Everything the Coffee Rows Know

TEXT MESSAGE THREAD
Carmela Carrasco → Gael Lozano
Thursday, 11:47 p.m.
Carmela: I found your jacket in the drying shed. The green one.
Carmela: I wasn’t looking for it. I just want you to know that.
Carmela: You can come get it whenever. No rush.
[No reply. Read 11:52 p.m.]
—
I still have the jacket.
That was eight months ago, and the jacket is folded on the shelf above my desk in the plantation house, under a stack of harvest logs I pretend I’m too busy to move. I am not too busy. I just don’t want to move them.
My name is Carmela Carrasco, and I manage forty-two hectares of coffee on the hillside above Medellín, and I am very good at not wanting things I can’t have.
Gael Lozano is the agronomist the cooperative sent up in March. He arrived with muddy boots and a clipboard and the particular kind of quiet that makes you talk too much just to fill it. He had opinions about soil pH and shade-tree spacing and the way we’d been sorting the cherries, and every single one of his opinions was correct, which I resented enormously.
We worked alongside each other for four months before anything shifted. That’s the thing about slow heat — you don’t notice it building until you’re already warm.
It was Keisha who noticed first.
Keisha Charles is my oldest friend and the plantation’s head of processing, which means she controls the washing stations and also, apparently, my emotional life. She started leaving two cups of coffee on the sorting table whenever Gael and I had morning walkthroughs. Not one cup each. Two cups, side by side, like a suggestion.
“I’m just being efficient,” she told me once, completely straight-faced.
“You’re being transparent,” I said.
She smiled into her own cup and said nothing, which is somehow worse.
By June, Gael and I had a rhythm. He’d arrive before sunrise, when the hills were still wrapped in cloud and the air smelled of wet earth and the faint sweetness of fermenting pulp from the night tanks. We’d walk the rows together — me reading the plants by instinct, him reading them by data — and somewhere between the two approaches, we always found the right answer. He started finishing my sentences about the harvest. I started anticipating which rows he’d want to sample. Neither of us said anything about it.
The jacket happened on a Tuesday in July. A storm came in fast off the mountains, the kind that turns the red dirt roads into rivers in twenty minutes. He’d left his jacket in the drying shed that morning, and I found it when I went to check the raised beds. I stood there holding it for longer than I should have. It smelled like coffee and vetiver and something underneath both of those things that I didn’t have a word for.
I sent the text. He read it. He didn’t reply.
And then, three days later, he told me the cooperative was sending him to a project in Huila for the rest of the season. He’d be back for the main harvest in October, maybe. He said it the way you say something when you’re hoping the other person will give you a reason to push back.
I said, “Safe travels.”
I am very good at not wanting things I can’t have.
—
It is now the second week of October, and the harvest is in full swing.
The plantation hums at this time of year — pickers moving through the rows in the early light, the mechanical chatter of the depulper, the smell of coffee cherries split open and running sweet. I love harvest season the way I love very few things: completely and without apology. It asks everything of me and I give it gladly.
Gael came back four days ago.
He looks the same and also different, the way people do when you’ve had months to build an idea of them in your head and then the real version shows up and quietly corrects you. Taller than I remembered, or maybe I’d been deliberately shrinking him. He shook my hand when he arrived, which was so formal it almost made me laugh, and then he looked at me for one extra beat before looking away, which almost made me not laugh at all.

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About the Author

Sophie Alderidge — a student of human attachment, for whom friendship always hides something more. Just do not mention about your handsome brother or his friend …

— Sophie Alderidge

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Categories: Romances, Slow Burn

Tags: 10min stories, coffee plantation, Colombia, contemporary romance, epistolary, found text, Medellín, second chances, short story, slow burn love story, slow-burn, Sophie Alderidge

August 19, 2026

10min-stories