She remembered every detail of it and they still weighed heavily on what she expected from life. Two years ago she had visited a fortune-teller. Now those words hovered in the back of her mind. She was to marry a guy whose name began with the letter E before she turned thirty. He would be tall, dark, and from a different social and professional world than her. At the time she had just broken up with her first love and was still not entirely over him. The fortune teller told her she would have a rebound and then would meet E. E that’s what she called him in her head.
She had already done the rebound with a nice guy named Derek. They had gotten along but it had been nothing serious. To her he was just the penultimate guy. She had a different destination in mind.
On this particular night they were at a bar for a birthday party. When they were three rounds in they decided to go to a club. In a wall of light and music they started dancing; their bodies swaying in close proximity.
He had originally been at the far end of the table and she hadn’t caught his name. When she asked he said it was Ed. In her mind she connected the dots and starting writing a future for the two of them. Perhaps this was the E she was fated to meet. He was tall and dark. At the end of the night he scrawled his number on a torn piece of paper and she carefully tucked it into her wallet. Perhaps it was fate after all, or maybe just a self-fulfilling prophecy.