Meghan gives me the trash and the heavy lifting, because I'm a prospect everywhere I go apparently, and she runs the place like a woman who's raised kids and a coffee empire and isn't about to be slowed down by either.
"I want the new place to feel like this one the second somebody walks in," Meghan tells Sophie, the two of them standing in the middle of the floor and looking back at the worn brick and the warm light and the mismatched chairs nobody would ever call a mistake on purpose. "Same vibe. Same warmth. But I don't want it to be a photocopy, you hear me? People want to feel like they found someplace, not like they walked into a chain. So you study this room. You tell me what makes it feel like somebody's kitchen instead of a storefront, and then you go build me that feeling somewhere else. Can you do that?"
"I can do that," Sophie says, and I watch her shoulders come down an inch at a time over the course of the morning.
She's good at this. Better than good.
She walks the shop with the notebook, sketching the way the shelves step down toward the register, holding chips up against the brick, talking through warm whites and a deep green for the accent wall at the new place, where the seating should go so it reads like a living room and not a waiting room.
Meghan mostly lets her run, throwing in a yes or a not that one here and there, and somewhere in the middle of it, Sophie forgets that her hometown thinks she's a monster.
There's grunt work in it for me, and I'm glad of the grunt work. I haul the trash, break down the boxes out back, fix thewobble in the table by the window that Tor's been meaning to get to for a month.
I keep my head down and my hands busy, and I stay near enough to her that if the door opens wrong, I'm between it and her before she's even looked up.
Dasha drifts in around noon and takes over the register, bumps Sophie with her hip, and says something that makes Sophie laugh for real, the first real one since yesterday.
I break down another box and let myself feel something close to all right.
Around one, an older woman comes in I half recognize—somebody's aunt, somebody from the edges of the club's world—and orders a cortado.
Dasha's slammed with a rush, so Sophie steps in behind the counter to help.
She hands the cortado over, and the woman holds her eyes a moment and says, "You're the teacher."
I'm across the room and moving before I've decided to, drying my hands on my jeans.
But the woman's face isn't hard. "My granddaughter had you. Pre-K, before you moved up to the second grade. Emma. Redheaded, never shut up." She wraps both hands around the cup. "Emma cried for a week when she found out she wasn't getting you again. You're the one who taught her to write her name." She nods once, like she's settling something. "Whatever they're saying out there, I know what my granddaughter came home telling me for a year. Don't let them take that from you, sugar."
Sophie doesn't say anything for a second. I watch her swallow hard and find her voice.
"Thank you," she manages. "That—thank you. You don't know what that's worth right now."
"I've got an idea." The woman pats the counter and takes her cortado to a corner table, and Sophie stands there a second, blinking after her.
I catch her eye across the room, and she gives me a look that's half a laugh and half about to cry, and I give her a nod back.
Not everyone is going to think she's a monster.
Meghan catches my eye from the pass and tips her head at Sophie, just slightly, a question.
She holding up?
I tip mine back.
She's holding up.
The women in this family run a whole conversation off the angle of a chin, and I've learned to speak it by watching my mother and sister my entire life.
It's the back end of the shift, both of us on a break in the little office with the door cracked, when she tells me.
She's got her hands wrapped around a cooling cup she's not drinking.
She's looking at it instead of me, and I know the look. It's the look of somebody walking up to a hard thing sideways.
"Can I tell you something stupid?" she says.
"You can tell me something. We'll see if it's stupid."