Chapter 11: The Regret Eraser

Marguerite woke to the sound of something that should not have been possible: the shop door closing.

She sat upright in the narrow bed Mr. Cog had made up for her in the room above the shop, heart thumping in a way that made her ribs ache. For a moment she thought she'd dreamed it — the soft click of the latch, the whisper of hinges that wanted oiling. Then she heard footsteps below, careful and deliberate, moving through the front room towards the back.

She was on the stairs before she'd properly thought about it, barefoot and still wearing the oversized jumper she slept in, one hand on the bannister and the other gripping nothing at all because there was nothing to grip. The shop was dark except for the streetlamp glow coming through the front window, which turned everything the colour of old honey. Marguerite reached the bottom step and stopped.

The back room door was open.

She had locked it. She always locked it. Mr. Cog had given her the key three weeks ago and told her, in his precise, economical way, that some objects required more care than others. Marguerite had understood him to mean that some objects were dangerous, which she supposed was true, though the danger was not the sort that came with warnings printed on the side.

She crossed the front room without breathing and looked through the doorway.

Aldous Gripe stood in the centre of the back room, holding something small and pink in his left hand.

"Don't," said Marguerite, and was surprised by how steady her voice sounded.

Gripe looked up. His face was haggard in the dim light, all sharp planes and shadows, and his eyes had the bright, terrible look of someone who had not slept properly in years. He was still wearing his coat, the one with too many pockets, and there was rainwater beaded on the shoulders.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't want to wait any longer."

"Put it down."

"I can't." His voice cracked on the second word. "I've been looking at it for fourteen years. I know what it does. I read the tag."

Marguerite's gaze flicked to the shelf behind him, to the empty space where something had been. The tag was still there, curling slightly at the edges, written in Grandmother's cramped, furious handwriting: Regret Eraser. Removes one specific regret. Cannot be undone. Do not use lightly. Cost: unknown.

"The cost is unknown," said Marguerite. She took one step into the room. "That means Grandmother never used it. That means she didn't know what would happen."

"I don't care about the cost," said Gripe. "I only care about the regret."

He looked down at the eraser in his hand — a small rubber eraser, the sort you might find at the bottom of a pencil case, pink and worn at the edges and utterly, devastatingly ordinary. It sat in his palm like a seed.

"Mr. Gripe," said Marguerite, and she heard the shake in her voice now, "please put it down."

"I wasn't home," he said quietly. "When my wife died. I was at work. There was a presentation I had to give. She'd told me not to worry, that she was fine, that I should go. And I went. Because I wanted to believe her. Because it was easier." He closed his fingers around the eraser. "I've spent fourteen years wishing I'd stayed. Fourteen years knowing I should have been there. And I'm so tired, Marguerite. I'm so tired of carrying it."

"Grief isn't something you carry," said Marguerite, though she wasn't certain that was true. "It's something you—"

"I don't want a lecture," said Gripe, not unkindly. "I want this to stop."

And before Marguerite could move, before she could shout or lunge or do anything at all, Aldous Gripe lifted the eraser to his temple and pressed it there, the way you might press an ice pack to a bruise.

For three seconds, nothing happened.

Then Gripe's face changed.

It was not a dramatic change. There was no light, no sound, no visible alteration that Marguerite could point to and say there, that is the moment. But something in the architecture of his expression shifted, the way a building shifts when a cornerstone is removed. The tightness around his mouth eased. The furrow between his eyebrows smoothed. His shoulders, which had been drawn up towards his ears like a man bracing against a gale, dropped slowly to a more natural position.

He took a breath — a deep, full breath, the sort of breath that filled the lungs all the way to the bottom — and let it out again. His eyes fluttered closed.

When he opened them, they were calm.

"Oh," he said softly. "That's better."

Marguerite stared at him.

Gripe looked around the back room with the mild curiosity of someone who had just walked into a museum. His gaze passed over the shelves of broken objects, the narrow desk where Mr. Cog kept the ledger, the window that looked out onto the alley, and finally came to rest on Marguerite herself.

"Hullo," he said politely. "I'm sorry, I don't think we've met. Are you the shopkeeper?"

