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“I see that.”

“Alphabetically and by steep time.” Valene turned. She’d lodged a complaint and lost, and it showed. “I’m charging rent. I have decided. Fair market rate for espresso-machine real estate, to be determined punitively.”

“What’s the going rate for that?”

“I’m going to make it up. It is going to be punitive.” She slid a mug across the copper counter. “Sit down. You look like you’ve been arguing with yourself since you left.” Mirelle sat. “I’ve been arguing with myself since about September.”

“How’s that going?”

“I’m losing.”

“Good.” Valene’s mouth curved. She’d been waiting for that answer. “Losing is the productive direction.”

The others arrived over the next twenty minutes. Garnet came through the back, took in the tea canisters on the floor, then the raccoon, then Mirelle. “It’s establishing dominion,” she said.

“Over a café?”

“Over a space that matters to you. Your creatures reflect your state. What do you feel when you’re here?”

Mirelle glanced around: the jewel-toned chairs, the copper counter, the chalkboard menu cycling between the daily specials and what Valene called the couplet of the week. This week it read:

The rain has no opinion about you, which is either very rude or very kind.

Mirelle had read it three times and was still deciding. Valene stood behind it all, running her café the way she ran everything she loved, as if it were personal. Mirelle took in the café, all of it. “Safe.” Garnet nodded as if this completed a calculation. “Then the raccoon is claiming it. On your behalf.”

“I didn’t ask it to.”

“No.” Garnet’s pause said the rest without words. “You wouldn’t have.”

Bexley arrived a few minutes later, notebook tabbed, two pens uncapped before she’d pulled out her chair. She studied Mirelle the way she approached every problem she’d decided to solve. “Four at once,” she said. “One is normal. Two is notable. Four is —” she checked her notes “— nowhere in the records. Walk me through the exact moment. Not what you were feeling, what you were doing. Where your hands were. Where your eyes were.”

“I was at the sink,” Mirelle said. “Tap running. Staring at Cara’s chair.” Bexley wrote. Underlined. “Cara’s chair specifically,” Bexley said.

“She dragged it slightly away from the table before she sat. Every time. For seventeen years.”

Bexley went still. Then she wrote three more items, added another tab, and said: “The specifics matter. Summoning magic responds to depth, not volume. You didn’t have more emotion. You had precise emotion.” Mirelle glanced at the notebook. “So, precision grief is worse than general grief. Noted. That tracks with my life.”

Bexley aimed a pen at her. “Yes.”

Fiora arrived last, her energy several feet ahead of her. She unwound her scarf and assessed the floor.

“The raccoon has been busy,” she said.

“Establishing dominion,” Garnet agreed.

“Obviously.” Fiora dropped into her chair and pulled a pastry from her bag. She always brought pastries and had never once arrived empty-handed. “Mirelle, you need to name it.”

“I have enough going on.”

“Naming it is recognition. Which is different from more work.” She pushed a pastry across the table. “It has goals. Name the raccoon.”

At the espresso machine, the raccoon finished its cork assessment and moved the selected specimen fourteen inches left with decisive authority. “It does have goals,” Mirelle admitted.

“Name it.” Fiora’s gaze was almost gentle about Mirelle’s procrastination.

Chaos. But that was too obvious. Too comfortable a distance. This creature had come from her. Whatever it was — chaotic, territorial, relentlessly purposeful — it came from the part of her that had cracked open in the kitchen and refused to be managed into anything acceptable.

She faced the raccoon, all of it, everything it had come from, and said: “Rowan.”