Part 6: The Stranger Who Knew My Coffee Order.

Theo didn't wait for an explanation. He grabbed his jacket, dropped cash on the table, and had Ava halfway out of the booth before the older woman finished speaking.

"Not that door," she said sharply, nodding toward the front entrance. "The kitchen. Now."

They moved fast, weaving past the counter, past a confused waitress, through the swinging kitchen doors into the smell of frying eggs and stainless steel. The older woman followed close behind, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds like she was counting down something only she could hear.

"Talk," Ava said once they were in the alley behind the diner, breathless. "Who are you actually? Who's coming?"

The woman older Ava, if that's truly what she was leaned against the brick wall and closed her eyes for a moment, like she was steadying herself against a memory. "Eleven years from now, I marry you," she said, looking at Theo. "It's the best thing that ever happens to me. But it almost doesn't happen, because of what's about to walk through that diner's front door in the next ninety seconds."

"Who?" Theo pressed.

"Someone who's spent years trying to make sure this " she gestured between Ava and Theo, "never happens. Because if it does, he loses something he needs. I don't have time to explain all of it. Just trust that I've lived the version where I didn't warn you in time, and I am not doing that again."

Ava's mind spun. "You said in the texts this mattered more than us. More than the wedding."

"It does," the woman said, and for the first time her composure cracked, just slightly. "Because if he gets to you today, there is no wedding. There's no eleven years. There's just a girl who never got to find out what her own life was supposed to look like."

A car door slammed somewhere on the street beyond the alley. Footsteps, unhurried, deliberate, coming closer.

Older Ava's face went pale. "He's early."

Theo pulled present-day Ava behind him instinctively, and the three of them pressed into the shadow of the alley wall, watching the mouth of the passage where a shape tall, calm, unbothered had just come into view.

to be continued... 👤