Chapter 1: The Shop at the End of Puddling Lane

Marguerite Tinker was eleven and did not know what a solicitor's letter looked like until one arrived at her house on a Tuesday morning in late September.

The envelope was cream-colored. Thick paper. The kind that suggested its contents were important even before you opened it. Her father held it for a full minute before breaking the seal, which was unusual. Her father did not usually hesitate over anything that came in the post. He ran an IT repair business from their flat in Walthamstow and believed all problems could be solved by turning things off and on again.

"Your grandmother," he said, reading the letter with the expression of someone who has just been asked to explain something that doesn't have an error code. "Eudora Crawe. She's passed away."

Marguerite blinked. She hadn't known she had a grandmother named Eudora Crawe. Or any grandmother at all.

"I didn't know we had a grandmother," she said.

"My mother," her father said. "I haven't seen her since you were born. She had... a shop. In the City. The letter says you've inherited it."

He handed the letter to Marguerite, which seemed odd given that she was eleven and he was the parent. But her father had a tendency to treat complicated feelings as though they were hardware failures, and hardware failures were best handled by someone else.

The letter was written in language both florid and blunt. It explained that Eudora Crawe, proprietor of The Department of Impossible Repairs, had died aged seventy-four in a care home in Hackney. She had no other living relatives. The shop and "all obligations thereto" were left to her granddaughter, Marguerite Alice Tinker, upon the condition that said granddaughter visit the premises within thirty days of notification.

Marguerite read the phrase "all obligations thereto" three times. It sounded like the kind of thing that should come with a warning label.

Her father bought two Tube tickets the next morning.

They took the Central line to Bank, then changed to the District line heading towards Monument. The weather was grey in the particular way London weather is grey in September, where the sky looks like an old dishcloth and smells faintly of rain that hasn't decided whether to fall.

"Puddling Lane," her father said, squinting at his phone. "It's not on Google Maps."

"Are you sure it's spelled right?" Marguerite asked.

"It says Puddling Lane, just off Pudding Lane." He frowned. "Maybe it's a typo."

But it wasn't.

They found it between a shuttered accountancy office and a narrow alley used mostly by delivery vans and pigeons. The sign was small, painted on a brick wall in letters so faded they looked like they'd been there since the Great Fire. The alley itself was barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. It smelled like old stone and something Marguerite couldn't quite name. Not unpleasant. Just old.

Halfway down the alley, tucked between a door that led nowhere and a window that had been bricked up, was a shop.

The sign above the door read: THE DEPARTMENT OF IMPOSSIBLE REPAIRS.

The windows were dusty but not dark. Light came from somewhere inside, warm and amber-colored, like the light from a lamp with a very old bulb. There were objects in the window — a cracked teacup, a broken pocket watch, a single glove with no partner, a music box with its lid half-open. Each had a small handwritten tag tied to it with string.

Marguerite stepped closer. The tag on the pocket watch read: "Mr. Alderman's. Stopped at 4:47. Cannot be restarted."

The tag on the glove read: "Lost its pair in 1953. Still looking."

The tag on the music box read: "Plays the wrong song. Always has."

"That's odd," her father said, which was the closest he ever came to expressing unease.

Marguerite pushed the door.

It opened with a small brass bell that made a sound like a question.

Inside, the shop was larger than it had looked from the outside, which was impossible but also clearly true. There were shelves along every wall, floor to ceiling, and each shelf was crowded with objects. Broken things. A chipped vase. A torn photograph in a frame. A lamp with no bulb. A umbrella with bent spokes. A book with half its pages missing. Each one had a tag.

Behind a wooden counter at the back of the shop stood a small, precise man in a grey waistcoat. He had the kind of face that might have been forty or might have been seventy, and wire-rimmed spectacles that caught the light in a way that made it hard to see his eyes.

He looked up as they entered.

"Ah," he said, in a voice like the sound of a well-oiled clock. "You must be the new Tinker."

Marguerite's father started to say something about being there to collect personal effects and settle the estate, but the man held up one hand.

"Not you," he said. "Her."

He was looking directly at Marguerite.

"I'm Mr. Fenwick Cog," he said. "I've been minding the shop. Your grandmother left instructions."

"I didn't know my grandmother," Marguerite said.

"No," said Mr. Cog. "You wouldn't have."

He reached beneath the counter and brought out a large leather ledger, the kind that should have been in a museum or a Dickens novel. He opened it carefully. The pages were yellowed and covered in handwriting so small and precise it looked like lace.

"Eudora Crawe," he read aloud, "closed this shop twelve years ago. On the day you were born. She left instructions that it was to remain closed until you were old enough to decide what to do with it."

"Twelve years," Marguerite's father said. "But the rent. The rates. Who's been—"

"Paid," said Mr. Cog. "From a trust. All quite legal. The solicitor has the paperwork."

He turned a page in the ledger.

"Your grandmother," he said, still not looking up, "was what you might call a specialist. She repaired things that couldn't be repaired."

Marguerite looked at the shelves. The broken teacup. The stopped watch. The lost glove.

"But these are all still broken," she said.

"Yes," said Mr. Cog. "They are."

He closed the ledger.

