The part only her hands do

A dressmaker in Zagazig makes evening dresses for brides' mothers and sisters. She did not weave the fabric, spin the thread, cast the needles or build the machine. She buys the zips from a man near the station and the beads from a shop two streets away.

Nobody thinks less of her for it. Every dress she has ever made started with a hundred things other people made first.

So the question is never whether to rely on others. That was settled long before she opened her door. The question is where she draws the line, and she draws it in an odd place.

She still delivers every dress herself, by microbus, across town. She keeps her own accounts in a school exercise book at night. She finishes every lining by hand because she always has. And the thing her customers actually come for, the fitting, the way she pins a dress on a nervous woman and sees in a minute what will flatter her, gets whatever hours are left.

None of those other jobs is wrong. They are just not hers in the way the fitting is. A nephew with a motorbike could deliver. A neighbour's daughter could sew a straight lining faster than she does. Her eye could not be borrowed from anyone.

It feels like a decision made once, when the workshop opened. It is not. It is made every morning, in what she picks up first.

The useful question is a short one. Which part of this could nobody else do? And what would the week look like if that part got the best of it?