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Tonight, Chéri and I spent a one on one evening at the movie theater.

We wanted to see Oppenheimer and munch on great popcorn. And so we did. I really enjoyed the movie, but it’s not what inspired this post.

As you can see on the above picture, Montréal’s sky wasn’t a happy one when we left home a little after 8 PM, and we had received a violent thunderstorm warning not long before. So, even though the theater was at reasonable walking distance, we opted for the subway, just to be sure.

On our way out of the theater, the sky wasn’t much happier, and we shortened our trip back home the same way. There was an oldish woman in the wagon we were on, and I noticed that she looked nervous right away.

I couldn’t blame her…

It was well after midnight, and she looked pretty frail. When the subway stopped at our station, she got up, and seeing that we were leaving the train too, she made sure to exit by a different door than ours. Conscious that we made her uneasy, we took our time climbing up the stairs, to let her get a reasonable headstart, given that we’d walk the same way once out of the station.

Which, coincidentally, was the case.

And as soon as we turned around the first street corner, I spotted a young man on an electric scooter, that was coming our way. When he noticed the woman ahead of us two, he u-turned and started following her. At first I thought that it might have been her son, or at least someone she knew. But they weren’t talking, and the lady obviously sped up.

At that point, we were on the opposite sidewalk, and when I shared my worries with Chéri, he offered we crossed the street to be able to step up if needed.

By then, there was enough a distance between us and said Lady for me to know we weren’t the reason she was walking so fast. The young man was still weirdly riding just next to her, and my gutt feeling was that this wasn’t right.

We got to a crossroad, where she continued, when we about to take a turn to the right. And my mind started running.

What if? What if that young man had bad intentions? What if tomorrow we saw on the news that something had happened in our neighbourhood?

I hate what ifs. And one thing I absolutely love about Chéri is that he knows it. Before I even cared to ask he whispered,

Would you like to keep following her, just in case?

I nodded, and we diverted from our original path. The scooter guy was still doing loops, and sticking by the woman’s side, although she didn’t seem interested in making contact in any way. There was a considerable distance between our duo and theirs by then, but we kept following.

Until she took a sudden turn and entered an appartment, and the electric scooter disappeared in a dark backstreet.

Chéri and I walked the extra 5 minutes home, not knowing if we had prevented something really bad from happening or if we had just imagined it. But it doesn’t really matter, right?

Because, it just comes to that what if?