February first arrived on a Sunday.
Which meant I was at the West Village location at four in the morning.
Renee arrived at four-fifteen, looked at the three things I had already rearranged unnecessarily, and handed me a coffee without comment. We worked in the focused silence of two people who had been building toward something for long enough that the arrival of it felt both inevitable and slightly unreal — the way the thing you had been imagining for two years looked subtly different from the imagined version once it was actually standing in front of you. Not worse. Just more specific. More itself.
The display cases were full by six.
The espresso machine was calibrated by six-thirty.
The new hire — Maya, twenty-four, fast and precise and possessed of excellent pastry instincts that
