The first problem was fabric.
The stolen gown had used the best silk she owned, and she had very little money left.
Lila opened the small tin where she kept her savings, coins and folded notes she had earned from mending clothes for neighbours and selling small embroidered handkerchiefs at the market in Hartley.
She counted it twice, her fingers trembling slightly, and realised she had just enough for a length of dark ivory crepe, a piece of emerald silk for the lining, and a small amount of the special thread she needed.
She would have to be careful with every centimetre, and she would have to use the swatches from her mother's box for the most important details.
She wrapped the money in a handkerchief and hid it in her coat pocket, ready for the early morning trip to the fabric shop before Regina woke up.
Hiding her materials was just as important as buying them.
Lila could not leave the new fabric on her table, where Tessa might find it and take it, or where Regina might throw it away.
She cleared a space at the back of her wardrobe, behind her winter coats, and laid a clean sheet there to protect the cloth.
She put the sketch back into the cedar box and slid the box under the sewing table again, covering it with a folded blanket so it looked like nothing more than old storage.
She hid her sharpest scissors inside a sock, her needles inside a small biscuit tin, and her precious thread inside an empty jam jar at the back of a shelf.
It felt strange to hide her work like a secret, but in this house, her work had always been something she had to protect.
When the clock struck midnight, the house was finally silent.
Lila listened for a long moment, hearing only the ticking of the hall clock and the soft sound of rain beginning to fall outside her window.
She lit the small lamp on her sewing table, turned it low so the light would not show under her door, and spread the dark ivory crepe across the table.
The fabric was cool and smooth under her hands, and as she smoothed it flat, she felt the familiar calm that sewing always gave her.
She pinned the paper pattern she had drawn from her mother's sketch, checking each measurement twice, and then she picked up her scissors.
The first cut was the hardest, because once she cut the fabric there was no going back, but she took a deep breath, remembered her mother's words about mistakes becoming beautiful, and cut in one clean, steady line.
Hour after hour, Lila worked while Hartley slept.
Her fingers grew tired, her eyes grew heavy, and the rain tapped gently against the window, but she did not stop.
She sewed the first seams of the bodice, her needle moving in small, even stitches, and she thought about her mother sitting at this same table years ago, drawing a dress she never dared to make.
Now Lila was making it, and every stitch felt like a conversation with a woman she had lost too young.
She whispered the plan to herself to stay awake, counting the nights left, counting the seams finished, counting the small victories.
By the time the sky outside began to turn pale grey, she had finished the cutting and the first part of the bodice, and she folded the work carefully away before anyone could wake and find it.
In the morning, she moved through the house like a girl with nothing to hide.
She washed the dishes, swept the floor, and answered Regina's sharp questions with quiet, polite words.
Tessa paraded past her in the stolen gown, turning in front of the hall mirror and asking everyone how beautiful she looked, and Lila forced herself to smile and say nothing.
Inside, she was counting the hours until night, when she could return to the secret beneath her sewing table.
She had five nights left, a hidden sketch, a box of her mother's fabric, and a dream that no one in this house could take from her, because they did not even know it existed.
To understand why Lila could sit up all night and sew a gown from a hidden sketch, it is necessary to understand the house she had grown up in, and the girl she had become inside it.
When Lila was young, after her mother Anna died, her father Daniel Bennett married Regina Caldwell, and Regina brought her daughter Tessa into the small house in Hartley.
From the very first day, Lila learned that there were two kinds of children in that house.
Tessa was the kind who was praised, photographed, and given the best of everything.
Lila was the kind who was expected to be grateful, quiet, and useful.
She was given Tessa's old clothes, Tessa's old books, and the smallest bedroom at the top of the stairs, the one with the narrow window and the sloping ceiling.
She learned to make herself small, to speak softly, and to never ask for more than she was given.
Her days were filled with chores that no one thanked her for.
She washed the dishes after every meal, swept the floors, folded the laundry, and cleaned the bathroom while Tessa practised her smile in the mirror downstairs.
If a glass was broken, Regina blamed Lila, even when Lila had been in another room.
If Tessa lost her homework, Regina said Lila must have hidden it.
If the house was untidy, it was Lila's fault for not working hard enough.
Lila learned to apologise quickly, even when she had done nothing wrong, because apologising was faster than arguing, and arguing only made Regina angrier.
Her father, Daniel, was often away working, and when he came home tired, he did not see the small cruelties.
He saw a quiet house, a smiling wife, and two daughters who seemed, from a distance, to be getting along.
At Hartley Academy, Lila was quiet in a different way.
She was not the girl who raised her hand first, or the girl who laughed loudly in the corridor.
She was the girl who sat at the back of the art room, sketching dresses in the margins of her notebooks when she was supposed to be taking notes.
Her drawings were detailed and strange and beautiful: gowns with dragonfly wings, coats with hidden pockets, skirts that looked like rivers.
Her classmates did not notice them, and most of her teachers did not either, but one teacher did.
Ms. Priya Sharma, her art teacher, had kind eyes and a habit of stopping beside Lila's desk and looking at her work for a long time without speaking.
One afternoon, Ms. Sharma had picked up a sketch of a gown with emerald rivers and said, simply, "Lila, you see things other people do not see. Do not stop drawing."
Those words stayed with Lila for years, like a small light she carried in her pocket.