A city-centre café where the coffee misbehaves, the staff are eccentric, and sandwiches keep vanishing without permission.
Not every café earned a reputation. Under the Hat did it by accident, with bad timing, excellent coffee, and a steady supply of impossible little incidents.
It sat on the corner of Moose and Spring Streets, small enough to miss if you blinked and odd enough to make you blink twice. Inside, the air always carried two competing scents: strong coffee and sugar-spun candyfloss, as if the room could never quite agree on what kind of place it wanted to be. Felt hats hung from the walls in a row of ridiculous sizes, from neat little mushroom caps to one broad-brimmed disaster that looked as though it had been designed to shelter a parade. The floor complained under every step. The counter, polished and scarred from years of cups, trays, and bad decisions, was usually occupied by Susanna, who wore her smile like a challenge.
Susanna liked to say the café ran on caffeine, sarcasm, and emergency improvisation. She was not wrong. Jerome, the house cat, assisted when he felt like it, which was rarely and never in a way that made anyone calmer. He insisted he was a lion on holiday, though his idea of professional pride usually involved knocking a spoon off the counter and watching it fall with grim satisfaction. Roman, a retired magician with the tragic hands of a man who had spent too long making objects disappear on purpose, could not pour milk without producing foam in some impossible shape. Last Tuesday it had resembled a swan. On Wednesday, a volcano. On Thursday, nobody was prepared for what it became. Clare, who worked the tables and had the weary expression of someone perpetually one step behind a small disaster, spent half her shift rescuing olives from drinks that had never asked for them.
The regulars loved it, or claimed to. Here, a morning greeting might be drowned by a tray crashing to the floor, a chair scraping back too fast, or Jerome pouncing on a toy mouse with the dignity of a seasoned predator. Your latte might arrive with a fern of foam, a heart, or, if Roman had been unsupervised, something that looked uncomfortably like a tiny monument. The sandwiches were excellent, famously excellent, and yet they had a habit of vanishing. Not being eaten. Vanishing.
On Thursday, a man named Witold Augustus walked in wearing a checked coat and the expression of someone prepared to declare war on puffins. He chose the largest hat in the room, the one so broad it looked as though it had been built to hide a small theatre, and sat beneath it without removing his gloves. He ordered something spectacular, then stared at the wall with the concentrated intensity of a man expecting a secret door to apologise to him.
Roman was at the back, trying to teach Jerome to juggle cupcakes with predictably disastrous results, while Clare carried a tray of coffees that all smelled faintly of cinnamon and regret. Susanna had just reached for the next batch of buns when the café made a sound it had never made before.
It was like ten metres of bubble wrap being unrolled inside a trumpet.
Every head turned. Even Jerome froze mid-pounce. Under the table beside Witold Augustus, a huge, brightly coloured umbrella was opening very slowly, as if whoever held it believed in suspense as a lifestyle choice. On the tip of the umbrella sat a sandwich.
Not a sandwich on a plate. Not a sandwich in a bag.
A sandwich placed there like evidence.
And then the umbrella tilted, just slightly, toward Susanna.