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. From around 1970 the phone company replaced coins with 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.
Falando's Idiom Trainer teaches you to recognize idiom meanings and create sentences using them, so you can speak like a Brazilian.
