Two coffees, No sugar

Episode Eight

*"Two Coffees, No Sugar – Epilogue"*

Day 31,390.

The bookstore was gone.

A flood took it in 2078. Then a highway. Then a block of flats. Kampala kept moving, the way cities do. It forgot the address.

But it didn’t forget 6:12am.

You’d find it if you needed it. Lakeside at the old pier. Rooftop of the hospital. Back of the 24-hour taxi park. Anywhere the city was honest before sunrise. Someone would be there. With a thermos. No sugar.

On day 31,390, it was the roof of the flats that used to be the bookstore.

86 years after two coffees, no sugar.

A boy was there first. 12. Holding his dad’s phone, playing a voice note on loop. _“It’s okay to be awake. Feels less lonely if someone admits it first.”_ Maya’s voice. Someone recorded her radio show in 2027 and it never died.

One by one, they came. A nurse off night shift. A baker waiting on bread. A grandmother who couldn’t sleep. A girl who just got accepted to university and was too scared to tell her parents.

No one brought cups. They shared the thermos lid.

At 6:12am, the boy stood up. He had a piece of chalk. He’d been saving it.

There were no walls left. So he wrote on the concrete, under a sky that was finally starting to blue:

_Day 31,390. The shop is gone. We’re still here. Still honest. Still not drinking alone. Deal with it._

They passed the thermos.

“To the ghost,” the nurse said.

“To the boss,” the baker said.

“To the bookstore,” the grandmother said.

“To 6:12am,” the boy said.

They didn’t clink anything. They just drank.

At 6:13am, the girl who got into university took the chalk. And under the boy’s line, she wrote:

_Day 31,391. See you tomorrow._

Outside, Kampala woke up.

Inside all of them, it was still 6:12am.

And it always would be.

---