#secondchances

The woman at the café kept checking her phone, then the door, then her phone again. I'd been watching her for twenty minutes from my corner table, the way her fingers worried the edge of her napkin into a small pile of paper snow.

She'd ordered a cortado. It sat untouched, a skin forming on the surface.

When the door opened, she looked up with such naked hope that I had to glance away. But it was just someone collecting a takeaway order. Her face reset itself, carefully blank.

The woman at the café table kept touching her collarbone—fingers finding the hollow, lingering there, as though checking for something that had gone missing.

Marco noticed because he'd been watching her for twenty minutes, waiting for his date who wasn't coming. The woman sat alone too, coffee long cold, a paperback open but unread. Every few minutes: hand to throat, that absent searching gesture.

When she stood to leave, something silver caught the light. A necklace, tucked beneath her collar. She paused, looking at his table, and for a suspended moment Marco thought she might speak.

The café terrace was closing when she noticed the book.

Not her book

—she'd left hers at home. This one sat propped against the sugar bowl at the next table, spine bent backward, pages fluttering in the evening breeze.