“I do. I’m just worried I’m letting something that happened almost by accident become my style, and I don’t know better.”

“I’m sure there are lots of pieces of art where someone’s been painting, they make a mistake and in the process of adapting to it, they find something better.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll dig around. Try new things, see what works.”

Sveta nodded.

The collection of coats was eclectic. I found bomber jackets, including ones with pads at the elbows—definite no from Sveta. There were jackets covered in patches.

“I kind of like that, except it’s someone else’s patches and story, and I don’t like the jacket style.”

“And it’s a jacket, not a coat, which you could get away with, theoretically—”

“Except it’d draw attention if I did.”

We broke apart, each of us searching different racks. I pulled out a long coat, with a material like suede, with shaggy fur around the collar, down the front, and around the end of the sleeves, seams standing out in relief.

There was a coat that would run ramrod straight from armpit to knee, with a tidy, neat folded collar in what might have been described as preppy if the rest of the coat wasn’t so un-preppy, and a bold blue curlicue along the hem and down one sleeve. The fabric was blue that faded to an almost acid-wash blue-green toward the parts the curlicues were. There was something grunge and something fantastical about it.

Sveta hadn’t picked anything out.

“Not enthused?” I asked.

“I’m not finding anything. And you’ve already found two things?”

I showed her.

“Oh, wow.”

“Good? Bad?”

“Really, really good. I could see buying either of those and being happy. How did you even find it? I’m sorry, but there wasn’t anything like that over here.”

“I’m betting there was something, maybe you second-guessed it, or you were looking for something specific, and your eye passed over it because it wasn’t what you were looking for.”

I passed her the two coats I’d found, and I went to the rack she’d been browsing. Women’s coats, sorted by size.

It wasn’t as good of a series of racks, but the sunk-cost fallacy kicked in, and I found myself pressing on.

“Number three,” I said. I pulled out a wool coat, cut like a trench coat, but with even more flare at the bottom. The coat was predominantly gray, but was defined by an arrangement of quilted patchwork, the dense wool coming in overlapping squares and rectangles of different, bold blues and greens, with an isolated yellow-green gradient taking up a sixth of the coat starting at one shoulder.

“It’s pretty out there.”

“It is,” I admitted. “It’s also very you.”