Something cold and sharp lodged itself beneath Marguerite's ribs.

"You're Mr. Gripe," she said.

"Am I?" He frowned, not with distress but with the gentle confusion of someone trying to remember where they'd left their keys. "I suppose I am. That sounds right." He looked down at the eraser in his hand as though surprised to find it there, then set it carefully on the desk. "Nice place you've got here. What does it do?"

"It's a repair shop," said Marguerite. Her voice sounded very far away.

"Ah." Gripe nodded. "I thought so. The shelves, you see. All the broken things." He smiled at her, a kind, empty smile that made Marguerite want to weep. "Do you fix them?"

"Sometimes."

"That's good. People ought to fix things." He looked around again, that same mild interest on his face, and Marguerite realized with a sick lurch of understanding that he had no idea why he was here. The grief that had driven him to break into the shop, to steal the eraser, to spend fourteen years searching for a way to undo what time had done — all of it was gone. And without it, he was a man without purpose, drifting, empty.

"Mr. Gripe," said Marguerite carefully, "why did you come here?"

He blinked at her. "I don't know," he said. "I can't seem to remember. Isn't that odd?"

It was worse than odd. It was terrible. Because the eraser had worked — it had worked perfectly, exactly as the tag promised — and Gripe had asked to have his regret removed. He simply hadn't understood that the regret was the only thing still connecting him to his wife. Without it, she was gone. Not just dead, but gone, slipped out of his mind like water through cupped hands.

Marguerite thought, quite suddenly and with perfect clarity: Grief, at least, is love with nowhere to go.

This was something else entirely.

"Mr. Gripe," she said, and her throat was tight, "do you remember your wife?"

He looked at her with that same gentle confusion. "My wife?" he said slowly. "I had a wife. I think I had a wife. Didn't I?"

"Yes."

"What was her name?"

Marguerite didn't know. She realized, horribly, that she had never asked. "I don't know," she whispered.

"Ah." Gripe nodded, as though this were a perfectly reasonable answer. "Well. I expect it'll come back to me." But his face, as he said it, was calm and untroubled, and Marguerite knew with a certainty that hurt that it would not come back to him. Nothing would come back to him. He had erased the regret, and the regret had been the thing that kept the memory alive.

She heard footsteps on the stairs behind her. Mr. Cog appeared in the doorway, wearing a dressing gown over his shirt and trousers and looking more dishevelled than Marguerite had ever seen him, which is to say that one button was undone.

"I heard the door," he said. Then he saw Gripe, and the eraser on the desk, and his face went very still.

"He used it," said Marguerite.

Mr. Cog closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he looked older than she had ever seen him. "Yes," he said. "I can see that."

"I came to fix something," said Gripe helpfully. "I think. Or perhaps I just wanted to see the shop. It's a very nice shop."

Mr. Cog moved past Marguerite and picked up the eraser with careful, deliberate hands. He turned it over, examining it the way one might examine a piece of evidence. Then he set it back on the desk and looked at Gripe with something that might have been pity.

"What did you erase?" he asked gently.

Gripe frowned. "I don't remember," he said. "Isn't that funny? I must have had a good reason, but I can't think what it was." He patted his pockets absently, as though looking for something. "I should probably go. I'm sure I have somewhere to be. Don't I?"

"Perhaps," said Mr. Cog.

"Right." Gripe smiled at them both, that kind, terrible, empty smile. "Lovely to meet you. Both of you. Thank you for—" He paused, uncertain what to thank them for. "—for having me."

He walked out of the back room, through the shop, and out onto Puddling Lane, moving with the aimless, unhurried gait of someone with nowhere particular to go and no reason to hurry. Marguerite and Mr. Cog stood in the doorway and watched him disappear into the rain.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Marguerite said, in a voice that shook: "That's worse. That's so much worse than grief."

"Yes," said Mr. Cog quietly.

"He didn't even remember her name."

"No."

Marguerite turned to look at him. "Grandmother made that. She made the Regret Eraser."

Mr. Cog nodded. He looked, Marguerite thought, profoundly sad. "She did," he said. "Twelve years ago. It was one of the last things she created."

