Mademoiselle Cocoa Beans's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Mademoiselle Cocoa Beans had promised the weeping woman a cure. She could taste joy, fold laughter into caramel, pour comfort into ganache. But sorrow refused her. The widow had left an hour ago, and Cocoa Beans still stood at her marble counter, her frizzy red hair loosening under her clockwork top hat. She wanted one thing above all: a chocolate for every broken heart that walked through her door. Yet she could not capture the feeling of a person remembering something sad. Without it, her cure was a lie. She pressed a chocolate she had made against her tongue. It tasted of nothing. She spat it into the sink. Twelve failed batches sat in a row, each dull and hollow. She had gathered tears, salt, wilted violets. None held the true weight of grief. The brass bell above her door rang. An old woman entered, wrapped in dark blue and gold, tarot cards fanned in one hand. Clockwork stars glinted in her white hair. Cocoa Beans knew her well. Casandra Videncia read spirits the way others read letters, and she never knocked before a truth. "You are chasing sorrow with your hands," Casandra said. Her voice was soft, the voice she used for the wounded. "Sorrow is not in the tear, child. It is in the mind, the moment it turns back." "Then show me how to hold it," Cocoa Beans said. Casandra laughed suddenly at the empty air beside her, then sobered. She lifted the glowing lantern hanging near the window, the one with amber crystal stars and moons dangling from its fine gold frame. Inside, a warm light spun like caught starlight. "This light remembers dreams," Casandra said. "A memory is a dream you have while awake. Feed it a true one, and it will keep the feeling whole." Cocoa Beans's hands shook. She thought of her grandmother, dead ten winters. She held that ache in her chest and breathed it into the lantern's glass. The amber crystals trembled. The light dimmed to a deep, aching gold, the color of a long goodbye. She melted fresh chocolate and set the bowl beneath the lantern's glow. The light poured into it, slow as syrup. When she tasted the chocolate, her throat tightened. She saw her grandmother's flour-dusted hands. She felt the exact shape of missing her. She wept, and she smiled, and she knew the cure was real. "It works," she whispered. "I can catch it." Casandra set down the lantern and studied the chocolate. Her wise eyes narrowed. "You caught your own sorrow, child. But your guests carry theirs. To fill each chocolate, you must pull the grief from a stranger's mind, and feel it as your own." She touched Cocoa Beans's wrist. "One heartbreak is heavy. Can you carry a hundred?" Cocoa Beans looked at the row of failed batches, then at the single true chocolate in her palm. She had her method now. She did not yet know its price.