The first time he noticed her, it was raining.
Not dramatically. No cinematic downpour. Just enough that the city looked blurred at the edges, like it was trying to soften itself. Elias stood under the narrow awning outside a café he couldn't afford to sit in anymore, watching the rain bead against the glass, counting the seconds between passing buses.
He wasn't waiting for anyone.
That was the strange part.
He had learned, over the past few months, that waiting implied expectation. Expectation implied disappointment. So he practiced standing still without hope, the way patients practiced breathing through pain.
She stepped into the frame of his vision without asking permission.
Dark hair pulled back loosely, strands already slipping free. A canvas tote bag pressed against her side, soaked at the bottom. She paused just inside the awning, shaking rain from her sleeves, her face tilted upward like she was briefly considering whether the weather might listen if she complained politely.
Elias noticed details the way he always did now. The way time had sharpened his attention, made everything feel precious and slightly unreal.
Her hands were red from the cold.She wore a watch with a cracked face.Her shoes were practical, not pretty.
She glanced sideways, just once. Their eyes nearly met.
Nearly.
A bus roared past, spraying water onto the pavement, and she stepped forward instinctively, bumping into his shoulder. The contact was light. Unremarkable. The kind of thing people apologized for without thinking.
"I'm sorry," she said automatically, already turning away.
"It's fine," he replied, but she was already moving, already gone, already absorbed back into the anonymous choreography of the street.
He stood there long after the rain eased, replaying the moment in his head like a song fragment he couldn't quite place.
That night, in the quiet of his apartment, Elias wrote a single line in the notebook he kept beside his bed.
Encounter One. Café awning. Rain.
He didn't know why he numbered it.
At the time, it felt like nothing.