The 7:42

Eight months of mornings, and I still didn't know his name.

I knew other things. I knew he took his coffee black from the cart on the platform—always black, always large, always with a nod of thanks that made the vendor smile. I knew he read history books, dense ones with cloth covers and no dust jackets, and that he underlined passages with a mechanical pencil he kept in his jacket pocket. I knew he sat in the third car, window seat, facing backward because he'd told someone on the phone once that he preferred to see where he'd been rather than where he was going.

I knew the exact shade of gray his eyes turned in morning light—somewhere between storm clouds and wet slate, depending on whether the sun hit them through the window.

I knew I'd spent far too many hours cataloging a stranger.

The 7:42 from Beacon to Grand Central was forty-seven minutes of my life, five days a week. In eight months, that added—I'd done the math, embarrassingly—to roughly one hundred and sixty hours. One hundred and sixty hours of sitting three rows behind him, watching the back of his head, the way his hair curled slightly at his collar, the way his shoulders shifted when he reached a passage that interested him.

One hundred and sixty hours of being too much of a coward to say hello.

It wasn't shyness, exactly. I'd given presentations to boardrooms full of executives. I'd negotiated contracts with people who could buy and sell my entire life. I'd moved to New York alone at twenty-four and built something from nothing.

It was him. Something about him specifically—the quiet intensity of his focus, the way he existed in his own pocket of stillness on a train full of chaos—made me feel like speaking would be an intrusion. Like I'd be interrupting something sacred.

So I watched. I wondered. I built an entire imaginary life for a man whose name I didn't know, and I told myself that was enough.

It had to be enough, because in thirty days, I'd be on a plane to London, and the 7:42 would become nothing but a memory I'd eventually stop visiting.

The morning everything changed was a Tuesday. February. Cold enough that my breath hung visible in the air as I stood on the platform, coffee warming my hands, watching the departure board flicker with bad news.

DELAYED. 7:42 TO GRAND CENTRAL. ESTIMATED DEPARTURE: 8:15.

I sighed. Pulled out my phone. Started composing an email to let my team know I'd be late.

"They're saying something on the tracks. Could be an hour."

His voice was deeper than I'd imagined. Warmer. I'd heard him speak on the phone exactly three times in eight months—brief conversations, clipped sentences—but never like this. Never directed at me.

I looked up, and there he was. Standing beside me like it was the most natural thing in the world, like we'd had a hundred convers...