It was a slow day at the café.
No glowing letters.
No enchanted coupons.
No pastry uprisings or teleporting goats.
Just a calm drizzle outside and the cozy smell of cinnamon steeping in the air. I was restocking sugar cubes (the polite ones that didn't scream when dissolved) when the front bell chimed.
A tall, cloaked figure stepped in, dripping faint stardust onto the welcome mat.
"Welcome," I said automatically, reaching for a towel. "Please wipe—oh."
Because the towel I reached for?
Wasn't there.
Neither was the countertop.
Or the floor.
Or my own hand.
For a blink—just one blink—I saw through myself.
Like I had been peeled sideways.
The Teacup Key
The stranger held out something tiny: a porcelain key, shaped like a teacup, with steam swirls carved into its handle.
I didn't reach for it. I couldn't.
Because time had stopped.
But not by me.
I didn't activate the stopwatch.
I didn't feel the freeze.
It just... happened.
Like someone had pressed pause from the outside.
The air shimmered.
And the stranger finally spoke—not aloud, but straight into my mind:
"You are not the center. But you are a thread."
"We are the Fourth Fold. We sip your time like warm tea."
"Soon, your perception will widen."
Then, just as suddenly—
Everything snapped back.
What the Scone Just Happened
I gasped and staggered backward.
Naomi, who had been playing cards with a bread elemental in the corner, looked up. "Whoa, what's up? You look like you saw a ghost and then became one."
I held up the key.
It pulsed with a strange warmth. Not heat. Dimensional weight.
And then I heard it—faintly.
"One move left. One move inward."
Naomi Attempts an Explanation (Kinda)
Later that night, I told Naomi everything.
"Okay," she said, lying upside down on the couch. "So basically you were visited by interdimensional teacup gods who sip our timeline like chamomile?"
"…Yes?"
She sat up. "I read a sci-fi manga about this once. Fourth-dimensional beings experience time like space. They can see past, present, and future all at once—like reading a book instead of living it."
"So they can see all my chapters at once?" I asked.
"Maybe," she said. "And maybe you're the book they're watching."
That made me feel weird.
And kind of important.
And also deeply unqualified.
Later That Night
I stared at the stopwatch ticking slowly beside my pillow.
I had thought I was in control.
Thought I was navigating this story, one breadcrumb at a time.
But if these "Fourth Fold" beings were real… then I wasn't just moving forward.
I was being observed.
Guided, maybe.
Not in a scary way.
But like…
Like I was part of a much, much bigger recipe.
And someone out there was already reading Chapter 45.