The steam wand hissed like a disgruntled violinist and Ivy Bloom felt, as she always did at eight in the morning, that the world was being ordered into shapes she understood. The bell over the café door chimed its tinny version of theatrical optimism every few minutes and the counter smelled of citrus cleaner and dark roast so reliably that she sometimes dreamed in crema. Bloom & Bloom was a narrow place wedged between a yoga studio and a vintage store with more sequins than plausible histories. The sign above the door had lost one letter years ago—an accepted imperfection that made the place feel like a conspirator rather than a business.
Ivy moved with the sort of speed that only long practice and a solid caffeine budget buy. Her hands knew the curves of the portafilter as if it were a friend with a slightly dramatic personality. She tamped, listened for the first whisper of espresso, and slid a latte across to a woman who smiled like she owned small suns. Behind the counter a squat espresso machine named Lemon, vintage enough to be cranky and shined enough to be vain, hummed a tune that sounded suspiciously like three notes from a musical Ivy couldn't place. On Ivy's shoulder, balanced as if on a middleware of trust and duct tape, sat Pip: a little mechanical cat with brass whiskers and a penchant for batting at stray napkins. Pip's green eyes blinked to life whenever someone dropped a coin into the tip jar, as if it were a tiny, polite slot machine.
The café had a steady clientele—students who wrote novels during shifts, a retired seamstress named Marta who mended things free of charge, and Theo, Ivy's roommate and an earnest songwriter who treated the café's window seat like a stage for songs that arrived only in fragments. Ivy's world fit into angles and rituals. She knew where the mismatched teaspoons lived, how the mug with the chipped handle warmed hands more generously than the rest, and that the old plant in the corner refused to die out of stubbornness or principle.
On that particular Tuesday the air carried an undercurrent of misplacement. A man rushed in with his hair still holding the shape of a pillow. "Has anyone seen a small bronze key?" he asked without breathing. His voice bounced off the walls and landed like a pebble in a pond. People glanced at him. Pip trotted down Ivy's arm, tail curling with detective-like poise.
Ivy reached for the rag without meaning to and then, because action had a way of committing things to happen, asked, "What's it for?"
"The city's Founders' Bell," he said, releasing a frantic breath. "It's ceremonial. It rings once, and then the day will—" He stopped, because he had realized his words sounded like superstition and not like a municipal calendar. "Important things happen when it rings," he finished.
Marta, who countered everyone’s urgency with a calm that smelled like lavender and thread, hooked an eyebrow over her knitting. "You mean the bell from the old square?" she said.
He nodded. "It’s gone. Someone must have misplaced it. Or—" He swallowed. "Or it walked away."
At the back table, a paperback fell open and Theo looked up with concern, his pen a precarious spear. Ivy's fingers curled around the rag until the threads left a small pattern on her palm—a map of tiny responsibilities. The city had lost little things before: umbrellas, passports, once a mayoral wig that had turned up deep in a sewer plant wearing an expression of cynical acceptance. But a ceremonial bell made everything feel vast. It made the absence a kind of weather.
Ivy smiled, the smallest of smiles, one that had a habit of becoming decisions. "Okay," she said. "Let's make a morning of it."