The missing hour

The rain hadn't stopped since I left the office, and by the time I reached the station, it had settled into something steady and patient, like it had nowhere else to be. I didn't have anywhere else to be either. Not really. Just a delayed train and forty minutes of nothing. I checked the board again. Still delayed. Of course, it was. I found a spot near the edge of the platform, away from the cluster of damp coats and dripping umbrellas, and pulled my bag higher on my shoulder. The strap was fraying at the edge. I ran my thumb over it without thinking, the way I always did when I had nothing else to occupy my hands. Something felt off. I couldn't have said what. It wasn't the rain, or the delay, or the tired hum of the announcements repeating themselves every few minutes like an apology no one meant. It was smaller than that. A pressure behind my ribs I didn't have a name for. I told myself it was nothing. Low blood sugar. Too little sleep. I'd had a long week. Then someone said my name. "Liora." Just that. No question mark at the end of it, like he already knew the answer. I turned before I decided to. That was the strange part I'd think about later — I didn't choose to turn. My body did it for me, like it had been waiting for someone to call me. A man stood across the platform, maybe fifteen feet away, hands in the pockets of a dark coat, rain caught in his hair like he hadn't bothered with an umbrella. He was watching me. Not the way strangers look at each other in crowded places, a glance that slides off and moves on. He was looking at me like he'd been looking for a long time and had finally stopped. "I'm sorry," I said, because it felt like the thing to say. "Do I know you?" He didn't answer right away. He just kept looking at me with an expression I couldn't place — not quite a smile, not quite grief, something in between that made my chest tighten for no reason I could explain. "You're late," he said. I almost laughed. "Excuse me?" "You're late," he said again, quieter this time, like he was repeating it more for himself than for me. "I don't think we've met." I gave him a polite, tight smile, the kind I used on strangers who got too familiar too fast. "You might be thinking of someone else." He studied me for a moment longer. There was no anger in his face. No confusion, either — the confusion was all mine. He looked almost sad, in a restrained sort of way, like sadness was something he'd had a lot of practice hiding. "I was beginning to think you wouldn't come," he said. "I don't know you," I said, and this time I meant it as a wall, not a question. He didn't flinch. He didn't apologize, the way most people would if they'd mistaken a stranger for someone else. He just stood there, rain dripping from his sleeve, watching me with that same patient recognition. The silence stretched longer than it should have. I felt it settle over both of us, thick and strange, broken only by the distant screech of a train somewhere down the line. Then he said one word. "Lyon." It shouldn't have meant anything. It was just a city. I'd never been there — I was almost sure of that, the way you're sure of your own name, or your birthday, or the color of your front door. And yet something about the word landed wrong. It didn't sit on the surface of my mind like an unfamiliar fact. It sank. My heart gave an uneven thud, then another, faster than it should have been. "I've never been to Lyon," I said. The words came out too fast. Too certain, in a way that made them sound less certain, if that made any sense. I heard it myself, the strange defensiveness in my own voice, and I hated that he probably heard it too. He nodded slowly, like I'd confirmed something he already suspected. "That's what you said before." I stared at him. "I don't understand what that means." He didn't explain. He just held my gaze, and for a moment I forgot about the rain, the delay, the tired murmur of the surrounding crowd. There was only him, and the strange gravity of his attention, pulling at something in me I didn't have a name for. "Who are you?" I asked. "Caius," he said. "Caius Moreau." The name didn't mean anything to me. I waited for some flicker of recognition, some proof that this was all some elaborate misunderstanding I could laugh off later. Nothing came. Just his eyes, steady on mine, and that quiet ache behind my ribs that refused to explain itself. "Well, Caius." I said his name carefully, testing the shape of it. "I really do think you have the wrong person." "I don't," he said. Not sharp. Not insistent. Just certain, the way a person is certain of the sky being up. I didn't know what to do with that kind of certainty. It wasn't aggressive. It wasn't the unsettling confidence of someone trying to manipulate me. It was worse, somehow — it was calm. Like he had all the time in the world to be right. A voice crackled over the speakers, announcing my platform, and I used it as an excuse to look away from him. "I have to go," I said. "I know." I turned and walked toward the platform edge, my heels clicking too loud against the wet concrete, my pulse doing something erratic in my throat. I didn't look back. I told myself I didn't need to. He was a stranger. An odd, unsettling stranger with a habit of speaking in riddles, and I would never see him again, and that would be the end of it. The train pulled in with a gust of damp air and squealing brakes. I stepped inside, found a seat by the window, and let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. That was when I noticed my hand. My thumb was pressed against the inside of my wrist, rubbing back and forth in slow, absent circles. I did it sometimes — I always had — usually when I was anxious about something, though I'd never really thought about where the habit came from. I stopped myself and stared at my hand like it belonged to someone else. Caius had been watching that. I was sure of it now, replaying the moment in my mind — his eyes hadn't been on my face the whole time. They had dropped, just briefly, to my wrist. Like he'd been waiting to see if I'd do it. Like he already knew I would. The train doors closed. My phone buzzed in my bag, and I pulled it out, grateful for something else to look at, something to pull my mind away from the platform and the rain and the man who had said my name like he had every right to it. The message was from an unknown number. No text. Just a photograph, loading slowly against the train's weak signal. I watched it revolve, line by line, and felt the air leave my lungs. It was me. Standing beside Caius Moreau, his arm around my waist, both of us laughing at something outside the frame. Behind us, unmistakable, was the skyline of a city I had never visited in my life. Lyon. The timestamp in the corner read six years ago.