Chapter: “The One Who Kept Missing Her”

He had been five minutes too late for three hundred years.

Kairo stepped into the café the same way he always did—shoulders tense, jaw tight, carrying the same wilted flower he had offered a thousand times. He looked around. Mira looked up from a glass she wasn’t polishing.

“You just missed her,” she said gently.

“I know,” he whispered.

He always knew.

The cat hopped off a nearby stool and landed with a soft thud at Kairo’s feet, twining itself around his ankles like clockwork. Kairo didn’t move.

“She was here?” he asked.

Mira nodded. “Left you a note.”

Kairo reached for it with shaking hands. This one was folded into a paper crane. He didn’t unfold it. Not yet. Instead, he sat at the corner booth. Her booth. The one that still smelled faintly of ozone and lavender.

“She always leaves just before I get here,” he said, not bitterly. Just… resigned.

“She always arrives just after you leave,” Mira replied, placing a cup of hot chocolate in front of him.

“Do you think she knows?”

“I think she hopes.”

He traced the rim of his cup. “We were never in sync. Not in life, not in death, not even now.”

Mira shrugged. “Maybe not in seconds. But you’re here. She’s here. Time gets fuzzy out here. Maybe that’s close enough.”

Kairo looked out the window. A ribbon of stardust curled through the black, like the ghost of a comet. “We only had one kiss. And we weren’t even sure it counted.”

“Why not?”

“We were standing between realities. Technically, we weren’t physically present.”

“That’s most kisses, isn’t it?” Mira smiled. “Two people hoping the moment is real.”

Kairo smiled back, small and aching. “She laughed like wind chimes. She hated bananas. She danced like she thought gravity was optional.”

The cat jumped into his lap. He didn’t push it away.

Mira pointed behind him.

Kairo turned.

She stood in the doorway. Wind-swept. Slightly out of focus, like she’d just stepped through a dream. Her hair was longer now. She still wore the same boots with the chipped moons painted on them.

“Kairo?” she said.

He stood slowly, afraid to blink.

“Amira?”

She nodded. “I came early this time.”

He looked down at the flower in his hand—crushed, as always. He dropped it. Reached for her.

Their hands touched.

And for the first time in three hundred years, they didn’t pass through.

The café didn’t cheer. The cat didn’t meow. Mira didn’t clap.

Instead, she quietly brought two drinks to the corner booth. Then she left them alone.

They sat, hands still tangled.

“How long do we have?” she asked.

“Long enough,” he said.

Outside, a nebula bloomed like a wound. Inside, two people sat across from each other and remembered how to fall in love.

Love, it turns out, isn’t about perfect timing. It’s about waiting long enough for the impossible to happen.