I have also watched her mistake urgency for destiny more than once.

There was the time-share.

There was the friend’s restaurant.

There was the man before this one, and the man before him, each arriving in her life wrapped in the same breathless certainty that this, finally, was the thing that would lift her out of the ordinary.

I had learned not to argue with the certainty directly, because certainty cannot be argued with; it can only be outlasted.

What I had not learned, until Chad, was what to do when the certainty came with a number attached, and the number was mine.