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Then, before I knew it, he was sitting at the table next to me, joining some dark-haired woman who
had an empty seat at her table. They introduced themselves and fell into an easy banter as they ate.
Watching him grin at her, making her laugh, hurt my stomach. I regarded my imaginary rival as
discreetly as I could. She was pretty and fit, but I bet she didn’t know that Mark had chosen the band
name the Careless Ones from The Great Gatsby, a book she’d probably never read, having cribbed
notes in junior high from people like me. Bet she wouldn’t even like Mark’s music. Minutes later I
watched him say goodbye to her by punching his number into her phone, imagining that he was giving
it to me.
What happened to me? Where did I go?
“Are you okay?”
Had I said that out loud? I had said it out loud … directly to the dark-haired woman who’d been
talking to Mark Drury and was now sitting alone. She stood, picked up a glass of water from her table
and moved in slow motion towards me. She placed the glass in front of me, a concerned look on her
face.
“Are you okay?” she asked again.
To this day, I have no idea why I said yes when she asked if she could join me; I so rarely spoke to
strangers. But as my mother would say, “Some things are fatefully divine and some are just divinely
fated.”