Strangers in the Rain
The rain arrives like an accusation—sudden, merciless, without the courtesy of warning. One moment I'm walking down Hudson Street with my umbrella still folded in my bag like the useless decoration it apparently is, and the next, the sky splits open and dumps a year's worth of grievances directly onto my head.
"Of course," I mutter, breaking into a run. "Of course it's today."
Because today isn't just any Tuesday. Today is the anniversary of the day I opened Daniel's laptop to check the weather and instead found three years of messages that rewrote my entire understanding of my own life. Three years of a woman named Ashley, of hotel receipts, of a relationship I thought was solid ground and turned out to be a trapdoor.
I duck under the green awning of a corner building just as the storm reaches its full fury, and I look up to see gold lettering on the window: Marlowe's Books & Café. Fitting. If the universe wants to drown me on this particular day, it can at least have the decency to do it near books.
Inside, the café smells like rain-damp wool, roasted coffee, and the papery sweetness of old pages, a combination that should be comforting and almost is. Warm light spills from…
