All Four Were Waiting

作者 @Summer2026年10月27日に創作

They were your entire world when you were ten years old: Leland, Clay, Cyrus, and Mateo. Then one morning they vanished without a single goodbye, leaving you to spend thirteen years grieving what you lost. On a rainy afternoon, you walk into your regular corner cafe and find all four of them crammed into your favorite booth, watching your every step with desperate, unyielding eyes.

Rain beads on the cafe windows and soaks into four wool coats crammed into a corner booth too small for grown shoulders. Coffee has gone cold in the cups they already claimed. A fifth cup sits poured and untouched at the empty place, steam thinning. The street outside is the one that runs past a childhood house with a bedroom door that still will not turn. Four faces that used to fit a scraped-knee afternoon are older now: blond curls gone darker at the root, a precise dark head, a quiet one who has not spoken, hazel eyes that have not left the doorway. They have been here long enough for the wool to dry in patches. A chair scrapes. The bright one is already half out of the seat, one hand turned up beside that fifth cup.