THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO LIVE

PROLOGUE People always say your life can change in a moment. They say it after accidents and weddings and funerals. They say it after moving cities and meeting strangers and making reckless decisions under beautiful skies. I never believed them. Life didn’t change in moments. Life changed in patterns. Small choices. Tiny habits. One conversation leading into another. One yes becoming ten years. At least that’s what I used to think. If somebody had asked me that morning whether I believed in fate, I would’ve laughed. If they’d asked me whether I believed there was one person made for another person, I would’ve told them to grow up. Soulmates were comforting stories people told themselves after bad breakups. Destiny was just hindsight with better marketing. You choose things. You choose your major. You choose your apartment. You choose your coffee order. You choose who you love. That had always made sense to me. At twenty-eight, my life wasn’t extraordinary, but it was stable. Stable counted. I had routines I liked. Work I didn’t hate. A boyfriend I trusted. Neil was safe in all the ways people mean when they say someone is good for you. Reliable. Warm. Easy. Being with him never felt like standing on the edge of something dangerous. It felt like getting home. And I liked that. My best friend, Della, used to tell me I overthought everything. She wasn’t wrong. Della believed in sparks and chemistry and all those things people write captions about. She’d started seeing someone a few months earlier. Kit. He seemed normal. Quiet. A little intense sometimes. The kind of guy who listened more than he spoke. Not mysterious. Not magnetic. Definitely not somebody who would become the dividing line between my old life and whatever came after. That afternoon, the four of us went to lunch. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic. Just sandwiches and bad lighting and one of those places that tried too hard to feel handmade. I remember almost everything. I remember Della laughing. I remember Neil asking if I wanted fries. I remember flipping through a math journal because apparently being insufferable was part of my personality. I remember feeling completely ordinary. That’s the strange thing. Nobody warns you that before your life changes— everything feels normal. There’s no music. No feeling in your chest. No voice in your head. Just a regular day. Until someone says something impossible. Until they look at you like they’ve already lost you. Until a blue crayon appears at your feet. Until someone reaches across a table and says words that don’t make sense— words that should have meant nothing— and somehow mean everything. The exact moment my life ended looked like this: “You are supposed to be with me.”