matched by destiny

The first thing Meera notices is the crown. Not the kind you keep in a velvet box, but the kind that sits on a paper cup—foam whipped into a looped heart, precise and show-offy, as if the barista wants to prove that love can be engineered. Jatin leans across the tiny café table and rotates the cup so the heart faces her. He holds it like a magician revealing the final card. “For you,” he says. “Behold: my beating latte.” “That’s cappuccino,” she corrects, laughing. “And that’s not how hearts look.” “They do if you’re mellow and made of milk.” She grins, pulling out her phone. Meera Ray—children’s book author and illustrator—has a habit of collecting moments the way some people collect seashells. She snaps a photo of the cup and Jatin’s boyish grin, already imagining it as a cartoon in the margin of her next sketchbook. Jatin—Jatin Malhotra to his readers—writes travel features for glossy magazines and the occasional deep-dive piece for the paper. He’s charming enough to get people talking and stubborn enough to keep them talking until he has the story he wants. But with her, he’s just Jatin: the man who leaves coffee spoons in the sink and uses her desk as if it’s a communal workspace. “Tell me something true,” he says now, tapping his phone screen. “If it’s good, I’ll send it to Future Us.” “Future Us doesn’t need your spam.” “Future Us thrives on content.” She glances around. The café is the size of a generous closet: warm wood, thrift-store plates on the walls, and a chalkboard menu that changes when the owner remembers chalk. Outside, April wind combs the street in quick, impatient passes. Inside, the radio hums an old pop song, the kind that makes you feel young and invincible. “Something true,” she muses. “Okay. I used to think love was a plotline. A thing you decide at the start of a story, and then it stays inside the margins until you get to ‘The End.’” “And now?” he prompts. “Now I think it’s a setting.” He raises an eyebrow. “Explain.” “It’s the room you’re in, the air you breathe. The ordinary things that suddenly feel like… not props.” She gestures at the table. “It’s this wobbly leg we keep propping with sugar packets. It’s the way your shoulder creaks when you stretch. It’s me stealing your sweatshirt and you pretending you mind.” “I don’t pretend,” he says solemnly. “I am deeply offended.” She steals a sip of his drink anyway. He types under the table: Cappuccino theft. Arrest me. Her phone buzzes. Citizen’s arrest, he replies. Punishment: fifteen kisses. She looks up to see him watching her over the rim of his cup. His expression says he knows exactly what she’s thinking. “What’s Future Us going to do with all your ridiculous messages?” she teases. “Frame them. Archive them. Quote them in interviews after we win a Nobel Prize for our epic romance.” She snorts. “Your ego’s showing.” “You love my ego,” he says, leaning in so close she can smell the faint spice of his aftershave. “And you love me.” She doesn’t say it back—she doesn’t have to. It’s in the way she tilts toward him, in the way her hand stays on the table instead of retreating to her lap. “Want to see what I drew last night?” she asks, flipping open her sketchbook. A little bear in a yellow raincoat steps into a puddle so big it reflects an entire sky. On the opposite page, scribbled phrases that might someday become a children’s story. “He looks like he’s about to discover something,” Jatin says. “Or lose something,” she murmurs, surprising herself. “Maybe both,” he says softly. “Maybe the puddle gives him back a different sky.” She studies him. “Since when are you a poet?” “Since you started drawing weather into everything you love.” He’s not wrong. Lately, her art is full of umbrellas and restless skies. But today the sky outside is bright and sharp, and the air smells like beginnings. “What are you doing after this?” he asks suddenly. “Working,” she says. “Some of us have deadlines.” “Deadlines can wait. Come on, let’s take the train somewhere random. Get off when we see a station name that makes us laugh.” “You make truancy sound ethical.” “It is. It’s the antidote to becoming a beast of obligation.” She shakes her head, smiling. This is how Jatin works—he throws possibility at her like confetti and waits to see if she’ll catch it. He stands, stretching until his shoulder pops. She pretends to wince. He bows, theatrically. “Shall we, Miss Ray?” “Fine,” she says, gathering her scarf, the one he claims by squatter’s rights. “But you’re buying lunch.” “Done. And maybe dessert.” “Greedy.” “For time with you? Always.” They weave between chairs, Jatin dropping a tip in the jar without looking. At the door, the bell rings its small silver cheer. The morning rush is thinning; the street smells faintly of roasted chestnuts from the vendor on the corner. They’re mid-step when Meera laughs—one of those unplanned, unpolished laughs—and he glances over, eyes lit. She feels, for a moment, like the world is in perfect balance: her hand warm in his, the city stretching open before them, nothing urgent except deciding which way to turn. He squeezes her fingers. “You okay?” “I’m… yeah,” she says. And she is. Across the street, a delivery van screeches around the corner, tires protesting. Jatin turns his head at the sound. She still has his hand when the moment snaps—