"Why?"

"Because she regretted what she had done." Mr. Cog walked slowly back to the desk and picked up the eraser again, turning it over in his hands. "She had given away all her certainty — all of herself — to repair your future. And afterwards, when she could no longer remember who she was, when she could not find her way back to the granddaughter she had saved, she wondered if she had made a mistake. So she created the Regret Eraser. She thought perhaps she could use it to erase the regret of having sacrificed so much."

Marguerite's chest felt tight. "But she didn't use it."

"No."

"Why not?"

Mr. Cog was silent for a moment. Then he said, very quietly: "Because she realized that erasing the regret would not change what she had done. It would only change how she felt about it. And if she no longer regretted saving you, if the sacrifice meant nothing to her anymore—" He looked at Marguerite, and his eyes were bright. "—then the sacrifice itself would become meaningless. She would have given everything for a choice she no longer understood."

Marguerite thought about Gripe, walking into the rain with no idea why he had come or what he had been looking for. She thought about his wife, whose name he could no longer remember, slipping out of his mind as though she had never existed.

"The eraser sat in a drawer for twelve years," said Mr. Cog. "Your grandmother never touched it again." He set it down carefully on the desk. "She told me once that regret was the tax on loving something. You paid it because the love was worth the cost."

"But Mr. Gripe—"

"Mr. Gripe paid the cost without understanding what he was buying," said Mr. Cog. "The eraser took the regret. It did exactly what it was designed to do. But he didn't understand that the regret was the only thing keeping his wife alive in his memory. Without it—" He gestured helplessly towards the door. "—she's gone."

Marguerite sank down onto the floor of the back room, her legs suddenly unable to hold her weight. She wrapped her arms around her knees and stared at the eraser sitting on the desk, pink and innocent and terrible.

"I didn't perform the repair," she said. "Gripe stole the eraser. He used it himself. So there's no cost to me. Is there?"

"No," said Mr. Cog. "There is no cost to you."

"Then why do I feel like this?"

Mr. Cog crouched down beside her, his joints creaking slightly. "Because you understand something your grandmother understood," he said gently. "That some costs cannot be avoided by clever thinking or magical erasers. That grief is not the enemy. That pain — the right sort of pain, the pain that comes from loving something and losing it — is not a thing to be erased. It is a thing to be carried."

"He looked so relieved," whispered Marguerite. "When he used the eraser. His whole face changed. He looked—" She swallowed hard. "—he looked happy."

"Yes," said Mr. Cog. "That is the horror of it."

They sat together in the dark back room, surrounded by broken things that could be fixed and impossible things that could not, and outside the rain fell softly on Puddling Lane. After a while, Mr. Cog stood and helped Marguerite to her feet.

"Come," he said. "I'll make tea."

"I'm not sure I want tea," said Marguerite.

"Nevertheless," said Mr. Cog, "I shall make it."

He locked the back room door — though they both knew locks meant very little when someone was desperate enough — and led Marguerite into the small kitchen at the rear of the shop. He filled the kettle, set it to boil, and took down two chipped mugs from the cupboard. The routine of it was comforting in a way Marguerite could not quite articulate.

While the kettle boiled, she said: "What happens to him now? To Mr. Gripe?"

Mr. Cog measured tea leaves into the pot with careful precision. "I don't know," he said. "He will go on living, I suppose. He will wake up each morning and not know why his chest feels empty. He will pass by places that once meant something and feel nothing. He will see couples holding hands and wonder, vaguely, if he ever had that. But he will not suffer. The regret is gone, and with it, the suffering."

"That doesn't sound like living," said Marguerite.

"No," said Mr. Cog. "It doesn't, rather."

The kettle whistled. Mr. Cog poured the water into the pot, waited thirty seconds — he was a man who believed in proper tea — and then poured two mugs. He handed one to Marguerite, who wrapped her hands around it and felt the warmth seep into her fingers.

