I ever owned. He did it to take up the slack in the fabric.

It made the left sleeve drape perfectly, matching the right side of my body. It hid my crooked shoulder completely.