A Guest at 10:17

Every night at precisely 10:17, Marianne set the table for two.

The ritual was simple. A chipped ceramic plate beside a slightly smaller one, two spoons of sugar heaped into matching crystal bowls, and a single pale lavender candle placed between them just so. It had begun the night Calvin first asked her to stay, to make dinner together before he went back to the city. A momentary thing, she’d said. A simple meal. But something about that first night had felt like the hinge of an old door. Once it closed, she could still feel the vibration in the frame.

She lit the candle at 10:16, watching the smoke curl upward like a silent tendril reaching toward an unspoken promise. The flame always flickered a little when she struck the match, so she held her breath until it steadied. Only then did she pour the sugar (one spoon for hers, one for his) and set the two plates in place.

Marianne didn’t eat anymore, not since the first week of the ritual. There was never food to eat. She would sit opposite the empty chair, her fingers brushing the edge of the plate as though the warmth of memory could cling to her skin. The soft glow of candlelight cast gentle shadows on the cracked plaster walls. Some nights she could almost taste the sweetness of what she had made for him. Ragú with fresh basil, buttered squash, bread torn at the craggy ends. Some nights, the memory felt too sharp, like a blade held just beneath the ribs.

At 10:27, she spoke to him.

“I made your favorite,” she said, voice smooth as porcelain. “But it got cold.”

The chair stayed still. The air beside it held only the kind of silence that crouches in the throat and weighs the ribs down until you forget to breathe.

She poured two small cups of water. The sound of liquid folding into glass was comforting in its precision. She set the cups before her and him without ever lifting one to her own lips.

“Did you see the fox today?” she asked.

Nothing, only that muted quiet again.

The fox had begun appearing two weeks into the ritual. At first it was real, or real enough. She would catch a russet blur at the edge of the garden, curling through the grasses with a slow, watchful gait. Marianne had thought it curious, its amber eyes so bright, so alive even in the dusk. She began to whisper to it as she worked in the yard, and once, when it lingered near the fence post, she felt a strange kinship, like two things recognizing something hard-won in one another.

After Calvin left, (or after he stayed; Marianne wasn’t sure which phrasing was true anymore) the fox stayed. Not outside, but in her mind. It came into her dreams as a living thing with wary eyes that watched from the foot of her bed. Sometimes it sat in the corner of the kitchen as she lit the candle. Sometimes it sat in the empty chair beside her, its bristled tail curled neatly around its paws.

Tonight, the fox was quiet.

Marianne pressed her palms flat to the table, steadying her pulse. She had always been good with rituals, having been born on the cusp of winter solstice. Her grandmother had told her once, “you drink deep of repetition; things stick to you like shadows.” At the time it had sounded poetic, but now it blared like a warning.

At 10:31, she closed her eyes.

In her mind, Calvin walked through the door with his coat in hand and that crooked smile she had memorized. He set the coat on the back of his chair, slid into the seat opposite her, and reached for her fingers across the table. In her mind, she smiled back, and his laugh filled the room. Warm, low, something that felt as true as gravity.

She opened her eyes. Only candlelight, only quiet, only the hollow air that bore no shape of him.

The flame twitched as though longing for breath.

Marianne rose and crossed to the mantle where a narrow wooden box sat. Inside were fragments of things: a button from his favorite shirt, a pressed violet she’d found on the path where they first walked together, a faded ticket stub from a late-night art show in the city. She traced each piece with reverence, as though her fingertips might coax a spark back into them.

Finally, she lifted the last item, a folded slip of paper with his handwriting.

Come home before the first star tonight, it read.

She pressed the paper to her chest, letting the edges wrinkle beneath her thumb. The candle flickered long and lean like a heartbeat caught between two beats.

The fox appeared then.

Not real. She knew that as surely as she knew the rhythm of her own breathing. But there it was, perched in the doorway, amber eyes luminous. Its gaze was not hungry, nor threatening, only curious, as anything quiet and watchful might be.

“It’s been so long,” Marianne whispered.

The fox tilted its head, unblinking.

She blew out the candle. The sudden darkness was not empty, but deep, like standing underwater and seeing only blackness beyond.

And then, in the dark, she heard it: the scrape of a chair being pulled out. A familiar hinge in the quiet.