for the penny to drop
Demorou, mas finalmente caiu a ficha dele que ela nunca gostou dele de verdade.
It took a while, but the penny finally dropped that she never really liked him.
The expression cair a ficha ("the token drops") comes from Brazil's coin- and token-operated public payphones. The phones used metal tokens (fichas); the ficha only dropped into the mechanism once the other person picked up and the call actually connected.
Source: Jornal S'passo.
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