Serena Rinaldi would tell the story differently every time she tried — starting in the middle, or too early, or with the wrong detail entirely. But when she finally got it right, sitting across from her sister at a kitchen table in Rome three months later, she always began the same way: “He walked in just as I was about to say yes to someone else.” Then she’d pause, and her sister would lean forward, and Serena would say, “Let me start from the morning.”
The morning had been perfect in the way Amsterdam mornings sometimes are — grey-bright, the canal outside the café window holding the sky like a mirror that couldn’t quite commit to the reflection. Serena had arrived early, which she always did when she was nervous. She’d taken the corner table, the one with the cracked tile on the windowsill and the view of the narrow bridge where cyclists never slowed down. She’d ordered a koffie verkeerd and wrapped both hands around it and told herself this was fine. This was the right thing.
She was twenty-six years old, finishing her second year of a research fellowship at the university, and Renato Salazar-Reis — warm, steady, good Renato — had asked her to dinner the week before and then texted that morning to say he’d rather do coffee first, if that was all right, because he had something he wanted to ask her properly. She knew what it meant. She’d known him for four months, had let herself be known by him, and she liked him. She genuinely liked him.
She just hadn’t stopped thinking about Ewan O’Grady.
That was the part she’d tried not to examine too closely. Ewan had been her person for two years during her undergraduate degree — the kind of person who became the unit of measurement for everything after. The one who read the same books she did and argued about them badly and apologized by leaving annotated pages under her door. They’d ended it mutually, sensibly, when his postdoc took him to Edinburgh and hers brought her to Amsterdam. It had felt adult. Correct. She’d been proud of how undramatic it was.
And then, eight days ago, she’d seen him across a seminar room.
He’d been brought in as a visiting researcher. Six weeks, someone had said. Maybe eight. His hair was the same hopeless length and he’d been wearing that green jacket she’d forgotten she remembered, and when he’d spotted her across the rows of chairs his expression had done something complicated and private that she’d spent the following eight days trying to decode.
They hadn’t spoken. Not really. A hallway hello. A shared elevator where neither of them had said anything meaningful. She’d told herself this was because there was nothing to say.
She was still telling herself this when the café door opened and Ewan walked in.
Not with intention. That was the thing she’d come to understand later. He hadn’t known she’d be there. He was carrying a battered canvas bag and a library book and he was shaking rain off his sleeve — it had just started, the kind of thin Amsterdam drizzle that arrives without announcement — and he looked up and saw her and went completely still.
Serena felt the coffee cup in her hands as if for the first time. Warm. Solid. Real.
From where Ewan stood, the café was amber and close, smelling of cardamom and wet wool, and Serena was at the corner table looking at him the way she used to look at him when he’d said something she wasn’t sure she believed yet. He hadn’t planned this. He’d ducked in from the rain on instinct, and now instinct had deposited him directly in front of the one situation he’d been carefully navigating around for eight days.
He almost left. He was aware of that later — the half-second where the door was still within reach.
But Serena said his name. Not loudly. Just “Ewan,” the way you say a word you’ve been avoiding, and he walked over.
“I didn’t know you came here,” he said, which was not the most elegant sentence he’d ever produced.
“I didn’t, until this year.” She looked at the chair across from her and then at the door and then back at him. “I’m meeting someone.”
“Right.” He should have said goodbye then. He didn’t. “I’ll just — there’s space at the bar.”
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