Tea And Empathy

Reading the leaves was just a bit of fun. No-one was supposed to take it seriously...

‘EVERYTHING all right, Mrs D?” Cassie paused beside the table where Melanie Dobbs set herself up every morning with the Financial Times”.

“The usual, please, Cassie. Unless you can recommend anything?”

Cassie grinned. Mrs D was keen to work her way through every tea on the menu, but liked to be sweet-talked into it.

“On a day like today, the Darjeeling goes down a treat.”

“Then I'll have a pot of that, thanks.” Mrs D sank her nose into the paper.

“Interesting set-up here,” the guy at table number five remarked.

He wasn’t a regular customer, and Cassie had assumed that he was meeting someone, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

He was scanning the menu, clearly at a loss with the list of teas available.

Finally he gave a shrug.

“Gunpowder, please.”

It was, after all, the most manly-sounding tea on the menu.

Cassie fished out her notepad.

“Anything else? Cake, biscuits?”

“Empathy?” He grinned up at her with warm brown eyes that she sternly told herself to ignore.

“That comes as standard.”

Funnily enough, although the name of her café, Tea and Empathy, often attracted people in the first place, it was what they discovered inside that made them stay.

“How does this work?”

He indicated the tea-leaf reading booklet that each table held.

“It’s all in the booklet,” she replied. If that doesn’t explain everything then haven't done my job properly.”

When she returned with his order, he held out a card.

“| should have explained. I’m with the local paper. came here to cover the village féte and stumbled across this place.

“It’s the sort of thing our readers would love to hear about.”