They’d almost not met. She thought about this sometimes.
If she hadn’t stayed late at the gallery that evening. If he hadn’t come back for the coat he’d forgotten. If the woman at the desk had been different and hadn’t called out to him as he was leaving, prompting him to turn at exactly the wrong angle and knock her coffee directly off the edge of a table neither of them had been standing near.
“That was entirely your fault,” she’d said, looking at the floor.
“It was impressively my fault,” he’d agreed. “I’m so sorry. Let me—” He’d already been reaching for napkins from somewhere.
They’d crouched together to clean up the mess and he’d looked up at her with an expression that was so thoroughly mortified that she’d started laughing, and then he’d started laughing, and the woman at the desk had watched them both with the expression of someone who has seen this exact thing happen before.
Nine years later she still had the coat he’d come back for — he’d left it again that evening, for different reasons, and she’d kept it before she’d meant to.
“We nearly didn’t happen,” she said now, not for the first time, in the half-awake way of someone letting a thought run.
“We very nearly didn’t,” Nico agreed.
“The coat.”
“The coat.” He smiled at the ceiling. “I should have left it more often.”
She reached over and found his hand.
Contingency, she thought, is frightening when you think about it too directly. The whole weight of a life resting on a forgotten coat, a late gallery, a knocked coffee. She preferred to think of it differently: that some things are looking for you even when you’re not looking for them.
✦ Today’s Reflection
What small, contingent thing brought you and your partner together — and have you ever really let yourself feel how easily it might not have happened?
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