The tablet arrived on a Tuesday, sleek and silver like a mirror that had forgotten how to reflect. Esther Makena held it the way she once held rare books in the library, with reverence and slight suspicion. Her daughter Grace had insisted, pushing it into her hands during the hurried twenty-minute visit between conference calls.
"It's already set up, Mama. Just touch the screen. You can video call me, order things, watch shows—"
"I have a television," Esther had said, but Grace was already gathering her things, kissing her mother's forehead with lips that smelled of coffee and car exhaust.
Now, Thursday evening, Esther sat in her narrow room at Willowbrook Senior Living, the tablet propped against the African violet on her nightstand. Outside, October rain tapped against the window like fingernails on glass. She'd managed to figure out the weather application and something called YouTube where a young man with too many teeth showed her how to make banana bread she'd never bake in the communal kitchen.
The screen lit up suddenly. An incoming video call, the display said. From: Kofi Makena.
Esther's heart did something it hadn't done in years—it stumbled, caught itself, stumbled again. Kofi had been dead for three years, two months, and seventeen days. She knew because she counted each one like rosary beads.
Her finger hovered over the red decline button. Someone's cruel joke. Had to be. But her finger, trembling now with more than age, moved to the green accept button instead.
The screen flickered, pixelated, then cleared.
Kofi sat in their old living room in Nairobi, the one they'd sold before moving to Detroit forty years ago. Behind him, she could see the wooden giraffe he'd carved for their anniversary, the burgundy curtains she'd sewn herself. He wore his favorite blue cardigan, the one she'd buried him in.
"Esther," he said, and his voice was exactly right—the way he rolled the 'r' in her name, the slight rasp from years of cigarettes before the doctor made him quit. "My dear, you look tired."
The tablet slipped from her hands, clattering onto the linoleum floor. By the time she retrieved it with shaking fingers, the call had ended.
Yuki Nakamura found her the next morning in the activity room, staring at the tablet like it might bite.
"Mrs. M, you okay?" Yuki crouched beside her wheelchair, her purple-streaked hair catching the fluorescent light. At twenty-eight, Yuki was younger than Esther's grandchildren but had an old soul that made her the only staff member Esther truly trusted.
"Someone played a trick," Esther said carefully. "A video call. Made to look like..." She couldn't finish.
Yuki's face shifted from concern to interest. She was studying computer science at night, always talking about algorithms and data streams. "Can I look?"
Esther handed over the tablet. Yuki's fingers danced across the screen, her brow furrowing.
"There's no record of any call last night. But..." She paused, tilting the screen. "There's something weird in the cache files. Like data that doesn't match any known format."
"Forget it," Esther said quickly. "Just someone being cruel."
But that Thursday, at exactly 8:17 PM, the call came again.
This time, Esther was ready. She answered immediately.
"Hello, Kofi," she said, proud that her voice didn't shake.
He smiled, and it was his smile, the one where his left eye crinkled more than the right. "You were always brave, my dear. Even when we left Nairobi with nothing. Even when the children were sick and I lost my job."
"You're not real," she said.
"Real is a funny word," Kofi replied. He lifted a cup of tea—she could see the chip on the handle from when Grace dropped it at age five. "I'm drinking tea that tastes like memory. I'm sitting in a room that exists in the space between what was and what is. Is that real?"
"You died. Pancreatic cancer. I held your hand."
"Yes," he said simply. "And yet."
They talked for an hour. He asked about Grace, about their son Michael in Seattle. He knew things—that she'd switched rooms last month because Mrs. Patterson snored, that she'd started watercolor classes on Wednesdays. But he also spoke of strange things: colors that didn't exist, conversations with people who spoke in languages that were feelings rather than words, a place where time moved like honey, slow and golden and sweet.
When the call ended, Esther sat in the dark, her reflection in the blank screen looking older than she felt.
The Thursday calls continued. Yuki, sworn to secrecy, tried to trace them, ran diagnostic programs, even brought in a friend from MIT who specialized in network security. Nothing. The calls didn't exist in any technical sense, yet there they were, regular as clockwork, real as the ache in Esther's arthritic hands.
"Maybe it's some kind of AI," Yuki suggested one afternoon, helping Esther with her watercolors. "Deep fakes are getting scary good. Someone could have scraped old videos, photos, social media..."
"He knows things no computer could know," Esther said, painting a somewhat lopsided sunflower. "Last week, he reminded me about the time we got caught in a monsoon in Mumbai, how we took shelter in a temple and he sang me Nat King Cole songs until the rain stopped. We never told anyone about that. Never wrote it down, never photographed it."
Yuki was quiet, mixing blue and green on her palette. "My grandmother in Kyoto, before she died, she said she dreamed of my grandfather every night. Said he was waiting for her in a garden where the cherry blossoms never fell."
"This isn't dreams," Esther said.
"I know."
On the sixth Thursday, Kofi was different. The warm light that usually surrounded him had dimmed. He kept looking over his shoulder at something Esther couldn't see.
