THE UNEXPECTED GUEST

- The Unwe

f small noises that told her who belonged there and who did not. For seven years alone on Holloway Lane, she ha

ack door. The rhythm felt like a metronome. Nyra set her mug down and peered through the peephole.

e opened the door a crack, chai

not expected deliveries. He spoke plainly, w

depot when the buses failed. He accepted the tea she offered and left with a warning on the

t herself to sleep alone. The parcel was ordinary on the kitchen table. Inside were letters tied with ribbon, a pressed lavender sprig, a theatre ticket, and a photograph of Henry and Ny

like a warm stone, the old fuse of hope and dread firing again. The post office said

e rumors - a man seen at a dock, a van gone at midnight - but nothing fixed itsel

hful, with damp hair, her eyes hollowed by travel. "Miss Rowan?" she asked. "I'm Claire.

t expected. What had been a single parcel now looked lik

ons, confessions, half-dares. One sentence said, "If you cannot meet me, look for the bel

cho. The letters were both map and tripwire. She told herself she wouldn't go to the harbor. She told herself she wouldn't look for any bell. But standing in her kitchen late that night, photogr

Thomas Gray's name. She considered leaving the town, relocating from the houses that had witnessed those younger years. Instead, she began answering the summons in small ways, checking the harbor when the fog lifted,

go alone." No signature. The hand that wrote it was unfamiliar, deliberate. Nyra folded the pa

omeone had misidentified a silhouette for a man who had once been loved. Each claim seemed to loosen and then tight

y had left a life full of suddenness and consequence; he had also left clues that had found other hands. Nyra wondered

lied into a thin dossier. Claire and Nyra exchanged names of places Henry had liked, of pubs

the distant harbor bell of rumor but a small, thin peal that crawled across the rooftops and s

was no note, no name. The smell of the sea clung to it, like a memory. Nyra looked down the lane. Far away, the

. The uninvited visitor hadn't entered the house as a singular entity but as a pattern: parcels, letters, strangers in wet coats, a bell that may call or may mislead. The past entered the present not with force but with persistence. She placed the bell on the table beside the photograph and the lavender. The night had made its choice to keep raining. Nyra sat with the bell and let the house settle around her, waiting not for a single knock but for the slow, inevitable cadence of a life being interrupted and perhaps, one day, reshaped. In the early hours, she rearranged the letters, as if by aligning them, her choices would be aligned. She thought of Thomas Gray trudging through rain with parcels on his back