The plaza had been rebuilt after the fire and most of the units were already spoken for. We were late. We brought a tape measure anyway, walked the empty bay at the corner, and tried to picture a roaster against the back wall.
The realtor watched us for a minute and then asked the question we hadn't prepared an answer for. What is this going to be? Not the legal answer — the human one. We said: a coffee shop. A real one. With a real bakery.
He nodded slowly, the way people do when they're working out whether to bother. Then he told us he could have filled the plaza three times over with restaurants. Restaurants are easy money. What this neighborhood actually needed, he said, was a place to sit. A place that would still be there in five years. A coffeehouse that took itself seriously enough that it didn't need to apologize for being slow.
We stood at the back of the bay, hands in our pockets, looking at the bare drywall, and signed the lease two weeks later.