Around him, the restaurant remained alive: cutlery clinking, glasses touching, conversations crossing, other people’s birthdays being celebrated with joy. But at that long table, decorated with balloons that no longer even moved, loneliness seemed to sit at every plate.
When the waiter returned, he hesitated a second before speaking.
“Would you like to order something while they arrive?”
Ernesto took a while to answer.
He looked once more at the entrance. Then at the empty chairs. Then at his own hands, still steady, resting on the tablecloth.
He lifted his gaze and smiled with a politeness that broke the soul.
“I think you can cancel the other places now, young man. It seems that… tonight it’s only me.”
He said it quietly. Without resentment. Almost like someone who was used to it.
And it was precisely that habit that chilled a man who was sitting at the bar, a few meters away.
He wore worn boots, a leather vest, a graying beard, and had a half-finished glass of beer.
His name was Raúl Cárdenas, though on the road everyone knew him as El Rayo.
He was not a man who got involved in other people’s business.
But there was something in Don Ernesto’s voice, in that calm way of accepting being forgotten, that squeezed his chest like an old hand.
He set his glass down on the bar.
He looked at the table for eight.
