What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?

Mine sounds made up.

It isn’t.

About six years ago, my marriage ended in a single phone call.

I was working in Michigan and driving home to Florida—a twenty-hour ride with a lot of time to think and nowhere to hide from your own mind. Early that morning, my wife called me.

“I have to tell you something.”

There had been another man in our house. The man she would eventually leave me for. The situation had been discovered.

That was it.

By the time I made it home, my wife had moved out. She was gone, my daughter was with her, and I had no idea where either of them was staying.

Think about that drive for a second.

Twenty hours behind the wheel, headed toward a house that looked exactly the same as it did when I left—but wasn’t the same house anymore.

That’s the strange thing about your life blowing up. The walls don’t move. The furniture doesn’t disappear. Your key still works. But the life you thought you were walking back into is already over.

That weekend, I went out.

I was drinking back then. I met a beautiful young woman with dark hair. We hit it off, stayed out all night, and eventually went back to her place.

I wasn’t looking for anybody. I definitely wasn’t tracking my wife. I didn’t know the neighborhood where she was staying, the street, the building—nothing.

The next morning, I walked outside.

And there was my car.

The car my wife had been driving.

At first, my brain couldn’t make the picture fit. Out of every bar I could have walked into, every woman I could have met, and every house in the entire Sarasota area, I had somehow ended up in the duplex directly next to the place where they had been staying.

Next fucking door.

You couldn’t have planned it. You couldn’t have followed a map to it. Hell, if I had tried to find them, I probably never would have.

But life dropped me right there anyway.

I stood outside looking at that car and realized how thin the line can be between one life and the next.

On one side of a wall was the marriage I had just lost.

On the other side was a complete stranger I had met only hours earlier.

And there I was in the middle, staring at the kind of coincidence nobody would believe if you put it in a movie.

Maybe it meant something. Maybe it didn’t. I’ve lived long enough to know that not every strange moment comes with an explanation.

Sometimes life just shows you how little control you ever had.

And sometimes, when one chapter ends, the next one is already waiting for you.

Right next door.

— Modern Day Dealer