The Stranger Who Knew My Coffee Order.

Ava had ordered the same thing at Blue Line Diner for six years: two eggs, rye toast, coffee black. So when a stranger slid into the booth across from her and said, "Two eggs, rye toast, black coffee, right?" before the waitress even arrived, she nearly dropped her phone.

"Do I know you?" she asked, guarded.

"Not yet," he said, unfolding a napkin like he owned the table. "But you will. In about eleven years, actually. You're going to spill coffee on my shirt at a mutual friend's wedding, laugh way too hard about it, and that's the story we'll tell at our own wedding for the next forty years."

Ava blinked. "That's the strangest pickup line I've ever heard."

"It's not a pickup line." He smiled, easy and certain, like he had nothing to prove. "It's a memory. I just haven't lived it yet from your side. I've lived it from mine."

She should have called security. Should have laughed him off and gone back to her book. Instead, she found herself asking, against every instinct, "So who are you supposed to be to me?"

He reached into his jacket and set something on the table between them a photograph, old and slightly worn at the corners, of the two of them at what was unmistakably a wedding, both of them laughing, both of them soaked in coffee.

"I don't know your name yet," he admitted quietly. "I just know your face. I've known it my whole life."

Ava stared at the photograph at her own laughing face, older, happier, undeniably hers and felt something in her chest tilt sideways.

"That's not possible," she whispered.

"No," he agreed. "But here we are anyway."

to be continued... 💫