"I keep thinking about the clerk," Claire had said. "Whoever double-booked four-B. Do we send a thank-you note? A fruitcake?"
"The fruitcake would be interpreted as an act of war," Samuel had said. "A note, maybe. Anonymous. From the beneficiaries of human error."
"Merry train," she had said, tipping her head against his shoulder as they walked.
"Merry train," he had answered, and the words fit then—no fumble, no crap, no imitation needed. Just a private holiday, portable, renewable, theirs.
If anyone asked later how it started, they would say it started with a mistaken seat and a mangled greeting and a woman who walked through amber light like she owned the weather. They would not say it started with certainty. Certainty was for résumés and Chicago offers and cloth-napkin proposals and alphabetized ties. What they had was better and harder: a laugh that didn't finish on the platform because it was never meant to finish there; a night that taught them the shape of possible; paper tickets with numbers written in bleeding ink; Polaroids of hands almost touching and of a man learning to share a doorway; and the knowledge, carried forward into every Christmas after, that sometimes the most important journeys are the ones where you are double-booked into the rest of your life, and you stay.