Mornings in the bookshop were always hushed, as though time itself hesitated before stepping inside. The air held the faint sweetness of old paper and ink, mixed with the sharper tang of polish rubbed into the wooden counters over decades of weary hands. Outside, the city moved at its hurried pace, but here—behind glass smudged by fog and fingerprints—the world slowed.
Elara liked it that way. Her rituals stitched her into the quiet: counting coins that clinked like tiny bells, folding brown paper bags with precise corners, steeping her tea until it stained the cup in watercolor shades of amber. Everything repeated, predictable, unchanging.
That morning, however, something slipped.
The receipt lay curled in the till as if hiding from her. The paper felt warm when she picked it up, too warm for something supposedly forgotten. She smoothed its wrinkles and read the black print:
Flat white. Extra shot. 7:42 a.m.
Her lips parted soundlessly. She had been in the shop since seven, shutters locked, alone.
But it was not the order that shook her. It was the ink on the side margin, slanted, hurried:
Do you see this too?
The words pulsed in her mind like a struck bell. She lifted her gaze to the shop's stillness—the crooked rows of books, the dust sifting lazily in sunbeams—and though nothing stirred, she felt eyes brushing against her skin.
She pressed the receipt into her apron pocket. For the rest of the morning she touched it as if it might vanish, as though it tethered her to something she could not yet name.