The room went completely quiet, except for the noise coming off that stage.

My stepmother laughed at the prom dress my fifteen-year-old brother made out of our mum’s old jeans. Halfway through the night the music stopped and the headteacher walked across that hall toward her.

My dad d.i.e.d last March. My mum went in 2021. Both of them, three years apart.

My stepmother came into the house in 2022 and married him in September 2023, and when he went she had everything — because that’s how it works when nobody’s got round to the paperwork, and because she was extremely organised about it from about the second week.

Including my mum’s money.

There was about eleven thousand pounds Mum had put aside for us. Not a fortune — eleven years of a woman putting forty pounds a month into a building society account for two children.

There was a letter with it saying what it was for. Driving lessons. University. Proms, weddings, the lot.

Those are the actual words. I’ve read them about four hundred times.

I asked about a prom dress in February. I picked a Tuesday because she’s better on a Tuesday, and I’d been working up to it for nine days.

She didn’t look up from her phone.

Prom dresses are a stupid waste of money.

And then she put her bag down on the counter. A proper one, with the tag still on it.

I said Mum had left money specifically for this. I had the letter in my hand — I’d gone and got it out of the drawer and brought it downstairs with me.

And she laughed and said: that money runs this house now.

And then, with no particular heat, the way you say something obvious:

And nobody wants to watch you play at being a princess anyway.

That was it. No dress. No ticket. No prom.

I went up and shut my door and did about forty minutes of the sort of crying where you put a pillow over your own face.

And my brother heard all of it, because our rooms share a wall.

He’s fifteen. In Year Nine he did textiles — not because he chose it. He wanted woodwork, woodwork filled up in about nine minutes, and textiles was the only thing left.

He was good at it immediately, the way some people just are. And for about four months he couldn’t shut up about it.

Then he stopped. Completely. He hasn’t mentioned it in my presence since April last year — and I was wrong about why for over a year.

Four nights after that Tuesday he knocked on my door at ten at night with an armful of denim.

Mum’s. Four pairs of her jeans, out of the bag in the loft nobody’s been able to take to the charity shop since 2021.

He said: d’you trust me?

I said what are you doing. And he said it again: d’you trust me?

For two weeks that boy turned our kitchen into a workshop between about nine at night and one in the morning.

He did it on Mum’s old machine, which was also in that loft, and which he’d got down on his own and oiled off a video.

I wasn’t allowed in. Genuinely not allowed — he put a chair against the door twice.

What I heard for fourteen nights was a sewing machine going in short bursts, and swearing, and once, at about half twelve, a chair going over.

On the ninth night he knocked and stood there with his hands behind his back and said: how tall are your shoes?

I said what?

The shoes you’re wearing. How tall. And then: don’t show me. Just say.

On the eleventh night he came up and said nothing at all. Stood in my doorway about half a minute. I said are you all right, and he said yeah, and went back down.

I found out in May what that one was.

He’d cut a panel wrong and lost about four hours of work, and he’d come upstairs to tell me he couldn’t do it — and then he looked at me and went back down and recut it.

He was fifteen. He had school in six hours.

He finished at twenty past four in the morning on the Friday and woke me up to show me.

(I know everyone’s desperate to know what the messages said…