'Their Time Will Come' by Cath Barton

She will go and meet her friends as planned. They will choose a different café from their usual haunt, a place of new possibilities, one of the group will say. But she will feel, as she has been doing for some time, the lack of something. The lack of someone.

She will pass their usual café on her way home at the end of the evening. The lights will have been dimmed, and she will see the outline of her future husband’s head, bending towards another. She will notice the tenderness with which he reaches out his hand. And she will turn away, for it is not yet their time.

That time will come on another night, in another town. She will be alone and, on a whim, she will walk into a café she does not know, a place where a man sits, also alone. The light will be behind him, so her face will be lit up while his remains in darkness. But she will know, nonetheless, immediately, that he is the one.

They will be shy with one another that evening. Formal even. When they part they will shake hands. When she gets home she will find that she holds in her hand something of him. And they will meet again, and again, and on a June day lit by sunbeams they will marry.

Neither of them will remember the night when they did not meet, though, over the years of their life together, he will tell her of those he loved before. He will mention a particular café in a French town and she will tell him it was a place she used to know. Perhaps they passed one another there one evening, she will say. And they will laugh together about that possibility.