The cursor blinked like a smug little heartbeat, and my laptop fan whined as if it, too, was tired of me. I hit “Save” again—once, twice, a third time—each click a prayer offered to an unresponsive god. The spinning icon appeared, pale and calm, and stayed.

Outside the café window, rain stitched the afternoon into grey fabric. Cars slid past in soft splashes. Inside, everything was noise pretending to be comfort: espresso machines hissing, a spoon clinking against glass, someone laughing too loudly at a joke I couldn’t hear. My own table was a battlefield of small failures—crumpled receipts, a pen with no ink, a phone face-down like a guilty witness.

I stared at the paragraph on the screen. It was almost finished. Almost is a cruel word. The sentence I had been shaping for an hour trembled at the end, waiting for its final clause, like a diver poised above a pool that might not be there.

Then the Wi-Fi died.