Mamoryllis
THE dreadful news arrived just as preparations for Sophie’s departure were well underway at the estate.
“There’s a rat in the house,” Martha had announced, her tone more somber than the occasion seemed to warrant.
Sophie had raised a hand to her mouth in mild astonishment—not because she was particularly afraid of the creatures, but because she knew how deep Martha’s hatred for them ran. That even one had slipped past her vigilance was difficult to imagine.
A few days into the extermination effort, with Martha casting handfuls of poisoned bait about the house in a near-trance-like fervor, Sophie encountered something curious in the salon.
She’d been in the middle of cleaning it. With how many ornaments and trinkets were crammed into the space, Claire and Martha had offered to help. But Sophie had refused. It was her space. And she wanted this final send-off to be hers alone.
The salon had seen no visitors since Bianca’s final call. With the wedding feast a month away and her journey to the capital set for a fortnight beyond that, Sophie had quietly ceased advertising her services. So it felt only natural—a little too natural, in fact—that when the letters stopped coming altogether, it didn’t strike her as strange.
Perhaps that was how it ought to be. In a world always grasping at the next new thing, where nothing was irreplaceable, and everything was destined to fade, it seemed only right to accept that Sophie’s Salon might as well have never existed beyond her own memories and the memories of those she had treated.
Sophie began to count them off on her fingers, slowly, as if to commit them once more to memory. Sixteen faces. Sixteen names.
Just sixteen.
She had blanketed the town in flyers and had sailors shout the name of her salon in ports and marketplaces far beyond the horizon. And still, in the end, only sixteen people had been healed by her hand.
Taken out of context, it was a laughable number. The sort one might expect from a pampered merchant’s daughter playing at work, indulging in a little fantasy between afternoon teas and dress fittings, but…
She placed a hand gently over her chest.
But within its proper context—within her heart—those sixteen people were everything. They had altered the course of her days. What had been shared here—the words, the silences, the tentative exchanges of trust—had become more enduring than anything she could have imagined. She would carry it all with her.
Just sixteen. She’d thought it herself only moments ago, but now she wished she hadn’t. There had never been anything “just” about it at all.
Not when those days had coaxed a reclusive girl out from behind her own walls. Not when they had given her the courage to love and to follow that love wherever it might lead. All those stories, all that pain once belonging to others—transformed under her hand, reshaped into joy and ease—had left their mark on her. Each small miracle etched into her being quietly showed her how to lift her head. How to walk forward.
In the end, it wasn’t Sophie who had done the healing. It was Sophie who had been healed.
“Oh?”
Her eye caught on a small slip of notepaper resting on the table. She was certain it hadn’t been there before—likely dislodged from somewhere during her cleaning. She picked it up and examined it.
The surface was covered in a mess of tiny, uncertain lines—more like a child’s scribbles than anything that could be called writing.
Tilting her head, she was about to throw it into the waste bin when she caught herself. For seemingly no reason whatsoever, she chose to keep it, tucking it into the side of an empty painting frame she’d kept in the salon as a kind of decoration; she had liked the pattern etched into its edges, even if it had never held a painting.
“It’s time for lunch, milady!” came Raymond’s voice.
“Coming!” she called back, leaving everything where it was and hurrying out of the room, the faint echo of her footsteps swallowed by the quiet behind her.