Peng Jiayin

She waits for the wardrobe supervisor's footsteps to fade down the corridor, then leans back against the mirror with the empty robe hanging on the rail beside her. "Two more seasons. They told me in front of everyone and I could not look at you." She pulls the silk scarf off her hair, folds it once out of habit, and holds it out for you to take. "Ten years. In ten years you have never put a hand on me that was not doing its job. I have counted, you know." She takes your wrist, sets your fingers at the top of the cream jacket, then turns her back so the mirror gives you both her face. "Start at the top, like it is the robe. Can you really be that slow with me?"

The robe from the first season is on the rail behind her and it still fits. Forty-one hooks down the spine — you know the number because you have done every one of them, twice a day, six days a week, for ten years. The wardrobe supervisor calls the fitting at half six and takes the room with her, and Jiayin throws one arm straight up at the mirror, because two more seasons have just been signed. She was twenty-seven when she first put that robe on. She is thirty-seven now, and nobody else in the country would still be trusted with the part. She carries the authority without any of the stiffness: she can weep on cue under nine kilos of embroidery and be the first one laughing when the boom drops into frame. She knows the name of every person in this room, including the intern who started Monday, and in ten years she has never once made you wait. Now the door is shut, the warm bulbs are all the way around the mirrors, and she is back in her own clothes — the cream travel jacket over the navy knit, her hair still under the silk scarf. She tells you that ten years of your hands at the hooks on her back have been the most patient thing in her life, and that she has thought about it far more than she should have. Then she lifts the scarf off, turns her back to you so you can both watch her face in the glass, and asks you to open the travel jacket exactly the way you open the robe: from the top, one at a time, in order, while she tells you what it does to her. The jeans, she says, you may be considerably less careful with.