Chapter Text
1. Before Miranda Priestly
Miriam Princhek was born into grief. Her mother, Chava, bled out on the narrow bed in the back of their East End flat, never once holding the child who had stolen her last breath. Miriam’s first cry was met not with joy but with mourning. She was swaddled by a neighbour while her father sat numb in a chair, his hands still smeared with his wife’s blood. From the beginning, Miriam understood, though no one ever said it aloud, that her very existence carried the weight of loss.
Her father, Josef, tried to raise her and her two older brothers, but he was a man hollowed out by history. He had come out of the camps alive, though “alive” was a generous word for it. He went to work in a factory by day, drank by night, and stared through his children as if they were strangers. The real authority in the Princhek household was the grandmother, Rivka. Bent and sharp-eyed, she had survived, too, though in her case survival had made her harder, not softer. Rivka did not believe in coddling. “The world will not love you,” she said to Miriam before the girl was old enough to understand. “The world will not save you. You must save yourself.”
Rivka’s lessons were not encouragement. They were warnings, often barbed with cruelty. Miriam’s brothers earned their share of her scolding, but Miriam, the motherless child, was the one Rivka seemed unable to forgive. She would stare at the girl with her daughter’s eyes, the child seeing something close to venom in her gaze. “Your mother is dead because of you”. Not said out loud, but always hinted at, just enough that Miriam grew up knowing she was a wound in the family, not a balm.
The Holocaust haunted every inch of the Princhek household. Josef never spoke of the camps, but sometimes, in his stupors, he muttered names Miriam did not know. Names that hung in the air like ghosts. Rivka kept a box of photographs locked in a drawer, and once, when Miriam stole a glance, she saw rows of stiff-faced children, some who looked like her. She asked, and Rivka slapped her so hard her cheek burned. “The dead are dead,” Rivka spat. “Do not waste tears on them. Survive.”
But Miriam did weep, in secret. She felt their absence like a hand on her shoulder. She felt the weight of her mother’s absence, too; an absence that defined her more than any presence could have. She told herself she would never be weak, never die forgotten in a backroom, never let herself be at the mercy of fate or men or history.
The flat was always heavy with silence, except when it wasn’t. Except when Josef exploded in drunken grief or Rivka raged about the price of bread or the neighbours’ laughter. The air smelled of boiled potatoes, coal smoke, and despair. Miriam learned quickly how to move quietly, how to vanish up to her room, how to remain out of reach. At school, she carried her shame like a second skin. She wore hand-me-downs, her hair cut blunt with kitchen scissors, her lunches wrapped in wax paper. Other children taunted her; “refugee girl”, and she learned to grit her teeth and say nothing. She hated the way their mothers collected them at the gates, fussing over their ribbons and scuffed shoes. She hated the way those children could hug their mothers and laugh without fear. Eventually, the hatred grew into something sharper. Resolve.
At thirteen, she found work after school in a seamstress’s shop. The fabric enchanted her. Velvet, silk, lace. To touch them was to touch another world, a world far from tenement walls and her grandmother’s scorn. She imagined herself transformed, unrecognizable, powerful. The seamstress laughed when Miriam begged to try on scraps of ribbon, but Miriam held her chin high, practicing the poise she would one day perfect. At home, however, her small defiance brought her no peace. Rivka called her vain. Josef called her ungrateful. But Miriam no longer listened. She was learning that cruelty could be endured, but invisibility was intolerable.
As the years passed, Miriam worked every spare hour she could outside of school, enchanted by the fabrics and possibility they held. She had long since learned how to stay silent, how to hold her nerve and plan and plot for her end goal. She worked and worked and eventually had saved up enough from her wage to put her plan into action. Eighteen-year-old Miriam sat on the edge of her narrow bed, her suitcase half-packed on the floor. It was small, pitiful, not nearly large enough for the enormity of what she was about to do. The mirror leaned crookedly against the wall, cracked in the corner, but she had polished her reflection as carefully as she could. The auburn curls pinned neatly, the second-hand dress pressed within an inch of its life, the careful lift of her chin. She looked older. Stronger. Not like the unwanted child whose grandmother had spat blame into her ears since birth.
“Miriam!” Rivka’s voice rasped down the hall. Her grandmother never called for her kindly. It was always a summons, a demand. Miriam’s stomach tightened. When she entered the kitchen, Rivka was at the table, her back bent but her eyes sharp, watchful. Josef sat across from her, staring at his hands as if they might tell him a secret. The boys were already gone; one married, the other working away, both having found their escape.
“You have something to say?” Rivka asked, her tone already accusing.
Miriam clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking. “I’m leaving.”
Rivka’s laugh was bitter. “Leaving? Where will you go? Who will feed you? What man is taking you in?”
“No one,” Miriam said, forcing the words through the tightness in her throat. “I’m going to Paris. Mrs Baumont has given me details of a dressmaker there where I can work.”
The silence after was a knife. Josef’s gaze flickered up, briefly, but he said nothing. Always nothing.
“Paris,” Rivka repeated slowly, her accent dragging the word into something ugly. “Paris, where our people died like dogs? Paris, where they spat on us, turned us in, shut their doors?”
Miriam swallowed hard. “Paris is not…”
“Do not tell me what Paris is!” Rivka cut in, her voice rising to an almost shriek. Her voice shook with fury, or maybe with the weight of memory. “I buried a sister there. I buried cousins. I buried half my soul. And you…you would run there, chasing vanity? Ribbons and silk, while the blood has not even dried!”
Miriam flinched. She had known this would come but hearing it out loud was almost unbearable.
“It’s not vanity,” she whispered. “It’s survival. I can’t stay here anymore. I can’t breathe.”
Rivka’s face twisted, every line etched with disbelief and rage. “You are ungrateful. You think the world is kind? It will eat you alive. Better you suffer here among your own than beg scraps from strangers.”
Miriam’s hands clenched at her sides. “I’m not begging. I’m building something. For myself.”
“For yourself,” Rivka mocked. “That is all you think of. Yourself. Your poor mother gave her life to bring you here, and you repay her by spitting on her grave. You shame her. You shame your father. You shame me!”
The words pierced like they always did—your mother died because of you—but Miriam was not a child anymore. She would not shrink.
She turned to her father. “Tate?”
But Josef only shifted, eyes down. The silence between them yawned like an abyss. He had never defended her. Not once. Not when Rivka’s hand left welts on her cheek. Not when the schoolchildren called her names. Not when she began to dream aloud of a different life.
“You won’t even speak,” Miriam said softly, bitterly. “You’ll just watch me walk away, like everything else you’ve watched disappear.”
His shoulders sagged, but he said nothing. Always nothing.
Rivka rose unsteadily from her chair. Her voice was low now, dangerous. “If you leave, Miriam Princhek, you do not come back. You are no granddaughter of mine. You are no Princhek. You will be alone.”
The words echoed in her chest, shaking something loose. But instead of fear, Miriam felt clarity. Wasn’t she already alone? Hadn’t she always been?
She straightened. “Then I will be alone.”