It began with the rain. This wasn’t the kind of polite, gentle mist you could ignore while keeping your chin up. No, this was a deluge that announced its arrival with a startling boom of thunder, crashing down as if the sky itself had finally broken. I was only about halfway through my delivery shift. The bag of groceries sat on the floor of my tired old scooter, and I still had three more destinations on my list.
My name is Evan. I’m 23 years old, just an ordinary person trying to pay the bills by delivering food for a local service. I don’t hate the work. It’s straightforward and predictable. A person places an order, I deliver it, they offer a brief smile and a thank you, and our interaction is over. But on this particular day, that familiar routine fractured, and something new found its way in.
My final stop before the storm fully unleashed its fury was at a house concealed behind a line of unckempt hedges. It had a white porch with blue shutters that stirred a faint unplaceable memory. I knocked twice on the door and stepped back, standing without an umbrella, the hooded sweatshirt I always wore becoming drenched in less than a minute.
Then the door opened and she appeared. She was older than me, but not old. perhaps in her mid-30s or early 40s. Her hair was gathered in a casual bun with a few strands gently framing her face. She possessed a serene and gentle expression, the kind you see on someone untroubled by storms or silence. Her sweater appeared cozy, and she was barefoot, standing on the gleaming hardwood floor as if the tempest outside was a world away.
