Jo always said the Harmony Café didn’t have normal business hours and that it had haunted suggestions of time, but today, even the espresso machine disagreed with reality.

The open sign flickered between YES and MAYBE while the specials board kept erasing itself, and Jo, already running late and dangerously low on patience, spilled her first coffee of the day straight into the mop bucket.

“Great,” she muttered, “now it’s a mocha mop.”

That was when the clock struck 6:66 am, which in itself is implausible but not all that impossible in Cedar Grove, and everything reset.

She blinked. She was holding her travel mug. No mop. No spilled coffee. No weird chalkboard. “…Did I black out?” she asked the toaster.

“Technically,” said Clorvex from behind the pastry case, “you’re in a time loop. Also, you owe me one blueberry scone.”

“How long have I been looping?”

“Difficult to say. You’ve developed a twitch, and at one point you tried to marry the espresso machine.”

Every loop began the same.

Jo opened the café. Sev ordered his ‘existential espresso, hold the dread’.  A bat flew in and stole a croissant. Matteo burned something. The Queen of the Hollow Moon complained about the sun from behind the black out curtains in her booth, and Jo spilled coffee and shouted, “Not again!”

And then everything restarted.

Over. And over.

By the forty-seventh loop, Jo had rewritten the chalkboard menu to include Screamaccino, memorized all of Sev’s sighs by tone and century, hosted vampire trivia and still lost, taught the espresso machine to yodel, and invented a dance called the “Time Pressed Shuffle”.

She tried breaking the loop with spells, a caffeine detox, and a full on mop sacrifice.

Nothing worked.

It wasn’t until Jo sat down with no plan, no mop, and only a cold brew and a deep sigh that things had changed.

“I don’t want to fix it today,” she said to no one. “I just want to be.”

The clock clicked calmly to 7:00 am.

The loop ended.

Sev handed her a fresh croissant.

Clorvex poured himself a celebratory mimosa while the espresso machine steamed a heart in her latte.

Jo blinked. “Wait. THAT was it? Just accepting the moment?”

Clorvex nodded. “Time is like biscotti. Don’t fight the crunch.”