No reply.
The door to the café opened. A gust of wet wind slapped the back of her neck. She didn’t turn around. She already knew it wasn’t him. His footsteps were heavier. These were soft, hesitant—someone looking for an outlet or a bathroom.
She looked up. A girl, maybe nineteen, holding a backpack with a broken strap. Her face was flushed from the cold, but her eyes were steady.
“He said he’d meet me here,” the girl whispered. “An hour ago.” candid-v3
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Lena didn’t say “Are you okay?” because they both knew the answer.
Her coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago. She wasn’t drinking it. She was holding it, both hands wrapped around the ceramic like it was a tiny life raft. No reply
The girl looked at the cup, then at Lena. She wiped her face with her sleeve—hard, like she was angry at her own tears.
Lena took a long breath. The kind that fills your lungs all the way to the bottom.
The girl nodded slowly. Then she picked up the cold coffee and drank it anyway. She didn’t turn around
She set the phone face-down on the table. The girl across from her had stopped crying. She was staring out the window now, watching the rain trace slow fingers down the glass.
Lena’s phone buzzed.
She sat at the last table by the window, the one with the wobbly leg she’d learned to balance with a folded napkin. The café was half-empty—a Monday evening kind of half-empty, where people nursed flat whites and stared at phones without really seeing them.
Lena almost laughed. Not at him. With him.
The Last Table by the Window