The café smelled of cardamom and rain. Misti sat at her usual table, watching the city blur past the window like a film she had stopped trying to follow.
She had told herself, more than once, that she was done with the kind of love that asked her to disappear. What she had not told herself — what she could not yet say — was that she was beginning to believe in another kind.
Her phone lit up on the table. A name she did not expect. A continent she had never visited. And, for the first time in a very long time, a small unguarded smile.
✦