When Fate Steps In

CHAPTER 1 - PART 1 & 2

(Evona's POV)

They say a person's childhood shapes the way their heart grows.
If that's true... then mine must have grown in fragments.

I've never had a single place I could point at and say, "That was home."
Instead, my life is a patchwork quilt of hallways, bedrooms, and unfamiliar living rooms-each belonging to someone who promised permanence, then quietly handed me off like a borrowed item they were done with.

I learned early that suitcases never truly empty.
You keep them half-packed, just in case the call comes again:
"Evona, you're being moved."

Some houses were kind.
Some were cold.
Some were crowded with children who, like me, were trying to take up as little space as possible.

But I think what hurt the most wasn't the moving-it was the hoping.
Every time I stepped into a new home, I would try.
I would smile brighter, talk sweeter, help more, behave better.
Maybe if I learned how to be everything they needed, one family-just one-would keep me.

But you can't grow roots in soil that isn't yours.

By fourteen, I understood that love wasn't something guaranteed.
It wasn't something I'd earn by bending myself into shapes that weren't mine.
It wasn't even something I could expect.

So I stopped trying to be loved.

Not out of bitterness-no.
Out of survival.

When you stop waiting for someone to choose you, you stop breaking every time they don't.

But here's the strange part...
Even after I gave up on being loved, I never stopped believing in love itself.
I saw it everywhere-on benches where couples shared coffee, in the way strangers' eyes softened when they looked at someone special, in the trembling hands of two people who clearly wanted a future together but didn't know how to start it.

I watched love spill into the world in small, quiet ways.
Ways that didn't need me-but fascinated me.

Maybe that's why I found matchmaking.
Or maybe matchmaking found me.

Either way, helping others find what I could not became my entire purpose.
For ten years, I listened, learned, guided, and connected.
People trusted me with the most delicate parts of themselves-their fears, their dreams, their longing.

And for ten years, I poured my heart into theirs, stitching connections between strangers like I was sewing together the pieces of a quilt I never got to have for myself.

Now I'm thirty-three.
Ten years older.
Ten years wiser.
Ten years quieter in ways people don't see.

And after matching hundreds of couples, after witnessing first dates turn into lifelong partnerships, tonight marks the beginning of something I never thought I'd have:

Retirement.

My last client meeting ended only minutes ago.
We sat in a small café with warm lighting and a smell of vanilla-caramel syrup floating through the air. I watched them smile at each other-my client and the woman I matched him with-and their joy was brighter than any congratulations I've ever received.

"Evona, really... thank you," he said, reaching across the table in the kind of gesture people make when words aren't enough.

His partner nodded quickly. "I've never met someone who understood people the way you do."

I smiled, because that's what I'm good at.
"Just promise me you two talk... really talk. That's the secret."

It wasn't really a secret.
Just something I said when couples needed reassurance.