5:47 AM, and I'm in the shop because my brain decided that sleep was optional and anxiety was mandatory, which is how I've ended up standing behind my own counter in the dark like some kind of caffeinated ghost, waiting for the sun to do something useful.

The wooden scoop sits by Betsy where it always sits now—Margaret's scoop, Noah's wife's scoop, given to me three months ago with half a sentence and a lifetime of meaning. I run my thumb over the worn edge of the handle. Eighteen grams, every time. She measured her love in coffee, apparently, and now I measure mine the same way.

I made Noah's cup twenty minutes ago. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, because that's the one, because it's always the one, because some things don't need to change to be holy. Left it outside his door the way I've left it outside his door for—I do the math—two hundred and thirteen cups now, maybe fourteen. He never says thank you. The empty cup says it for him.

The shop is quiet in a way it won't be in three hours. No bell. No steam. No Jennifer arriving with plans that have sub-bullets. Just me and the slow brightening through the front window and the particular smell of a coffee shop before it becomes a coffee shop—grounds and wood and the ghost of yesterday's pastries.

I decide to make myself a pour-over because I have time and because the ritual of it sounds like the kind of thing a person who has her life together would do at 5:47 AM. The kettle. The filter. The grounds—eighteen grams, Margaret's measurement, which feels right even though she never met me and I never met her and somehow we're both here anyway, in this scoop, in this morning.

The water needs to be 203 degrees, which I know because I've been studying coffee since I was ten years old and my brain has apparently decided that this information is more important than, say, how to make small talk or what to do with my hands when I'm not holding something.

I pour. Count. Wait.

The light through the front window has shifted from gray to something almost pink, which means the sun is doing that thing where it pretends spring is going to be gentle before it dumps three inches of rain on us by Thursday. The cemetery across the street is still. Walter won't be here for hours. Grace won't be here until Thursday. The corner table sits empty in a way that feels like potential instead of absence.

I pour again. Count again. The coffee blooms.

Somewhere above me, I hear the soft click of Noah's door, and then nothing. No footsteps on the stairs—he never comes down, never has, probably never will. Just the click, and then the particular silence of a cup being taken.

Two hundred and fourteen, I think. Or fifteen. I've lost count, which means I've stopped counting, which means something has shifted without my permission.

The pour-over finishes. I wrap my hands around the mug—not the daisy mug, that one stays on the shelf behind the counter where Grace can see it—just a regular mug, cream-colored, slightly chipped, the kind of mug that doesn't need to mean anything.

I stand there.

The light shifts again. The clock on the wall ticks in that way clocks do when you're actually listening. Mabel is probably upstairs judging me from the cozy chair, but she hasn't made her presence known yet, which means I have this moment to myself.

I realize I've been standing still for—I check—eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes without knocking anything over. Without spiraling about the quarterly taxes or whether Patricia will notice that I changed oat milk brands or whether Todd meant something when he said "bring more beans" or whether my mother will ever actually talk to me or—

I'm just standing here. Drinking coffee. Watching the light change.

This is what rest feels like, I think. Not the absence of things to do—the shop opens in two hours and I have prep and the cinnamon situation isn't going to resolve itself—but the presence of something quieter underneath. Like the still point at the center of a pour-over spiral. Like the space between Noah's door clicking and my cup being empty.

Be still.

I don't say it out loud. Don't need to. The morning is saying it for me.

And then Mabel yowls from the top of the stairs—that particular yowl that means she's realized I'm not in bed and has opinions about it—and I startle so hard I knock the sugar caddy off the counter, and there's sugar everywhere, in the floor mats, in my shoes, probably in tomorrow's espresso drinks, and I'm standing in the middle of it laughing because of course, of course, I can't have eleven minutes without—

But I had them.

Eleven whole minutes of being still. Of being here. Of resting in a morning that didn't ask anything of me except that I show up and drink coffee and watch the light.

I get the broom. Start sweeping. Mabel appears at the bottom of the stairs, surveys the chaos with the particular disdain of a cat who has never knocked anything over in her life, and begins grooming her paw like she wasn't the direct cause of this.

"Same time tomorrow," I tell her.

She blinks.

That's close enough to yes.