The week after the rain did not exactly clear; it softened. Clouds parked themselves above the city like tired guests who meant to leave and kept thinking of one more story to tell. The light was generous but indecisive, and inside the restaurant the air held on to it the way wood keeps the memory of a warmth it once knew.

Daphne woke earlier than necessary, a quiet alarm inside her that only she could hear. She liked arriving before the street stretched and yawned, before the buses rehearsed their routes, before the smell of hot brakes and bakery ovens made a treaty in the air. She unlocked the door and stepped into what she had chosen—tables, a counter the color of cinnamon bark, the plant by the window that had decided to be brave and grow toward the street.

She had begun listing small repairs in a notebook: hinge squeak near bathroom, wobble on table three, hairline crack in the glass sugar jar, the way the bell above the door rang a fraction of a second after the door had already closed as if it were remembering its job. Under the list she wrote a sentence she would not yet say aloud: Keep the rhythm. A place could lose its rhythm the way a person could. You had to listen and tap your foot when no one else did.

Mira found her there with her sleeves already rolled. “You beat me,” she said, which was more compliment than complaint. She set a folder on the counter as if setting down a sleeping cat.

“What’s in there?”

“Tomorrow,” Mira said, voice soft with the realism of someone who had been right too many times. “Rent, utilities, estimates for the new dishwasher. Also, a note from the landlord reminding us that he has, in fact, noticed we exist.”

Daphne opened the folder, then closed it again, and the movement felt like weather. “We’ll make a plan.”

“We always do,” Mira said, then added, “and then we make a second plan that actually works.” She looked around the room the way a conductor looks at a stage before the musicians show up. “I ordered more cups. The thick ones that don’t pretend to be delicate.”

“Thank you.”

Mira’s mouth curved. “We serve the kind of comfort that chips but doesn’t quit.”

Finn arrived with a crate of lemons that glittered like small, patient suns. Behind him, Jamie carried a bundle of chalk and authority. “I’m curating the board,” he announced, climbing the stool. “We need a sentence for people who are still waking up but want to believe they’re already here.”

“What’s the sentence?” Daphne asked, already smiling.

Jamie drew his letters with care. TODAY WE PRACTICE STAYING. He underlined practice twice and added a crooked moon in the corner.

“Practice implies we can get better,” Finn said.

“Practice implies we forgive ourselves for not being good yet,” Mira said.

The door’s late bell rang. Caius, hair still wet from a shower he had taken too quickly, paused on the threshold like a note stretched just a little longer than written. He lifted a hand in greeting. The camera bag hung from his shoulder—present, undecided. The postcards he’d given Daphne a few days earlier were in her apron pocket; she had begun carrying them the way some people carry talismans.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Please,” he said, and added, without ceremony, “They want an answer by Friday.”

Mira cleared a clean rectangle on the counter. “That’s three days.”

“Three days is a personality test,” Finn said. “I fail those.”

“You fail all tests,” Jamie said, and Finn bowed as if thanked.

Daphne ground beans, the small thunder of it steadying her thoughts. “Are you leaning toward yes?”

“I am leaning toward not lying,” Caius said. “About what the work is. About what I want from it. About what it asks from me.” He placed his palms flat on the counter. “Six weeks is short and also a kind of geography. I don’t know if I can cross it without moving the map.”

“Maps move,” Daphne said, pouring water in circles. “They always have. We pretend they don’t because stillness is a comfort.”

He watched the coffee bloom, and she watched him watch it, and the room put a hand lightly on both their shoulders, saying, if a room can say anything, You’re not alone in your decisions even when you decide alone.

By noon the neighborhood had committed itself to being awake. The *Sunday Table* idea had grown legs during the week and now reappeared with arms full of dishes and stories. A woman in a green raincoat carried in a pot that smelled like tomatoes forgiving onions. A teenager set down a cake with a steadfast tilt. A postal worker on his break read the rules Finn had scribbled on a napkin and nodded solemnly: ONE DISH, ONE STORY, ONE SONG IF YOU DARE.

Mira staged the line with a competence that could have run a small government. “No bottlenecks near the condiments,” she commanded. “No philosophizing at the forks.” She put Jamie in charge of writing the first name of anyone who volunteered a story; he misspelled all of them in the same affectionate way.

Caius did not film; not filming had become its own discipline. He listened. He wiped crumbs with the heel of his hand. He asked a man in a dusty baseball cap about the photograph pinned to his apron. It was a dog. It was always a dog. The man cried a little and didn’t apologize. Daphne breathed in the room and felt every chair as if her attention were a blanket tucking them in.

Evelyn appeared in the doorway, unannounced but not unwelcome, as if the street had pushed her gently inside. She had cut her hair; the new line of it made her look less like a plan and more like a choice. “Before you protest,” she said to Caius, “I’m not here to stir anything. I have a thing two blocks away and wanted to see… the not-thing you’ve built here.”

“It’s very much a thing,” Jamie corrected, then looked at Daphne for approval.

“It is,” Daphne agreed, and handed Evelyn a plate. “You’ll need both hands.”

Evelyn took a piece of the tilting cake, balanced it well, and stood near the window where the light auditioned for everyone and chose most. “They want you for six weeks,” she said, a fact presented without a verdict.

“They do,” Caius said.

“Six weeks is long enough to tell the truth badly,” Evelyn said, “and short enough to wish you’d told it better.” She glanced at Daphne. “Will you be angry if he goes?”

Daphne considered anger the way one considers a coat—useful, heavy, not for every day. “I’ll be busy,” she said. “Anger requires time I owe to the floor, and the cups, and the people who think joy is something they’re allowed to touch here.”

Evelyn smiled, small and earnest. “Then you’ll both be fine.” She finished the cake carefully. “I’m rooting for complicated forms of fine.” She left the plate near the sink, like someone leaving an altar without making it a scene, and slipped back into the weather.