"The shop accepts requests," he said. "People bring things that can't be fixed. Promises that were broken. Apologies that were never made. Friendships that fell apart. The shop—" He hesitated. "—used to help."

"Used to?" Marguerite's father said.

"Before your grandmother closed it."

"Why did she close it?" Marguerite asked.

Mr. Cog looked at her for a long moment. He had very steady eyes, the kind that didn't blink often.

"She paid a price," he said. "For the repairs. Every one of them. By the end, she had paid so much she couldn't remember her own name."

Marguerite's father made a noise that suggested he was about to say something reasonable about mental health services and NHS provision, but Marguerite spoke first.

"What kind of price?"

Mr. Cog opened the ledger again. Turned to the last page. The handwriting there was shaky, barely legible, nothing like the precise script on the earlier pages.

He turned the ledger so Marguerite could see.

The entry read: "Marguerite Tinker, age 0. Repair requested: future. Cost: all remaining certainty. Performed by: E.C."

Below it, in the same trembling hand, two words: "Worth it."

Marguerite stared at the page. Her father leaned over her shoulder, squinting.

"I don't understand," he said.

But Marguerite thought she might.

She had been born premature. Two months early. Her father had told her once, in the flat factual tone he used for things that were too big to have feelings about, that the doctors hadn't expected her to survive the first night.

But she had.

Mr. Cog closed the ledger gently.

"Your grandmother," he said, "left you the shop. And all obligations thereto. What you do with it is up to you. You can sell it. Close it permanently. Or—" He paused. "—you can open it again."

"What happens if I open it?" Marguerite asked.

"People will come," said Mr. Cog. "With things that need repairing. And you will have to decide whether to help them."

"And the price?"

Mr. Cog looked at her steadily.

"The same as it always was," he said. "Certainty. Every repair costs a piece of what you're certain of. Small repairs cost small certainties. Large repairs cost large ones. Your grandmother gave away so much certainty that by the end she wasn't certain of her own name. Or yours. That's why she never came to see you."

Marguerite felt something twist in her chest. Not quite grief, because you couldn't grieve someone you'd never known. But something close to it.

"She didn't forget me on purpose," she said quietly.

"No," said Mr. Cog. "She didn't."

Her father was looking between Marguerite and Mr. Cog with the expression of someone whose operating system had just crashed.

"This is ridiculous," he said. "Repairs that cost certainty. Impossible repairs. This is—"

"A shop," said Mr. Cog calmly. "With a very particular inventory. You're welcome to examine the books. Everything is quite legal."

Marguerite walked slowly along the shelves. She read the tags.

"Mrs. Keating's wedding ring. Lost during an argument. Still angry."

"Tom Harrow's courage. Misplaced at school. Cannot be found."

"A promise made in 1987. Broken in 1988. Still hurts."

The objects sat on the shelves, waiting. Some of them had been waiting a very long time.

"What happens to these?" Marguerite asked. "If I don't reopen the shop?"

"They stay here," said Mr. Cog. "Broken."

Marguerite turned back to face him.

"And if I do reopen it?"

"Then you repair them," he said. "At the cost I explained."

"That's not fair," her father said. "She's eleven."

"No," agreed Mr. Cog. "It isn't fair. Your mother didn't think it was fair either. But she did it anyway."

Marguerite looked at the ledger on the counter. At the shelves of broken things. At Mr. Cog, who stood waiting with the patience of someone who had stood waiting for a very long time.

She thought about her grandmother, who she'd never met. Who had saved her life and lost herself in the process. Who had written "Worth it" in a hand that could barely hold a pen.

"I need to think about it," she said.

"Of course," said Mr. Cog. "The shop will be here. It's been here a long time. It can wait a little longer."

He reached under the counter and brought out a small brass key on a loop of string.

"In case you decide to come back," he said.

Marguerite took the key. It was warm in her hand, as though someone had been holding it just a moment before.

Her father ushered her toward the door, talking in the quick nervous way he talked when he was trying to make something complicated into something simple. But Marguerite wasn't listening.

She looked back once.

Mr. Cog stood behind the counter, watching her with those steady, unblinking eyes. The light from the lamp made his shadow stretch long across the floor.

"She left you more than a shop," he said quietly. "She left you a choice."

The bell made its questioning sound as the door closed behind them.

Marguerite and her father walked back down Puddling Lane in silence. The alley looked exactly the same as it had when they'd arrived. The same pigeons. The same smell of old stone. But Marguerite felt different.

The key sat heavy in her pocket.

By the time they reached the Tube station, her father had recovered enough to start talking about property valuations and commercial real estate in the City. He said the shop could probably be sold, and the money put into a trust for her education.

Marguerite nodded and said nothing.

That night, in the small bedroom of their flat in Walthamstow, she took out the key and looked at it. It gleamed in the lamplight, old and solid and real.

She thought about broken promises sitting on shelves.

She thought about her grandmother, uncertain of her own name, writing "Worth it" in a shaking hand.

She thought about Mr. Cog, standing in that impossible shop, waiting for someone to decide whether to open the door again.

She put the key on her bedside table, next to her alarm clock and a half-finished library book about a girl who found a portal in a wardrobe.

She didn't know yet what she would do.

But she knew she would go back.

People with choices always went back.