Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

The storm knocked out the road and she was stuck at the farmhouse B&B for an extra two days with four strangers and the owner’s elderly dog.

One of the strangers was a man named Alex who had been walking a long-distance trail alone and seemed the most at peace with the delay. She found this interesting. She was a travel writer and she had an instinct for people who were running from something — she’d interviewed enough of them — and he wasn’t. He was just walking.

“Why the trail?” she said, on the second evening. The road still closed, the rain still making the windows opaque.

“I needed to do something hard,” he said. “On purpose. To remind myself I could.”

“That’s not nothing,” she said.

“It’s also not very dramatic.” He looked at her. “You’re waiting for a better story.”

“I’m not, actually. I think that’s a good reason.”

He was a carpenter. He had recently ended a long engagement and was doing the trail before beginning again — something cleared, something started. He said this plainly.

She was a travel writer who hadn’t been home in eight months, not because the assignments ran long but because home had become a concept she kept failing to update. She said this, surprised to say it.

“What’s in the way?” he said.

She thought about it honestly. “I think I’m scared of what I’d find if I stopped moving.”

He nodded. Like he understood. Like he had been there.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“That it wasn’t as bad as the moving,” he said. “Mostly.” He looked at the window. “Also that I’d been lonely for longer than I admitted.”

She felt that land somewhere it was meant to.

They were stuck two more days. They talked through most of them — the kind of conversation that happens between strangers with no stakes, which is sometimes the most honest kind. By the time the road opened she had his number and he had hers and neither of them pretended it was for networking.

She went home six weeks later. Not because of him — it was time — but with something he’d said keeping her company: it wasn’t as bad as the moving.

It wasn’t.

He visited in the spring. She showed him her city the way she’d have shown a reader — the good unlit corners, the things you had to look for.

He looked at all of it. He looked at her.

“I think I’ve been looking for a reason to stop walking,” he said.

She took his hand on the bridge.

“Stay a while,” she said. “See what’s here.”

So you made it to the end… which probably means you’re the kind of person who enjoys a little romance with their coffee ☕. If you’re in the mood for more stories about messy feelings, stubborn attraction, and women who absolutely refuse to settle for boring love, you can find all my books here.

Fair warning though. One story tends to lead to another. I’ve seen it happen. Repeatedly.