The bike was still moving when time betrayed me.
Not suddenly.
Not violently.
It slowed down the way a memory does—stretching itself, forcing me to feel everything I had been trying not to.
The speedometer hovered near seventy. Wind clawed at my jacket, cold and sharp, as if it was trying to remind me I was still alive. Thunder rolled above me, deep and angry, shaking something loose inside my chest. The road was dark, endless, unforgiving. For a moment, I felt free. For a moment, I felt nothing.
Then I saw the car.
It didn't belong there.
Black. Motionless. Sitting in the middle of the road like a question no one wanted to answer.
Lightning split the sky, and in that sudden white light, I saw her.
A silhouette leaning against the car. A cigarette between her fingers, its ember glowing softly—steady, unafraid. Smoke curled upward, refusing to bow to the wind.
That was the first second.
In the second, she raised her hand.
Not desperately.
Not in panic.
Slow. Certain.
And in the narrow space between those two seconds, something inside me shifted—quietly, permanently.
I could have ridden past her. I knew that. The road was open. The night was wide. The storm would have erased her the moment I passed. By morning, she would have been nothing more than a passing thought—another stranger swallowed by the dark.
Venice would end.
The office would return.
Life would continue pretending it was enough.
But there was a heaviness in my chest that night. A tiredness deeper than fatigue. I was exhausted from repeating the same days, the same silences, the same version of myself. I didn't want another memory that felt unfinished.
My fingers loosened on the throttle.
The engine protested as I slowed, its roar fading into a dull ache. Each kilometer I gave up felt like surrendering control. The pendulum inside my head began to swing—left, right—counting something I didn't yet know would haunt me.
As I came closer, the air changed.
Her perfume reached me first.
Miss Dior.
Roses—warm, familiar, painfully out of place in the cold stormy night. The smell wrapped around me before I could resist it. It pulled something from deep inside—something safe, something old. For a brief, dangerous moment, I felt comfort where I shouldn't have.
My throat tightened.
The bike stopped.
Silence rushed in, heavy and loud. The storm still hadn't released its rain, as if even the sky was waiting to see what I would do next. My heart beat harder than the thunder. I remember thinking how strange it was—how one stop could feel heavier than years of motion.
She walked toward me.
Not rushed.
Not hesitant.
She moved like she knew the road would make space for her. The wind lifted her hair, played with it, let it fall back against her shoulders. Black dress. Long strides. Confidence stitched into every movement.
She wasn't scared.
People who are lost scan the darkness.
She didn't look anywhere but at me.
Her eyes met mine—dark brown, calm, unreadable. There was no relief in them. No gratitude. Only a strange recognition, heavy and unsettling, like déjà vu—as if this moment had already happened somewhere before, in another time I couldn't remember but somehow still felt.
"Can you help me?" she asked.
Her voice was steady. Too steady.
I felt something twist inside me—curiosity mixed with caution, attraction tangled with an unspoken warning. Every instinct told me to think, to ask questions, to leave.
But loneliness has a quiet way of sounding like courage.
I nodded.
That was the third second.
I didn't know then that the choice had already been made. That the pause between those seconds was the last moment when anything else was possible.
Once you stop
Once you let someone in
Time stops asking permission.
It only remembers.