"Your grandmother," said Mr. Cog, after a long silence, "was not a perfect woman. She made mistakes. She created things she should not have created. She kept the shop open longer than was wise. But she understood one thing very clearly: you cannot shortcut grief. You cannot erase loss without erasing love. And anyone who tries to sell you that shortcut—" He gestured towards the back room, where the Regret Eraser sat on the desk like a small pink accusation. "—is selling you an empty room where something precious used to be."

Marguerite sipped her tea. It was too hot and slightly too strong, which meant it was exactly right. "I don't know if I can keep doing this," she said quietly. "Performing repairs. Watching people pay costs they don't understand. Losing pieces of myself every time someone asks me to fix something impossible."

"You don't have to," said Mr. Cog. "The shop is yours. You can close it. You can walk away."

"Grandmother didn't walk away."

"No," said Mr. Cog. "But your grandmother had twelve years to understand the cost. You've had three weeks. It would not be abandonment, Marguerite. It would be self-preservation."

Marguerite looked down into her tea. She could see her own face reflected in the dark surface, distorted and uncertain. "I'm not sure anymore," she said. "Whether I'm brave or cowardly. Whether I'm kind or selfish. Whether Grandmother loved me or just felt obligated. I've lost so many certainties I can't remember what I was sure of before."

"That," said Mr. Cog gently, "is the cost."

They sat in silence for a while, drinking their tea whilst the rain drummed softly against the kitchen window. Marguerite thought about Gripe, walking aimlessly through London, his pockets full of nothing and his heart lighter than it had been in fourteen years. She thought about Grandmother, sitting in this same kitchen, holding a pink eraser and deciding not to use it because the regret, however painful, was the proof that the sacrifice had mattered.

She thought about love, and how it left wounds when it departed, and how those wounds were sometimes the only evidence that the love had been real.

"I'm frightened," she said.

"I know," said Mr. Cog.

"What if I become like Grandmother? What if I give away so much of myself that there's nothing left?"

"Then you will have made the same choice she made," said Mr. Cog. "And you will pay the same cost. But—" He set down his mug and looked at her with eyes that were kind and sad and very old. "—you are not required to make that choice. No one is asking you to sacrifice yourself. Grandmother chose to save you, and she chose to pay the cost. That was her decision. You are allowed to make a different one."

"What would you do?" asked Marguerite. "If you were me?"

Mr. Cog smiled slightly. "I am not you," he said. "And I do not have your gifts. But if I did—" He paused, considering. "—I would remember that Grandmother's greatest regret was not the sacrifice itself. It was that she could not remember why she had made it. The regret was not the enemy. Forgetting was."

Marguerite finished her tea and set the mug down carefully on the table. Outside, the rain was beginning to slow. Dawn was still an hour away, but she could feel it approaching, the way you could feel a train coming before you heard it.

"I should try to find him," she said. "Mr. Gripe. Make sure he's all right."

"He won't be all right," said Mr. Cog. "Not in any way that matters. But yes. We should try."

They put on their coats and locked the shop behind them and walked out into Puddling Lane, where the rain had turned to mist and the streetlamps glowed like small moons. They searched for an hour, walking through streets that were just beginning to wake, asking early-morning workers and bleary-eyed night-shift workers if they'd seen a tall, thin man in a coat with too many pockets.

No one had.

Eventually they returned to the shop, damp and tired and unsuccessful. Mr. Cog made more tea. Marguerite sat at the counter in the front room and stared at the shelves of broken objects, each one waiting patiently to be fixed.

She did not know if she would open the shop that day.

She did not know if she would perform another repair.

She did not know very much at all, except this: the Regret Eraser had worked perfectly, exactly as designed, and that was the most terrible thing about it.

Outside, the sun rose slowly over London, turning Puddling Lane the colour of weak honey. Somewhere in the city, Aldous Gripe was walking through streets whose names he did not recognize, his heart light and his memory empty, wondering vaguely where he was meant to be and not knowing that the answer — with her, always with her — had been erased along with the regret.

And in the shop at the end of Puddling Lane, Marguerite Tinker sat in the grey morning light and understood, finally, what her grandmother had known twelve years ago:

Some things, once broken, should not be fixed.

And some costs are too high to pay, even when the repair works perfectly.