The Stranger in the Rain
Rain hit the front window of Bellamy's Café like handfuls of thrown gravel, and Ella Vaughn watched the streetlights outside smear into gold ribbons across the wet glass. Ten forty-three. Seventeen minutes left of her shift, and the storm showed no sign of easing up. Chicago in late October had a particular talent for cruelty—the kind of cold that crept beneath coats and settled into bones, the kind of rain that seemed to fall sideways just to spite anyone without an umbrella.
She wiped down the espresso machine for the third time, more out of habit than necessity. The brass fittings gleamed under the pendant lights, and the smell of burnt coffee grounds and vanilla syrup clung to the air the way it always did by the end of a long shift. Her feet ached inside her sneakers. Her lower back had developed a persistent, dull throb somewhere around hour six, and she still had a research paper on nineteenth-century labor economics waiting for her at home, due by nine the next morning, roughly forty percent finished.
"You're doing the thing again," Maya said from behind the pastry case, where she was rearranging the last of the day's croissants into a sad little pyramid nobody would buy…
