Cafe Burgos: Reflections on Love and Becoming

Natalia Flores is twenty-six, a neurosurgery resident who knows every pathway of the brain and has no idea what her own heart is for. After each shift she sits at the corner table of Cafe Burgos, a café on Manila's Burgos Street, and charts the men in her life the way she charts patients: chief complaint, history, assessment, and plan.There's the analyst who believes love can be optimized. The lawyer who loves the world more than the woman beside him. The musician who tells her the date he'll leave on the first night. And the quiet nurse who stays, which she finds hardest to believe.Then a patient's wife, a mother in Lipa, and a surgeon in sneakers force Natalia to turn the chart on herself.A tender, wry novel about grief, staying, and the difference between being loved and being watched, for readers who suspect love is less a lightning strike than a decision made again.