Jo didn’t sleep that night. She couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the woman in the lightning. The one who wasn’t her mother but looked like a ghost born of tea leaves and broken promises.

By morning, Harmony Café was unusually calm. Too calm.

Even The Froth, now residing in its meditation jar, remained suspiciously silent.

“We’re in a pre-steep,” Mira muttered, wrapping a shawl of lavender infused fabric around her shoulders. “Like a pause before the boil.”

Matteo frowned. “The espresso beans are sweating.”

“They do that sometimes,” Jo replied.

“No, I mean they’re actually sweating. I just saw one blink.”

Outside, Cedar Grove’s wind carried ash not from fire, but from memory. The rooftops smelled of regret and the air tasted like over steeped chamomile.

The door chimed and in walked a woman. She wasn’t tall. She wasn’t loud, but the silence bent around her like gravity. Her hair billowed as if underwater. Her clothes shimmered with patterns that shifted between constellations and spilled ink. In her hand was a teapot, old and clay fired with carved runes no one could read but everyone felt.

“Is that…?” Matteo whispered.

Jo nodded. “That’s the original steeping vessel. The Original Teapot of Steeped Secrets.”

The woman placed the teapot on the counter.

“I’m here for Jo,” she said, in a voice that wasn’t a voice so much as a sensation behind the ribs.

Jo stepped forward.

The teapot trembled.

The woman smiled.

“Your mouth remembers what your memory doesn’t. But your steep was always meant to boil over, child.”

The runes on the teapot flared.

Then Jo remembered. She remembered a fire, a circle of stone, a tea so strong it stopped time, and  her hands pouring from that very vessel. She looked at the woman and saw her own reflection.

“You brewed the first silence,” the woman said gently. “And now, you’ll brew the last.”