In Another Lifetime

If I ever believed in soulmates, or fate, or the idea that two people are destined to find each other, I buried that belief twenty years ago, along with everything else I lost that year.

Since then, I've built my life around certainty and routine.

Boundaries and distance.

The quiet knowledge that guilt and grief will always be my companions.

But then she walks into my lecture hall, twenty years old, my student, looking at me like she already knows me.

Like she's been waiting her whole life to...