Gwyn draws

The oven at the back of the shop on Rue des Martyrs has been warm since three. Coleen doesn't set an alarm for it. She wakes when the building goes quiet, the last delivery van gone, the last window dark across the street, and she lies there a minute listening to the difference before she gets up.

Flour first. Then the pot.

The hot chocolate isn't on the menu. It never has been. She makes it anyway, milk and dark chocolate and a pinch of salt, and leaves it on the low burner where the early kids can see the steam on the inside of the glass as they come up the street with their collars up.

She unlocks at 5:58. Not six. Her mother told her once that six is when the town starts, and 5:58 is when it's still yours, and Coleen has never found a reason to argue with that.

The chalkboard by the door says Coleen's and nothing else. There was a week she wrote the hours under it, careful, in a straight line. She rubbed it out on the Thursday. If you're the kind of person who needs the hours, she figured, you'll find the door open anyway.

Hugh was the first one. Six years old, or near enough, in a coat with the sleeves rolled twice and coins counted out twice on the counter. She gave him the cup and pushed the coins back with two fingers, and he looked at her like she'd broken a rule of the world.

So she made it one. The first cup of the morning is free, for whoever gets there first. It doesn't matter who they are or how much they have on them. That's permanent. She said it out loud once, to the tabby on the sill, so it would count as said.

The tabby arrives around 5:40 most mornings and waits with its chin on the sill until the lights go on. It has never once been invited. It has also never once missed a day.

Hugh came back the next week with two friends. Then four. Now there's a small knot of them at the counter at 5:58 every morning, coats too big for all of them, arguing about nothing, and Coleen works around them the way you work around weather.

There's a thing she does when the first tray comes out: she stands at the door for a second, hand flat on the wood, and looks down the street. Nothing to see. The town's asleep. But it's hers for that second, before the bell, before the noise, before anyone wants anything from her.

Then she opens.

Some mornings the board says Coleen's and it looks like a promise she made to herself and forgot the details of. She keeps it anyway. That's most of what a shop is: showing up at the same minute for people who might not come.

If you want a character of your own, there's one word between you and it. That part's on the front page. This one, though, wasn't asked for by anybody. She just showed up at three in the morning and started the oven.