It’s a white ceramic with gold lettering that readsBe the light that helps others glowwith stars scattered around the rim.
It’s the Christmas present the operators of ShareYourGlow sent their moderators last year.
I raise my eyes back to Travis’s head. He’s gone to the fridge now, and is getting out cherry tomatoes and mushrooms, laying them on the cutting board like he’s prepping for a cooking show segment.
Travis is a moderator for ShareYourGlow? Oh my god, it’s yet another thing we have in common.
What lightbeam does he monitor? Maybe he moderates one of the achievement lightbeams: PersonalBests, where people share their marathon times, or GraduallyGettingThere for weight loss journeys. That would track with his analytical nature, verifying times and checking before-and-after photos for consistency.
Or could it be RandomActsofAwesome, where people post about strangers helping them? He’d probably be great at fact-checking whether someone really did pay for twenty cars behind them at the drive-through.
I’m about to open my mouth and ask him when a meowing noise distracts me.
I look out the window to see a fluffy ginger cat standing at the patio door, demanding entrance.
“I didn’t realize you have a cat,” I say as I go to the patio door.
Travis looks up from where he’s chopping mushrooms to follow my gaze.
“I don’t. I have a neighbor’s cat who demands treats in exchange for leaving me alone. It’s really just an extortion arrangement,” he says.
My hand stills on the door. Because what he’s just described to me sounds familiar.
The room tilts sideways as my stomach swirls.
It can’t be… There’s no way…
I mean, the odds are almost impossible, right? There must be hundreds of moderators for ShareYourGlow. I’m sure TruthGuardian would be able to calculate the statistical probability of two ShareYourGlow moderators from the same subforum meeting in real life because one of their brothers set them up.
But, even as I try to dismiss it, I can’t help thinking about the conversation we had last night. There was something familiar about it, wasn’t there? Not the words we spoke, but the pattern of bouncing off each other.
Like we’d instantly settled into a groove we were both familiar with. Talking to Travis is definitely similar to messaging TruthGuardian online.
I raise my gaze to him now to find him frowning at me.
“Are you allergic to cats? I can give him his treat outside if you want.”
He’s trying to figure out why I’m reacting this way.
“No, I’m not allergic to cats,” I say slowly. “What’s the cat’s name?”
“Ernest Hemingpaw. Which is a ridiculous name for a cat, if you ask me.”
Holy shit. Holy shit.
He’s definitely TruthGuardian. I’m sitting in TruthGuardian’s kitchen. The cynical, spreadsheet-obsessed, romance-debunking TruthGuardian is Travis.
This can’t be real. This is too perfect to be real.
This is a story that even I would agree isn’t plausible. Yet here we are.
I’m so happy I’m almost delirious with it.
This is my argumentative, cynical, endlessly frustrating online nemesis who once rated the believability of every romantic trope on a scale of “potentially plausible” to “someone’s creative writing exercise.” The man who said that people who believe in “the one” are just “too lazy to acknowledge the mathematical probability of multiple compatible partners.”
This is the man who has debunked hundreds of love stories with the determination of a detective solving cold cases.
How is he going to react when he’s faced with irrefutable evidence that he’s living inside his own ultra-romantic meet-cute?
