THE UNEXPECTED GUEST

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

metronome, Nyra set her mug down and peered through the peephole. In the lamplight stood a man, rain darkening his coat, holding a

" Henry Mercer, the name tugged at a time she had tried to pack away, he had belonged to an earlier life, laughter, late-night plans, small ruins. She had closed the door on that and taught 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 Nyra laughing in an easy way that mad

lace she could reach. The parcel felt like a small, private earthquake, then, another knock one evening, softer, tentative. A woman stood at the door, more youthful, wit

ss the pages, Claire's voice had the tired edge of someone who had been following an echo. 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, photograph in hand, she recognized a loosened seam she had sewn tight years ago. The presence of other people, deliverymen, strangers, a woman in a damp coat, had made the past insist that it mattered, sleep was thin at this time. In the morning Nyra walked to the post offic

someone had seen Henry by the crowded quay, someone had heard the bell, someone had misidentified a silhouette for a man who had once been loved claim seemed to loosen and then tighten her chest like the working of a fist. The town was starting to feel like a vessel carrying news she could not own, she would sit with the phot

, she did not know but she did know this house, which was once a sanctuary of ordered quiet, had become a place where the world persistently chose to make its argument with her past. Nyra cut the twine, inside was an object she recognized before she fully saw it, a brass bell, small and dulled, a ribbon through its handle frayed by sea air. Someone had left it here as an answer to a line in a letter, or as an invitation to follow. The bell's mouth had been struck, it sang a thin, lonely note when she tipped it, it was in the dying of the note that Nyra realized nothing was ever so straightforward. 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,