July 1993
I noticed the group before I properly registered why they’d caught my attention — a small cluster of children, seven or eight of them, trailing behind a diminutive figure with an unmistakable air of authority, the kind that had nothing to do with height and everything to do with the way every child in the group kept glancing back to make sure they hadn’t strayed too far.
Muggleborns, I guessed, watching them gawk at Eeylops Owl Emporium with the particular wide-eyed wonder of people seeing a talking portrait or a self-stirring cauldron for the very first time in their lives.
I didn’t think much more of it until the little procession drew level with my window, and the figure at the front of it — barely taller than the eldest of the children he was shepherding — stopped dead in front of my display, tilted his head, and studied the storage ring with an expression of open, professional interest.
“Wait here a moment, if you would,” he said to his charges, in a voice considerably larger than his frame, and stepped inside.
I recognized the accent before anything else — crisp, precise, the kind of voice that had clearly spent decades explaining the same wand movements to hundreds of children a year and never once lost patience doing it.
He crossed to the counter with quick, light steps, peering at the ring on its cushion with real scrutiny.
“Professor Filius Flitwick,” he said, extending a hand.
“Charms, Hogwarts.
Forgive the interruption — I have eight new students to deliver safely to Ollivander’s before lunch, and I do try to keep them moving, but a scaffolded layering enchantment in a shop window tends to override my better judgment.”
I shook his hand, genuinely startled, and more than a little pleased.
“Marcus Hale,” I said.
“And yes — you can tell that from the window?”
“I can tell something’s holding multiple functions stable without them degrading each other, which in my experience means either an extremely lucky accident or a scaffolded base layer, and I’ve learned not to bet against the latter in a shop this well kept.” He glanced up at me with sharp, bright eyes that missed very little, I suspected, in seventy-odd years of teaching.
“May I?”
I handed him the ring without hesitation.
There was something almost thrilling about watching an actual Charms Master examine my work — not with suspicion, the way Mirabel had at first, but with the frank, delighted curiosity of a fellow craftsman encountering an interesting problem.
“Starts at one cubic metre, weightless, with room to scale,” he murmured, turning it over, and then, more to himself, “anchored through the band itself rather than a separate focus — clever, that, most people would’ve built the anchor into a stone and lost half the ring’s practicality doing it.” He looked up.
“Where did you train, if you don’t mind my asking?
I don’t recognize the technique from any current Mastery program in Britain, and I do try to keep track.”
I gave him the same careful, half-true answer I’d given Percy — independent study, strong grounding, self-directed from there — and watched him accept it with the same considering nod, though his eyes lingered on me a fraction longer than Ollivander’s had, the particular attentiveness of a teacher clocking a student he suspected was underselling himself.
“Well.
Whatever the path, the destination’s impressive.” He set the ring down carefully.
“I don’t suppose you’d object to a Hogwarts professor sending the occasional curious student your way?
Rather more useful than another textbook diagram, in my experience.”
“I’d be glad of it,” I said, and meant it — the idea of Flitwick, of all people, considering my shop worth a student’s time felt like a genuine milestone, one I hadn’t expected to hit this early.
He glanced toward the window, where his eight charges were beginning to show the particular restlessness of children left unsupervised for longer than they’d been promised, and sighed with the fond exasperation of a man who’d clearly done this exact thing every summer for decades.
“I should get them moving before one of them wanders into Knockturn Alley out of curiosity.
It happens more often than you’d think.” He paused at the door, though, glancing back.
“You strike me as the sort of person this street could use more of.
Competent, quiet, not overly hungry for attention.
Do keep it up.”
“I’ll do my best, Professor.”
“See that you do.” And with that, he was back out the door, herding his cluster of wide-eyed eleven-year-olds onward toward Ollivander’s with the brisk, practiced efficiency of a man who’d shepherded a thousand children through this exact street and never once lost one permanently.
●●
I found myself smiling long after the bell above the door had stopped swinging, turning the encounter over the way you turn over a compliment from someone whose opinion you’d decided, without quite realizing it, mattered rather a lot.
It wasn’t until later that afternoon, restocking a shelf and still faintly buzzing from the whole exchange, that I registered the shape of what had actually happened.
Flitwick hadn’t just admired the work.
He’d offered to send students my way — an informal endorsement from a sitting Hogwarts professor, the kind of thing no amount of careful shopkeeping or honest pricing could have bought on its own.
I made a note in my ever-growing notebook, right beneath the entries on subtle storage and quiet-baby charms and shaking hands: Flitwick — Charms Master, Hogwarts, seemed genuinely impressed.
Follow up if any students actually come by.
Don’t get complacent.
That last part felt important enough to underline.
●●
The students did come by, as it happened, though not that same day — a trickle over the following week, easily recognizable by the particular mix of nervous excitement and second-hand confidence that suggested they’d been sent rather than wandered in on their own.
A boy with ink-stained fingers who spent a solid twenty minutes examining the glasses before admitting, shyly, that his eyesight had always worsened gradually and would always end up needing a new pair every three months, and he’d simply assumed he’d struggle through school squinting. Find the original chapter at novelping(.)com.
A girl, clearly still getting used to the idea of magic being real at all, who asked so many rapid, intelligent questions about the ring’s anchoring that I ended up giving her a simplified, age-appropriate version of the actual theory, delighted by how quickly she followed it.
None of them bought much — they were, after all, children with modest allowances, not customers with real spending power — but I found I didn’t mind that nearly as much as I’d have expected.
I did end up giving the boy a pair of glasses at cost price since no one should suffer at school just because they didn’t have the money to get a pair.
Each visit felt less like a missed sale and more like a small deposit into something longer-term: a shop that Hogwarts students thought of as worth visiting, a name that would follow some of them, presumably, into adulthood and eventual disposable income.
I mentioned as much to Florean over ice cream one morning, and he laughed, delighted, in the specific way of a man hearing a lesson he’d learned decades ago being rediscovered fresh.
“That’s the whole trick of this street, you know,” he said, sliding a bowl across.
“Half of Diagon Alley’s business isn’t the transaction in front of you.
It’s the eleven-year-old today who becomes the loyal customer in fifteen years, and the parent behind them who remembers you were kind to their kid even if you didn’t sell them anything.” He nodded toward the direction of Hogwarts, invisible somewhere north of the city but present all the same, the way a held breath is present.
“Flitwick doesn’t send students to just anyone.
Man’s got standards.
You should be proud of that, not just pleased by it.”
I thought about that the rest of the walk home — the difference between pleased and proud, and how strange it was that a professor’s five-minute visit to my shop window had somehow become one of the things I was proudest of since I’d woken up in this life at all.
●●
That evening, sitting at my workbench with the half-finished steady-hand device still waiting patiently for its next session of careful, painstaking work, I found myself thinking less about the mechanics of it and more about the shape of the life accumulating around me without my having planned most of it.
A neighbor who saw radishes as jewelry and Nargles in the light through my windows.
A family that fed me before they’d even properly learned my name.
An apothecary who trusted fair dealing over flattery.
An ice cream seller who’d apparently appointed himself my unofficial mentor in the fine art of running a shop the boring, sustainable way.
And now, a Hogwarts professor who thought well enough of my work to send children his way.
It didn’t feel, sitting there, like I’d built any of this deliberately.
It felt like I’d simply shown up, done honest work, and let the world respond in kind — which was, I suspected, exactly the kind of quiet foundation Death had been talking about back in that grey nowhere, the scaffolding that held up a life rather than being the life itself.
I picked up my tools again, steady-hand device waiting, and got back to work.
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