ISLA
The man left without ordering anything.
He stood in the doorway for exactly long enough that I had time to register every detail.
The deliberate averageness of him, the eyes that hadn’t moved from mine, that feeling of something ancient and unbothered turning its attention toward me… and then he simply turned and walked back out into the normal everyday neutral zone afternoon.
Gone.
Like he had come in for no reason except to confirm something.
I stood behind the counter with my hand flat on the surface and my heart doing something uneven in my chest, and told myself it was nothing.
A wrong address. Someone who had mistaken the café for somewhere else.
The part of me that had spent weeks learning to trust its own instincts didn’t believe that for a second.
I didn’t mentio
