“On rainy days, we are all just people looking for a window to share our weather.”

Lena looked up to thank him, but he was already gone, leaving only a wet spot on the chair and a new kind of silence in the air.

“I have one,” he said softly. “But it’s not mine. It’s my wife’s. She passed last spring.”

Her favorite came from a teenage girl with purple headphones, who didn’t speak but slid a napkin across the table: “I cried during the drought. Then the rain came and I couldn’t tell the difference.”

She’d found it three years ago on a soaked bus bench, its pages somehow still dry. Tucked inside was a single handwritten line: “Rain is the sky telling the earth it misses her.” No name. No date. Just that.