The woman at the café dropped her pen three times before I realized she was crying.

She sat two tables away, close enough that I could see the tremor in her hands, the way she pressed her palm flat against the marble tabletop as if to steady something inside herself. Her coffee had gone cold. A thin skin had formed across its surface, catching the late afternoon light that filtered through the plane trees outside.

I shouldn't have looked. In Barcelona, we've perfected the art of proximity without intimacy—sharing walls, streets, the same square meter of shade, all while maintaining our careful distances. But her pen rolled under my table, and I had no choice but to pick it up.

"Gracies," she said, taking it. Her Catalan was textbook-perfect, the accent wrong. American, maybe. Or Dutch.

"De res," I replied, already turning back to my own notebook.

"What are you writing?"

I almost didn't answer. The question felt intrusive in a way I couldn't name. But something in her voice—a brittleness, like she was holding herself together with that single question—made me pause.

"Stories," I said. "Small ones. About people."

She nodded, staring at her cold coffee. "Do you ever write about people who can't say what they mean?"

"Always," I said. "That's the only kind worth telling."

She smiled at that, though it didn't reach her eyes. "I'm supposed to call my mother. She doesn't know I'm here. She thinks I'm at a conference in Stuttgart."

I waited. Outside, a bicycle bell rang twice, insistent.

"I needed to see if I could still do this," she continued, speaking to the coffee cup now, not to me. "Sit alone somewhere. Order something in a language I barely know. Not explain myself to anyone."

The waiter passed, clearing the next table with practiced indifference.

"And can you?" I asked.

She looked up then, meeting my eyes for the first time. Behind her glasses, I saw recognition—not of me, but of something in the question itself. She reached for her phone, held it for a moment, then set it down again.

"I don't know yet," she said.

We sat in silence after that. She never made the call. When she finally left, she didn't take the pen. I found it later, still under my table. A cheap blue Bic, the kind you buy in packs of ten.

I kept it. I'm using it now.

#flashfiction #Barcelona #untoldstories #solitude