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Magdalene left last night the way she arrived, dramatically, sweeping out through the door with a promise to write. Her final piece of wisdom was that the next sign wouldn’t come until it came, and that fretting about it in the meantime achieves nothing except wasted energy better spent on patience.

Which is, apparently, why I’m back behind the counter at Coffeelicious the very next morning, opening up, same as always. It turns out prophecies don’t come with paid leave, and rent still needs paying whether the world’s ending or not.

I decide, on balance, that the best response to your two closest friends discovering you’re the literal embodiment of a cosmic force, and to the whole end-of-the-world business suddenly feeling less like a distant childhood story and more like something with an actual date attached to it, is to reorganise the entire pastry case by colour.

It seemed, at seven in the morning with the shop still smelling of last night’s bleach and this morning’s first batch of coffee, like an entirely reasonable use of my energy. Better than sitting somewhere still and letting the actual size of yesterday catch up with me, certainly. But now I’m having slight doubts.

“That’s the fourth time you’ve done that today,” Felix says, watching me shuffle the almond croissants two inches to the left for what is, admittedly, the fourth time.

“It looks better this way,” I say.

“It looked exactly the same the first three times,” Felix says.

“Did it? I don’t think it did. I think the lighting’s different in the afternoon and it was throwing the whole display off.” I step back, consider the case with my head tilted, then move the croissants back to where they started. “There. Much better.”

Felix folds his arms and watches me with the particular flat, assessing look he usually reserves for suspicious stock deliveries. “You’ve also renamed the teas on the menu.”

“Teas should be named properly,” I say. “It’s basic organisation.”

“You’ve used their Latin names, Bunny,” Felix says. “Nobody who walks in here wanting a camomile tea is going to look for Matricaria chamomilla on the chalkboard. You’ve made the entire menu unreadable to every customer we have.”

“I like a challenge,” I say.

“Bunny,” Felix says.

“I’m fine!” I say, possibly slightly too loudly, beaming at him with what I’m fairly confident is my most convincing smile. The one that’s gotten me through years of compound dinners, and considerably worse complaints than this. “Genuinely, properly fine. Never better. Would you like to hear about the goats again? I’ve got several new theories.”

“I would not,” Felix says.

“They might have been reacting to a change in barometric pressure,” I say. “Goats are surprisingly sensitive to that sort of thing.”

“Bunny,” Felix says, warningly.

“Or possibly there was a particularly interesting smell nearby,” I say. “Goats will follow an interesting smell to the ends of the earth, it’s actually rather sweet when you think about it, very committed little creatures, I really think we’re underestimating them as a species.”

“Bunny.” Felix’s voice goes quiet in the way that actually gets my attention, rather than the sharp way that mostly makes me talk faster. “You’ve reorganised my entire shop twice and you’re doing the voice.”

“What voice?” I ask.

“The voice where everything’s fine and you’re extremely happy about it and if anyone asks you’re going to keep insisting everything’s fine and extremely happy until either they stop asking or you actually combust,” Felix says.

I open my mouth to insist, again, cheerfully, that everything is in fact fine, and something about the way he’s looking at me, patient and unimpressed in equal measure, makes the words stick somewhere behind my teeth instead.

“I don’t know what else to do with it,” I admit, quieter, the smile slipping slightly at the edges before I catch it and haul it back into place. “The alternative to being cheerful about it is sitting somewhere very still and thinking about it properly, and I don’t especially want to do that in the middle of a shift.”

“That’s fair,” Felix says, and, mercifully, doesn’t push further, just squeezes my shoulder once on his way past to deal with the queue that’s built up while I’ve been relabelling tea by Latin name.

I make it through the rest of the shift on sheer momentum, chattering at customers with slightly more enthusiasm than strictly necessary. I compliment three separate people on their coats. I learn entirely too much about a stranger’s difficult divorce, because I ask how his day is going and genuinely mean it. I offer a free biscuit to a woman who looks vaguely sad, which Felix later informs me is not technically company policy. And then I organise a small impromptu debate with two regulars about whether goats can, in fact, sense barometric pressure, which ends inconclusively but with everyone considerably more invested than they were five minutes earlier. A student comes in wanting to know if we do oat milk. I talk her through all four alternative milks we stock, with the enthusiasm of a man launching a small business, entirely unprompted. She leaves looking faintly bewildered but also, I think, genuinely better informed.

By the time I lock up and step out into the evening, I feel wrung out in a way that has nothing to do with being on my feet for eight hours.

My shadow is waiting, same as always, except tonight there’s something different in the quality of his stillness. Something coiled tighter than usual, the sort of stillness that makes the air round him feel a few degrees more serious than the evening itself.

“You are not all right,” he says, before I’ve even properly fallen into step beside him.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You rearranged the same pastries four times,” he says. “Felix told me he was concerned.”