the night train to budapest

She had the seat opposite mine on the night train, and somewhere after midnight her enormous thermos ran out, and I offered her my terrible coffee, and that was that. We talked through the whole of Austria in the dark, hills you could only tell were there by the way the lights tilted, and she drew a map of her hometown on the back of my ticket so I would understand a story properly.

At six in the morning we stood on the platform and swapped numbers, both of us certain that was the end of it. Eight years on she was at my wedding. The ticket with the map is still in the box where I keep the things that matter.