The woman's hands moved over the keyboard at the internet café, but her eyes kept drifting to the window. She'd been typing the same email for forty minutes.

Marco wiped down the espresso machine and watched her. In three years of running this place off La Rambla, he'd learned to read his customers. The tourists came in loud, took photos, left. The locals settled in quietly, knew where everything was without asking.

She was neither.

The cup of cortado he'd made her sat untouched, a skin forming on the foam. She wore a wedding ring but kept twisting it, pulling it up to her knuckle, pushing it back down.

Draft saved, her screen said. Not sent.

Marco had seen this before. The café wasn't really about the coffee or the wifi. It was about the threshold—the place between deciding and doing.

She looked up suddenly, catching him watching. "Sorry," she said in accented Spanish. "I should probably order something else if I'm going to stay."

"The cortado's fine." He picked up a cloth, began polishing glasses he'd already polished. "No rush."

She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I'm trying to write to someone. It's harder than I thought."

Marco nodded. He'd stopped giving advice years ago, after his own divorce. But he understood the weight of words you couldn't take back.

"Sometimes," he said, more to the glass in his hand than to her, "the coffee gets cold because we're not ready. And sometimes we're waiting to see if we can live with it cold."

She looked at the cup. At the screen. At her finger, worrying the ring.

Then she closed the laptop.

"You're right," she said. She pulled out a five-euro note, left it on the counter though the coffee was only two-fifty. "Some things you have to say in person."

She was gone before he could give her change.

Marco poured the cold cortado down the sink and wiped the table. Her cup had left a ring, a perfect circle in the wood's condensation. He studied it for a moment before wiping it away, the way he did with all the marks people left behind.

The email, whatever it said, would stay unsent. Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe tonight she'd write it again, from somewhere else, with different words.

He made himself an espresso and drank it while it was still hot.

#flashfiction #Barcelona #untoldstories #decisions