Right Person, Wrong Time

The covenant of the near miss. Two people who would work, repeatedly failing to arrive at the same moment in their own lives: one is leaving, one is married, one is not yet the person capable of holding it. The device converts external obstacles into internal ones, because nothing at all is stopping this couple except who each of them happens to be this year.

The promise is that timing is the only thing missing, which is the most flattering and most painful thing a book can say about a love that did not happen. The form runs on accumulated near misses, each costing more than the last, and its endings split honestly into two camps: the eventual arrival, and the admission that some people only ever overlap. The desk's test is whether the wrong times are built from character rather than coincidence, since a couple kept apart by traffic is a plot device and a couple kept apart by who they were at twenty-six is a novel. The common failure is the near miss repeated until the reader stops believing either of them wants it.