The café was closing, but the woman at table six hadn't moved in an hour. She sat with her hands wrapped around a cold cup of cortado, staring at the empty chair across from her.

"We're closing," I said, gentler than usual.

She looked up. Her eyes were red. "I'm waiting for someone."

I'd seen this before—the waiting that turns into vigil, the hope that curdles into something else. "How long?"

"Three years." She laughed, a small, broken sound. "He said he'd meet me here. Same table. Same time. I said I'd wait."

I should have walked away. Should have cleared her cup, flipped the sign to cerrado, gone home. Instead, I pulled out the chair—his chair—and sat down.

"What if he's waiting too?" I asked. "What if he came yesterday, or he'll come tomorrow, and you keep missing each other by one day?"

Her face crumpled. "Then I'm a fool."

"No," I said. "Then you're both fools."

She smiled, just barely. "What do I do?"

I thought of my own waiting—letters I never sent, calls I never made, the distance I built brick by brick until it was too high to cross. "You write it down. Everything you wanted to say. You leave it here, with me. If he comes, I'll give it to him."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then at least the words exist somewhere other than inside you."

She pulled a napkin toward her, borrowed my pen. Her hand shook as she wrote. When she finished, she folded it twice, pressed it into my palm, and stood.

"Thank you," she said.

I never saw her again.

But two weeks later, a man came in. Asked for table six. Looked at the empty chair like it might still hold her shape.

I gave him the napkin.

He read it. Wept. Left.

I don't know what the napkin said. I don't know if he found her, or if they both went on waiting in different cafés, different cities, missing each other by miles instead of minutes.

All I know is this: some stories don't have endings. They just have the space where an ending should be, and we fill it with whatever we need to keep moving.

#flashfiction #Barcelona #waiting #untoldstories