The woman at Table 7 ordered black coffee and asked for the check before taking her first sip.
Marco had been working at Café Luna for three years, long enough to catalog the patterns. Sunday morning regulars nursed their cortados, stretched their newspapers across two tables, made the café their living room. But Table 7 was already counting coins from her wallet, arranging them in neat stacks on the marble surface.
She wore a wedding ring—gold, thin, catching the morning light slanting through the Gothic Quarter's narrow streets. Her phone lay face-down on the table. She hadn't touched it.
Marco wiped down Table 5, buying time. The coffee sat untouched, steam rising in slow spirals.
When he returned with her change, she was crying. Not the dramatic kind—just water sliding down her face while the rest of her stayed perfectly still. The coins remained in their careful towers. The coffee remained exactly where he'd placed it.
"I'm sorry," she said. "How much do I owe you?"
"Nothing," Marco heard himself say. "The coffee's on the house."
She looked at him then, really looked, and he saw something crack in her expression. "I come here every Sunday," she said. "Did you know that?"
He hadn't. Not consciously. But now that she said it, he recognized the pattern—the same table, the same order, the same precise arrangement of time.
"I sit here and decide whether to go home," she continued. "Every week. Same table. Same decision."
The café hummed around them—the hiss of the espresso machine, someone's laughter, the scrape of a chair. Ordinary sounds in an ordinary place where extraordinary things happened quietly.
"And today?" Marco asked.
She wrapped both hands around the untouched cup, feeling its warmth. Outside, church bells began to ring—Santa Maria del Pi, calling the faithful. She looked toward the sound, then back at the coffee, then at the ring on her finger.
"Today," she said slowly, "I think I'll stay long enough to drink it."
Marco nodded and walked away, giving her space. When he glanced back from behind the counter, she was raising the cup to her lips. Small sip. Then another.
She stayed for forty-seven minutes. He counted.
When she finally left, she placed exact change on the table despite what he'd said, and beneath it, a folded napkin with two words written in careful script: Thank you.
Marco never saw her at Table 7 again. But every Sunday morning, he kept it empty until noon, just in case.
#flashfiction #Barcelona #moments #decisions