Chapter Fifteen
Oh, that boy’s teeth.
The thought came as Wendy bustled out with her usual efficiency, leaving Felix alone to ready the instruments. Gold foil, burnishers, hours of work. His fingers flexed in anticipation of the ache. The tray already gleamed, but he wiped it again, habit more than need.
The boy had shuffled in with an air of obligation, not fear, his hands folded loosely across his middle. Felix liked that—it meant less trembling, fewer flinches. But it wasn’t the boy who unsettled him.
It was the girl.
Fifteen, perhaps sixteen. She moved with the watchful care of someone older, as though every step had been measured in advance. And she was humming.
Felix kept his eyes on the instruments, but the sound threaded through the room, soft, persistent. Not quite a tune for a child, not quite a prayer. Something else. Something that reached under his ribs.
Maisie.
He tried to ignore the thought, jaw tightening as he arranged the mirror just so. The boy’s molars. That was what mattered. The work.
But the girl hummed again, and the lilt of it snagged him. That rise, that fall. He knew it too well.
It can’t be. She isn’t here.
He hadn’t slept the night before—hadn’t in years when her dreams came too vividly. Vienna bled into London in those hours, and he woke with her name lodged in his throat. Perhaps this was the echo of another sleepless night. Perhaps he was losing his mind.
He set down the last tool, aligning it with meticulous care. Everything in order. Everything ready.
And then he glanced up.
Just a profile, caught in the slant of afternoon light. The line of a cheek. The neat tuck of hair.
His breath hitched.
For one raw second, he saw her. Maisie, standing where she always had—steadying the light, watching him work, the air between them charged with everything they hadn’t dared speak.
He blinked, and the illusion broke. Only a girl remained, a stranger with careful hands and a humming voice.
Felix turned back to the gold, his face blank, his chest aching. He told himself it was absurd—sad, even—that he saw her everywhere. In shop windows, in shadows, in the reflection of his own glass. But that was his life now.
Always searching and missing her.
The curve of the cheek. The neatness of her hair.
Stop it.
Felix dragged his gaze back to the boy in the chair. He was seeing Maisie everywhere these days—in the sheen of a shop window, the break of a stone wall, even the folds of his own coat. If he wasn’t careful, he’d start imagining Wendy in her likeness next.
Absurd. Sad. But it was the truth of his life now.
The boy looked up at him with quiet unease, and Felix softened his voice, coaxing.
“Now, open again for me. A bit wider… that’s it.”
They worked in near silence. Each time the boy flinched even only slightly, Felix stopped, let him breathe, then continued.
Patience was its own medicine. Wendy caught his look and wordlessly passed him the finer scraper, her expression matter-of-fact—like two of them could coax trust back into a child who had every reason to withhold it.
“You may rinse now,” Felix murmured, tipping his chin toward the basin.
The boy accepted the glass from Wendy’s hand. Sage-scented water gleamed as he tilted it carefully, spitting into porcelain with the neatness of someone already trained to mask mistakes.
Felix should have kept his eyes on the patient. He knew that. But across the room, the girl sat with a book unmoved in her lap. Her gaze wasn’t on the page.
She was watching him.
His hands, perhaps? The steadiness or care?
The moment he looked her way, she ducked back behind the cover, but too late—he’d seen it. And still, at the edges of his hearing, that low humming circled him like smoke.
“When am I finished with the scraping?” the boy asked, voice muffled as Wendy dabbed his mouth with a cloth.
Felix eased the tool aside. “It will take a while longer,” he said gently. “These teeth must have troubled you for months. Has no one taken you before?”
The boy hesitated, then gave a half-shrug. “I don’t remember my father. My mother was ill, and the servants were—” He cut himself off, color flaring in his cheeks. Too much spoken.
“She died last year,” the girl said quickly. Her voice was even, but her lips pressed tight, as though sealing back the grief that wanted out. The look on her face—a ripple of pain contained, then gone—stilled something deep in Felix’s chest.
Wendy, practical as ever, broke the hush. “Is this your sister?” she asked, nodding toward the girl.
The boy opened his mouth to answer, but Felix was already fitting gauze into his cheek, sparing him the words.
Wendy returned to her tray. Felix bent over the work again. But his mind wasn’t on the teeth.
That girl. That song. The uncanny thread of memory winding through her presence.
It was nothing, of course. It had to be nothing.
And yet—why did it feel as though a shadow from his past had just walked into his treatment room?