“Too dark,” Andre added.
“Too intense,” Felix said, quiet now. He picked up the mug.
He didn’t sweeten the tea. Sugar ruined teeth—and masked the bitterness that gave the leaves their strength. This was black tea, from the foot of the Himalaya, the kind he’d drunk in India, meant to besteeped slowly, touched with clove or cardamom. Instead, he’d prepared it without thought about the richness of the brew and it was just like everything these days: rushed, bland, or bitter. It tasted like something he knew too well. Something broken at the start, but swallowed anyway.
He took a sip. It burned his mouth. He drank again. “I’ll clean the kettle tonight,” he said. “Buy better tea tomorrow.”
He moved for the door, but Wendy stepped in his path and nodded in Andre’s direction.
Andre’s voice was gentler now. “We know you’re alone here at night.”
“I’ve always been alone,” Felix said. “You’ve just noticed now because you’re not.” Felix loathed himself for how that came out. He was happy Andre had his princess, Thea, and Wendy had her Prince Stan, and yet, that made him no less lonely without his Maisie. She wasn’t a princess but the queen of his heart, mind, and soul, no less.
Wendy frowned. “That’s not true, we always noticed.”
He laughed under his breath. It didn’t sound amused. “There’s nothing you can do, Wendy,” he said, unable to mask his sadness.
“I’ve asked Thea for help,” Andre said. “She’s trying to help find your Maisie. Nobility have their ways.”
“But Maisie isn’t nobility,” he went on, barely pausing. “That’s the problem. No paper trail, no titles, nothing to search. She’s unfindable.”
“People don’t disappear like ghosts, this is not a story in a book,” Andre said.
Felix looked down at the tea, swirled what was left in the cup.
“I saw her yesterday,” he said softly. “Outside a bakery. It wasn’t her, but I followed the woman with a parcel of lemon tarts half a block before I could stop myself. Then again in my sleep.” Silence. But sleep didn’t come easily on the days he wished he could hold her, which was every day, admittedly. “I don’t even know what I’d say if I did find her,” he admitted. “Except maybe I’m sorry for ever leaving her in the first place.”
He swallowed the last of the tea, the heat cutting sharply.
“I wish I could stop needing her,” he said, not quite looking at either of them. “I really do, but that’s impossible. She’s a part of me. She has my heart, and it feels like the muscle inside me isn’t even pumping without her love nearby. I just can’t…” I can’t bear the pain of missing her thus. He didn’t say it. Not again lest Wendy and Andre pity him, and he hated pity.
No one moved.
Wendy took his empty cup and poured him a fresh one. This time, she stirred in a spoonful of honey without asking.
“Then let’s start there,” she said. “You’re not alone.”
He didn’t answer.
But he stayed.
“Perhaps there’s still hope to find her again.” Andre gave a smile of the sort he’d give for a fatal diagnosis and yet didn’t have the heart to take the patient’s will to fight.
*
Across town ina different house but the same evening…
“Don’t you want honey in your tea?” Deena’s voice broke the quiet, gentle but persistent, like a thread tugging loose.
Maisie didn’t answer right away. She sat at the long kitchen table, stirring her tea in slow, idle circles. The spoon clinked against the porcelain.
“Nothing will save it,” she said at last, nose wrinkling at the bitter, over-steeped brew. “It’s all wrong.”
Deena, undeterred, dipped the spoon into the honey pot anyway. “You used to like it sweet.”
Maisie didn’t look up. “The tea I liked wasn’t this kind.”
She traced a finger along the edge of the cup. “Back in Vienna, I brought tea to the practice in the mornings. Always something light—rose petal, sometimes jasmine. Rachel’s father used to send parcels to us, wrapped in muslin with yellow bows. The scent would fill the kitchen before I even opened them.”
