Part 5: The Stranger Who Knew My Coffee Order.

Ava didn't sleep that night. She sat with her phone in her lap, waiting for another message that never came, the photograph propped against her lamp like evidence in a case she didn't understand.

She met Theo at the diner the next morning anyway because whatever the texts meant, she wasn't ready to lose the one good thing sitting in the middle of all of it.

Theo noticed immediately. "You look like you didn't sleep."

"I found a photograph," Ava said carefully, sliding into the booth across from him. "Of us. Older. It was in my mother's things dated eleven years from now."

Theo went very still. "That's not possible."

"That's what I said about yours."

He reached across the table and took her hand, and for a moment neither of them said anything, both of them staring at the same impossible math.

"There's more," Ava said. "Someone's been texting me. Claiming to be me. Future me. She knew things things nobody could know. And last night she said something's coming. Not in eleven years. In three days."

Theo's jaw tightened. "Did she say what?"

"No. Just that it matters more than the wedding. More than us." Ava swallowed. "Theo, what if this isn't fate pulling us together? What if it's a warning?"

Before he could answer, the bell over the diner door chimed. A woman walked in mid-thirties, tired eyes, a coffee stain permanently set into the collar of her shirt like she'd worn it that way for years. She scanned the room once, found their booth, and walked straight toward them without hesitation, like she already knew exactly where to look.

She stopped at their table and looked down at Ava with an expression that was somehow both loving and terrified.

"You need to leave," the woman said. "Both of you. Right now. Before he gets here."

Ava's breath caught. The woman had her mother's eyes. Her own nose. A scar above her eyebrow, faded with age but unmistakable.

"Who's 'he'?" Theo asked, already rising, instinctively placing himself between Ava and the door.

The woman's eyes filled with something like grief. "The reason I had to come back and stop this from happening exactly the way it happened to me."

to be continued... 🚪