Chapter 3 Ramon’s Secret

By Saturday morning, Nora had learned that opening a business was much easier when nobody was watching, and unfortunately Moonvale was watching closely. She stood outside the laundry with a paintbrush in one hand and a half-finished sign in the other, the letters of CARTER'S MAGICAL LAUNDRY leaning at odd angles, the final Y tilting so badly it looked ready to fall off the wood entirely.

"It has character," Nora said, stepping back to admire her work.

Milly Rose, standing beside her with a box of flowers balanced against her hip, tilted her head. "It has a drinking problem."

"You were supposed to encourage me."

"I am encouraging you. I'm encouraging you to repaint it."

Nora sighed and dipped her brush back into the paint anyway, insisting she didn't have time, and Milly pointed out gently that she didn't have customers either. Milly owned the little flower shop next door and had spent the better part of an hour helping Nora make the laundry look less like a building abandoned halfway through construction. The broken washing machine was still waiting for Theo. The front window needed replacing. The shelves stood uneven, and her savings were disappearing faster than she wanted to admit. Still, the shop looked better than it had. It looked open, and that mattered more than she'd expected.

Across the street, a small crowd had already gathered outside Frost and Thread, its windows polished to a shine, its sign elegant, enchanted mannequins out front in gowns that shifted color whenever sunlight touched them. A table had been arranged with pastries and sparkling drinks, and people were already filing inside.

"She's very good at attracting attention," Milly said, watching the crowd.

"She has money."

"So do lots of people. You have magic."

"Restoration magic," Nora reminded her. "Not the kind that makes dresses dance in the street."

"Maybe people are tired of dancing dresses," Milly said, just as a man walking past them slowed and stopped.

He was a middle-aged vampire in a dark suit old enough to have its own family history, and he asked cautiously whether this had been her grandmother's shop, whether she could still restore enchanted clothing the way her grandmother once had. When Nora said yes, relief washed over his face, and he opened a case to reveal a pair of white gloves, old but not damaged, their enchantment simply fading after a hundred and twelve years. They had belonged to his wife, and something in his expression told her everything before he said another word.

Beneath the restoration lamp, warmth flooded through Nora's hand the moment she touched the fabric, and she saw laughter, music, two hands clasped together beneath lanterns, years passing, one hand eventually disappearing from the memory altogether. She understood then that restoration wasn't only about making something look new. Sometimes it was about preserving what someone was afraid of losing. When she lifted her hands, the gloves looked almost exactly as they must have on the day they were first worn.

The vampire stared at them before picking them up carefully. "They're perfect." He left twenty silver on the counter, refused to take the change, and promised to tell his friends. Milly rushed in the second he left, thrilled over what she called Nora's first real referral, and more customers trickled in after that, enough that Nora began to believe the shop might actually survive.

The bell rang again, and this time it was Ramon, empty handed for once.

"What happened to your clothes?"

"I have clothes at home. I wanted to see how opening day was going." He glanced around the busier shop, then his eyes settled on the case the vampire had left behind, still open on the counter with tissue paper curling out of it. Something shifted in his expression, and he was quiet for a moment longer than the sight of an old pair of gloves should have warranted.

"You've gone somewhere else," Nora said.

Ramon didn't deny it. "Your grandmother was known for a very particular kind of restoration. Not stains nor tears. Bonds. Things that connected two people, worn thin by time or grief." He looked at her carefully. "I came to her shop once, before you arrived. I never got the chance to ask her for help."

Nora set down the cloth she'd been holding. "Help with what?"

"Something I lost that ordinary magic can't touch," he said, and didn't elaborate further, though the guarded look on his face told her it wasn't only the coat from the day before. "I didn't come back today only to check on your business, Nora. I came because I'm hoping you inherited more than her shop."

The admission sat strangely with her, heavier than his usual teasing, and before she could answer it, Milly's grin faded into something more watchful, sensing the shift in the room without needing to be told what caused it.

They were interrupted by Theo Bell bursting through the door with a toolbox under one arm and panic written across his face, insisting he'd repaired the washing machine and that this was not good news. The machine roared to life behind them, spinning faster until the whole frame shook, drawing power from everything magical in the room, the salts, the lamp, the restored gloves, even the current running quietly under Ramon's skin. Nora pressed her hands against it and returned the enchantment to its original balance instead of forcing it down, and the machine slowed, shuddered, and stopped, leaving the shop in a silence that felt earned.

"It was trying to do too much," she said, looking at it. "Just like me."

Outside, a real line had begun forming, and across the street Vivian Frost stood watching it with an expression that had lost every trace of politeness. When their eyes met, Vivian's gaze flicked toward the case still open on Nora's counter, toward the gloves inside it, and something crossed her face that looked less like rivalry and more like recognition.

"She worked for your grandmother once," Ramon said quietly, following Nora's gaze. "Before she opened her own shop."

Nora turned to him slowly. "You knew that and didn't tell me?"

"I wasn't certain it mattered until just now."

Across the street, Vivian was already looking away, arranging her mannequins with hands that weren't quite steady, and Nora understood, for the first time since arriving in Moonvale, that the shop's debts and the rival across the road and the ache behind Ramon's careful questions might all be tangled around the same unfinished thread her grandmother had left behind.