By the first weekend back, the block was no longer a business district.
It was a local event.
Not officially.
Not with permits.
Not with barricades or vendors or civic blessing.
Just in practice.
Because by Saturday morning, every person in town who had heard even one rumor about the Winchester block had decided they needed to see it with their own eyes. The café had become a pilgrimage site for the curious, the thirsty, the suspicious, the deeply bored, and the socially unwell. The workshop had become worse: a fake-service war zone filled with people who suddenly cared very deeply about tire pressure, brake checks, oil changes, and whether the “dark-haired mechanic with the scary pretty girlfriend” was working that day.
The answer, unfortunately for public stability, was yes.
They all were.
Both Deans.
Both Sams.
Vlyluna.
Adrian.
The baby upstairs in the private flat with Mara and Thomas alternating supervision like highly trained national security personnel.
And the staff, already exhausted beyond reason, now running on caffeine, grim loyalty, and the kind of black humor that only developed after surviving monsters and town gossip in equal measure.
By 9:05 a.m., the line at Lantern & Ledger curved out the door and onto the sidewalk.
By 9:12, the workshop lot was full.
By 9:18, someone on the town app posted:
THEY ARE ALL HERE. I REPEAT. THE WHOLE BEAUTIFUL FAMILY IS VISIBLY FUNCTIONING.
And then everything got worse.
Amelia Grant had come in for a lemon scone.
That was the story she would later tell her sister, her group chat, and, eventually, three separate people who did not deserve access to her emotional state.
It was not a lie.
It just wasn’t the whole truth.