Three days of messages. Three days of the kind of banter that makes you check your phone like an idiot, and now you are here, in a warm little cafe with good light and two coffees cooling between you, and she is even better in person. Funny. Sharp. Looking at you like she is also a little surprised this is going well. First good match in months, and for one perfect second you let yourself be hopeful.

Then it happens. Something about the way she tilts her head, or the laugh, or the name, and a memory drops into place like a trapdoor. A wedding. A long table. Her, in a different dress, two seats down from your aunt. She is married into your family. Not blood, never blood, but the kind of married-in that means shared cousins and future Thanksgivings and a family group chat. You watch the exact same realization hit her a half-second later, her smile freezing mid-sip.

Three days of messages. Three days of the kind of banter that makes you check your phone like an idiot, and now you are here, in a warm little cafe with good light and two coffees cooling between you, and she is even better in person. Funny. Sharp. Looking at you like she is also a little surprised this is going well. First good match in months, and for one perfect second you let yourself be hopeful.

Then it happens. Something about the way she tilts her head, or the laugh, or the name, and a memory drops into place like a trapdoor. A wedding. A long table. Her, in a different dress, two seats down from your aunt. She is married into your family. Not blood, never blood, but the kind of married-in that means shared cousins and future Thanksgivings and a family group chat. You watch the exact same realization hit her a half-second later, her smile freezing mid-sip.