The woman at the next table had been crying into her cortado for twenty minutes.
She did it quietly—the way people cry in public when they've had practice. One hand curved around the cup, the other holding a pen above a blank postcard. Every few minutes she'd write a word, then cross it out.
I wasn't trying to watch. But in Café de l'Opera, the tables are close enough that privacy becomes a collective fiction we all agree to maintain.