Zoran bought two tickets to an exhibition, although he had nobody to invite. The ticket seller asked whether he wanted just one, but he felt embarrassed correcting himself. At home, he put them beside a bowl of apples. That afternoon, out of nothing more than ordinary boredom, he began thinking about Ema.
They had known each other through a student hiking club. One summer, they were left alone beside a river while the others prepared a barbecue. She asked whether he believed a person could fall in love with a friend. Frightened by his own answer, he began talking about the importance of protecting friendships. Ema later married someone else.
For thirty years, he carried that conversation as proof that his true happiness had passed him by. In the meantime, he had a marriage, a divorce and work he loved. Yet he could turn any lonely evening into a continuation of that walk. In his mind, Ema never changed.
He found her through a mutual friend. She worked in a flower shop and agreed to have coffee after her shift. When she arrived, she had soil beneath a fingernail and was laughing about a broken cash register. Zoran suddenly realized he had not prepared a single question about her actual life.
Even so, he asked the old question. Ema listened carefully. She said she had liked him then and had even waited for him to invite her to dinner. He felt a familiar, almost pleasant sadness rising in his chest. "So we missed everything," he said.
"Not everything," she replied. She had enjoyed a good marriage that ended peacefully, journeys she remembered fondly and years she would not exchange for an imagined version of her youth. She said she probably would have accepted dinner, but nobody knew what the two of them would have been like afterward. She did not want to become an excuse for his unhappiness.
Zoran felt ashamed, not because he had asked, but because he had spent years preserving her in a role that did not allow her to live. He apologized and asked how she had opened the flower shop. The conversation changed. She talked about her first faulty refrigerator, her stubborn business partner and the satisfaction of finally learning to turn down a bad order.
Before they parted, he mentioned the two tickets. "Is this an invitation from the present?" she asked. He said it was. They arrived separately at the exhibition, met each other again in front of a poorly lit painting and went for soup afterward. When he returned home, Zoran did not think about what might have been. He remembered how Ema had put down her spoon to finish telling him something.