Cedar, Coffee, and the Things We Keep

The sentence lands between us like something dropped from a height.
“You had reasons,” I say.
“I had excuses. There’s a difference.”
I look out at the valley. The afternoon light is doing its slow amber shift, the way it does up here — like the whole landscape is deciding to be beautiful on purpose.
“I told you to go,” I say.
“You did.”
“I meant it at the time.”
“I know.” A pause. “Did you mean it for ten years?”
The honest answer is: no. The honest answer is that I meant it for about two years, and then I just didn’t know how to undo it. The honest answer is that I have been running this plantation and loving it and also carrying around the specific weight of a choice I made at twenty-three that I couldn’t figure out how to unmake.
“No,” I say.
Just that. Just the one word.
Jin exhales slowly. Not relief exactly — more like something that’s been held at tension finally being allowed to move.
—
*Jin, now:*
We don’t say everything.
That’s the thing I notice. We don’t try to account for ten years in one afternoon. We don’t have the argument we maybe should have had at twenty-four, the one about distance and sacrifice and who was supposed to ask whom to stay.
We just stand on the ridge as the light changes.
At some point, Carmela’s shoulder is close enough to mine that I can feel the warmth of it. She doesn’t move away. I don’t either.
Below us, the plantation is settling into evening — the pickers heading down the hill, the equipment shed going quiet, the first bats emerging from the shade trees to skim the rows.
I think about what Dolores said when she picked me up at the road.
*She still has your jacket.*
I hadn’t known what to do with that sentence for six weeks. I still don’t, entirely. But I’m here, and the jacket is somewhere in that farmhouse, and Carmela just said *no* in a voice that sounded like the beginning of something rather than the end.
—
*Carmela, now:*
We go back to the farmhouse as the dark comes in.
Dolores has, mercifully, left. She’s set out coffee — real coffee, from this year’s early harvest, the first lot I processed in March. The thermos is still warm. There are two cups.
Of course there are two cups.
I pour them both.
Jin is looking at the wall near the door — the row of hooks where we hang work jackets and pruning gloves and the old canvas bags used during harvest. There, on the far hook, is a faded olive-green jacket I have moved from house to house and hook to hook for ten years without ever quite deciding to throw away.
He doesn’t say anything about it.
Neither do I.
We take our coffee to the farmhouse steps, the way we used to. The valley below us is dark now, the city lights beginning to bloom in the distance. The air is cool and smells of soil and green leaves and the faint sweetness of the drying beds.
Jin wraps both hands around his cup.
I wrap both hands around mine.
The night settles over the plantation, unhurried and enormous, and we sit in it together — close enough that our shoulders touch, neither of us moving away, the coffee warm between our palms as the stars come out one by one above the hills.

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About the Author

Elara Wynford — Her dreams comes true or not? Who knows, she stopped differentiating reality from dreams 10 years ago. Each of her stories has part of a dream…

— Elara Wynford

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Categories: Contemporary, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, coffee plantation, Colombia, contemporary romance, emotional fiction, Medellín, reunion story, second chance, short story, slow burn

August 13, 2026

10min-stories