No more.

She leaned over and scooped up her clothes, along with her silk shoes, and tied it all into a neat bundle. Moving quickly to the window of the compartment, she pulled it open and threw her expensive clothes into the darkness and the racket of the train’s wheels. The snow was beginning now. Spring was a long way off. Her beautiful clothes would be a blackened ruin by then.

She pulled a small tattered gray suitcase from the rack above her head. She opened the clasps and pulled out a plain black wool dress, one of three just like it. She sat again at her dressing table, and ripped open a short length of hem. Taking off her jewelry, a garnet bracelet and earrings, funfair trinkets, she wrapped them in a delicate handkerchief still smelling of a man’s tart cologne. Adding to it a delicate diamond ring, she stuffed the small package into the hem of the skirt.

With deft fingers she threaded a needle and quickly sewed her jewelry into the hem of the skirt. Insignificant as it was, it reminded her of the way she had once lived, her old life now hidden in the hem of a plain dress. It was her insurance, her little baubles, her ticket out of the darkness, if darkness fell. It was her independence. It was her past.

There. She stepped into the dress, buttoning the thirteen buttons. These were her clothes, the only clothes she had. She had made them herself, in the way her mother had taught her. Without corset or stays, she felt surprisingly light. She quickly finished dressing.

She knew all the details of her new life. The details were not a problem. She had rehearsed them for hours and months. The phrases. The false memories. The little piece of music. She had so little life of her own, so little self, that it was easy to take on the mannerisms of another with ease and conviction. Her new self may have been no more inhabited, but it was no less real.