Miles to go before I sleep.

If you asked Miles about that morning—months later, years later, in some dimly lit bar when his guard was down—he wouldn’t be able to tell you why it mattered. Not at first. He’d frown, tilt his head like he was trying to shake loose the answer, and maybe laugh it off, saying something dismissive like, “It was just a weird moment. Nothing, really.” But that would be a lie. Because the truth is, the world is full of people you meet and forget, faces that blur into a background you never bother to sharpen. And then, there are the ones who—without meaning to, without even trying—get stuck. Not because they want to be, but because, for one reason or another, your mind refuses to let them go.

And that’s exactly how this started. Not with some grand revelation. Not with sparks flying or a moment that changed everything. Just four seconds. A flicker of something real in a woman who wasn’t supposed to be real to him. A moment so small it should have disappeared into the mess of his day, but instead, it lodged itself into his brain like a splinter. He didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning. The beginning of something he wouldn’t be able to shake. The beginning of something unfinished. 

The beginning of Her.

The coffee cart stood at the street corner like an old stray—worn down but reliable, the kind of place that knew too many secrets and kept them anyway. Steam coiled into the crisp Melbourne air, wrapping itself around half-spoken conversations and the sound of shuffling shoes. This was the kind of hour where everything felt like an in-between—too late to still be waking up, too early to be fully alive. She stood by the cart, waiting for her coffee, chin slightly lifted in that way that made people assume she was either deeply thoughtful or deeply uninterested. The truth was, she was both. She had that quality some people mistake for arrogance but is really just a refusal to entertain nonsense. She was a designer of some sort, but what she really did was engineer how people moved in space—how walls could shift, how functions could merge, how everything could feel intentional. Efficiency, but with a pulse. Right now, though, she was just standing there, tolerating the small talk that came from the men orbiting Miles.

Miles stood nearby, flanked by two of his people. Or rather, people who wanted to "be" his people. His orbit was full of those—men who mistook ambition for personality, who fumbled over themselves to impress him, like eager retrievers dropping slobbered tennis balls at his feet. He let them. Not because he thought he was brilliant, but because at a certain point in life, wanting to make a difference felt like bluffing your way through a poker game where everyone else had better cards. So he played along, nodded in the right places, let people believe he was making decisions when in reality, things just happened around him. He had a quiet demeanour, sure, but he wasn’t stupid—he knew the game was about confidence, about making people believe you knew what you were doing even when you were just playing catch-up. So he stood there, half-listening, fingers grazing over his phone screen in a way that suggested he had something important to check. He didn’t. 

And then—something. Not in the conversation. That was just noise. Across the street, something cut through Her carefully calibrated world. A man—loud, entitled, the human equivalent of a bad aftertaste—was being an asshole to a ‘good boy’. Not the kind of asshole who kicks or hits, but the kind who makes cruelty a performance, a flex of his own emptiness. The woman with the dog was already pulling the poor thing away, moving fast, diffusing the moment with quiet dignity. But She saw. And She felt it. Miles didn’t see the street, didn’t see the dog, but he saw Her—saw Her body stiffen, the way Her breath hitched for just a fraction of a second, the way Her fingers brushed the corner of Her eye so fast it could have been mistaken for a blink. And then, just barely, under her breath—low and sharp, a blade of disgust cutting through the air—“What the fuck.”

It was nothing. A flicker, a shift, a crack too small to notice if you weren’t paying attention. But Miles was paying attention, and he hated that he was. Because for four or five seconds, She wasn’t the girl with the sharp mind and sharper tongue, not the person who made his teams nervous in meetings, almost cool and composed. No. For four or five seconds, she was something else. Something real. And that irritated him. It irritated him the way an offbeat in a song irritates a musician—just enough to make you replay it, to make you notice, to make you care.

She recovered quickly, of course. She was the kind of girl who could make emotions disappear like street magicians made coins vanish. She straightened, turned to him and his people, and gave them the kind of polite, dismissive smile that felt like an unspoken you may go now. “Nice to meet you,” she said, but it wasn’t nice. It was nothing. And then she was gone, disappearing into the building, into her world, into a place he couldn’t follow.

Miles was still standing there, his coffee growing colder in his hands. The moment should have passed. It should have been insignificant. But it wasn’t. Because now, he had a problem. Now, she wasn’t just Her—the girl who designed spaces and made his teams nervous. Now, she was something unfinished. And Miles had never been good at leaving things unfinished.

Its been about five years now, but Miles could never explain why that moment stayed with him. Not in a way that made sense, anyway. Life had moved forward—like it always does—one meeting, one project, one calculated decision at a time. People came and went. Empires were built, deals were signed, deadlines blurred into late nights and early mornings. And yet, somewhere in the middle of all that, there was still her. Not constantly. Not in a way that interrupted his life. Just in quiet moments, in the in-between spaces, in the way certain mornings smelled like burnt coffee and cold air, and suddenly, his mind would betray him. And for no logical reason at all, he’d wonder if she ever thought about it too. If she even remembered. If, in some small, fleeting way, he had gotten stuck in her head the way she had in his.

But that’s the thing about moments like that—they don’t ask permission to linger. They just do. Long after the last meeting, the last handshake, the last necessary words have been spoken. Long after logic says it shouldn’t matter anymore. And maybe it didn’t. Maybe it never really did. But every now and then, in some quiet, unguarded second, Miles would find himself staring at nothing in particular, a coffee cup cooling in his hands, and thinking: Four seconds. That’s all it was. And somehow, it still feels forever.

Because how would he ever explain it? That he saw her while she saw the world?That even without knowing what she saw, for a fleeting second, he saw everything? And how the hell does he unsee something like that?

Until next time, 

Love always

S