“It’s funny,” he said, placing a cup of coffee down in front of me. “I swear that I know you.”

“But, we’ve never met,” I said, still shaking. I tried to lift the cup to my lips but it sloshed and scolded me.

“No,” he said. “That’s right. We’ve never met.”

He had helped me up off the floor after he had made my bike swerve on the icy road. Now he was buying me hot tea and trying to calm me down.

“But I feel like I know you in the future,” he said, staring out of the window. “Like I know you when we are eighty, and we have spent a lifetime together already. Do you get what I mean?”

“No,” I said.

I looked down at my cup on the table in front of me as I stirred in my sugar. I didn’t dare look up because I absolutely understood what he meant. It was the strangest of feelings, but it was undeniable. We were eighty and still sitting here, drinking our tea and laughing over photographs of our grandchildren.

It was a life that I needed to live. It was a life spent with him.