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Tavi, a small child from the seaside town of Pebblewick who can hear the hum of threads, follows a trail of stitches to recover the town's missing blue button. Along the way she meets a tailor, a seagull named Patch, and learns that mending is often the bravest thing of all.
Pebblewick was a town of small things. Its houses sat like smooth stones along the coast, each roof tucked under the next like a row of sleeping birds. Salt threaded the air in tangy ribbons. Mornings smelled of wet rope and warm bread; evenings smelled of damp wool and the little fires people kept for stories.
Tavi lived in the house with the crooked chimney, the one that leaned like an old man listening for news. Her hair had a stripe of salt in it from the sea; her fingers always smelled faintly of lemon curd and mending paste. Tavi was small for nine years, but smallness had advantages. She could crawl into the narrow spaces in the workshop where the sun left tiny golden paths on the floorboards. She could pull a wild thread from a tangle and coax it straight again without tearing. She could hear what others did not.
It began when she was very little—she learned to listen to things. Chairs hummed when someone sat on their edge; kettles sang low when water thought it might boil; old coats kept secrets in their pockets and let them out as tiny stitches when the night was windier than usual. Tavi could hear the thin music of a thread. It whistled when it was being pulled too tight. It sighed like an exhausted child when it was left loose. The sound was faint, like a moth rubbing its wings, but once you knew how to listen you could not stop.
Her mother mended sails and curtains in a shed that smelled of beeswax and tar. The village called her hands "steady ones". People brought everything there—buttonless jackets, torn book spines, a kite with a hole the size of a teacup. Tavi learned to sit on an upturned crate and watch the stitches gather into order. She learned to hold the needle like a small, kind sword.
On market mornings the street near the harbor filled with voices. Fishwives called prices like birds calling across fields. Children chased one another in circles until their laughter blew like dandelion seeds. Tavi liked the market because it had corners where lost things sat. A single glove. A pebble shaped like a heart. Once she found a little brass button on a damp stone ledge and kept it under her pillow for a week, just to hear the faint, brave clink it made at night.