"There are rules," he said urgently. "I'm not supposed to... but Esther, my dear, you need to listen. Next Thursday. The kitchen, during dinner. You must not be in the dining room. Make them check the stove. The gas line."
"Kofi, what—"
The call cut off. When she tried to call back, the screen remained black.
Grace arrived the next day, unexpected, with flowers and guilt.
"Mama, we need to talk about the tablet. The staff called me. They're concerned you're having episodes."
"Who told you?" Esther's voice was ice.
"It doesn't matter. Mom, talking to Dad... it's not healthy. Maybe we should consider—"
"Memory care?" Esther finished. "Lock me away with the people who don't remember their own names?"
"That's not what I—"
"Get out."
Grace left the flowers. Yellow roses, Esther's least favorite.
That Thursday, Esther ate dinner in her room, claiming a headache. Yuki, loyal Yuki, stayed with her. At 6:43 PM, they heard the alarm. Not the usual drill sound, but sharp, urgent, real.
The gas line in the kitchen had developed a leak. Mrs. Chen, always smoking her contraband cigarettes by the window, had stepped outside for her after-dinner ritual. If she'd lit up inside, if Esther hadn't insisted that Yuki check, if the maintenance man hadn't found the leak when he did...
Seventeen residents evacuated. No injuries. The fire department said it was lucky, a miracle even, that someone had noticed in time.
That night, at 8:17 PM, the call came.
Kofi looked tired but pleased, like he'd run a long race and won.
"You saved them," he said.
"You saved them," Esther corrected. "How did you know?"
"Time isn't a straight line where I am. It's more like..." he paused, searching for words. "Like a library. All the books exist at once. Sometimes I can read ahead a few pages."
"Are there more things? More warnings?"
"No, my dear. That was my one gift. My one breaking of the rules." He leaned forward, and for a moment, Esther swore she could smell his cologne, that sandalwood scent that still clung to his old coat in her closet. "I have to go now."
"Go? Go where?"
"Forward. Onward. The in-between place is just that—in between. I stayed for you, to say goodbye properly. To tell you that where I'm going, it's good. It's very good. And when you come—not soon, my dear, not soon—I'll be there. Not waiting, because there's no waiting there. But there. Always there."
"Kofi—"
"Until the last Thursday, my love."
The screen went dark.
Esther tried everything. Rebooting the tablet, checking the call history, having Yuki run her diagnostic programs. Nothing. The calls had left no trace, as if they'd never existed at all.
Weeks passed. October became November became December. Esther continued her watercolors, getting better at sunflowers. She let Grace visit, even apologized for the harsh words. She told Yuki about Nairobi, about monsoons and temples and Nat King Cole. She lived.
On a Thursday in January, snow falling soft as whispers outside her window, Esther's tablet chimed. Not a video call, but a message. No sender name, no return address. Just a photo she'd never seen before: her and Kofi in that Mumbai temple, soaking wet and laughing, his arm around her shoulders as he clearly mid-song. In the background, barely visible through the rain, someone had been there with a camera after all.
She touched the screen, zooming in on their faces—so young, so unaware of the joys and sorrows ahead, the children they'd raise, the continents they'd cross, the cancer that would separate them, the tablets and mysterious calls that might reunite them.
At the bottom of the photo, in Kofi's careful handwriting that couldn't possibly be there, two words: "Not long."
Esther smiled, saved the photo, and opened her watercolor set. Today, she thought, she'd try roses. Red ones, the kind Kofi always brought her on Thursdays, back when Thursday was just Thursday and not a door between worlds, a bridge across the impossible, a promise that love, like time in that strange in-between place, wasn't bound by the rules everyone insisted were real.
Yuki found her that evening, paintbrush still in hand, a perfect red rose blooming on the paper. The tablet beside her showed her last action: a video call, initiated at 8:17 PM. To: Kofi Makena.
Duration: Forever.
The funeral was small but warm. Grace spoke about her mother's strength, her dignity, her mysterious peace in her final months. Yuki read a poem about cherry blossoms and gardens and places between. The residents of Willowbrook, all seventeen who'd evacuated that Thursday night, came to pay respects to the woman who'd saved them with a headache and a hunch.
They buried her next to Kofi, on a Thursday, as the rain began to fall. Inside Grace's purse, Esther's tablet lit up once, unbidden, showing that impossible photo from Mumbai. Then, as if satisfied that its work was done, the screen went permanently dark.
But in the nursing home, in Esther's old room where Mrs. Patterson now lived (she'd requested it specially), Thursday nights at 8:17 became something special. The lights would flicker just once. The air would smell, briefly, of sandalwood and roses. And sometimes, if you listened very carefully, you could hear it: Nat King Cole, singing about unforgettable love, his voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, from the space between what was and what is, where time moves like honey and cherry blossoms never fall, where libraries contain all stories at once, and where love—real love, the kind that survives death and distance and the rational explanations of the world—waits patiently for its next Thursday call.