Dinner is over, and we are lingering at the table. I am idly pushing creases around on the table cloth, and Juliet is sitting back, content, attempting to make her wine glass sing. Jacobo has fled upstairs, and neither Shen ever came down, although we set places for them. It was not a formal meal, but a good one: the stew turned out well. Marco has brought coffees, and the Mayor sips his with gentle fingers, even though the cup is stout.

"Thank you, Marco." The Mayor is a short man, with thinning hair and tired cheeks. I have seen him in town, but I had not known who he was. "It has been some time since I have had such a pleasant evening." He touches his cup carefully.

Marco is sitting back and softening, feeling good from the food and the wine and the dim light like the rest of us. "The nights, they are still hard?"

The Mayor smiles a little. "Yes," he says. "It is very quiet in my house, in the evenings. I am not used to it." He looks up at us. "What do you do, in the evenings?"

Juliet is peering through the wine in the bottom of her wine glass, nearly elsewhere. "Sometimes we tell ghost stories."

The Mayor becomes still. His hand reaches out to find Marco's across the table, as if unable to see.

"Marco," says, and his voice is firm. "You remember Greta well, no? I do not know if I have ever thanked you for your kindnesses to me ever since she went on." Marco nods. A waiting falls across the table. My finger has stilled in forming a long wake in the white of the table cloth, and I can see Juliet's eyes focus on the wine, intent. The Mayor begins again. "I have a ghost story to tell you. I am sorry it is not a very good one. I do not know how to tell it except in this way, and I have told few.

"It is the evenings of the Fridays that are dimmest for me. The work of the week is safely put away, and the revelers sing from step to step on their routes from a place to another, all outside my windows. I do not wish to join them and I do; it would be nice to taste too much wine at the public tables, pressed to the arms with others, but I know that the Saturday will come after, and it is the Saturdays that I still dread.

"It was the Saturdays that Greta and I kept for ourselves, you see. We would take the long walk through the hill yards, stealing a grape or two and talking of the week. We would measure the lives of our children against our hopes for them and never find them lacking, we would tell tales of the things we had yet to see." He stopped. "She had wanted to see the Moon, did you know? She knew the impracticality of it, but she always thought it would be nice to stand there, in the grey, and look up at this pretty place.

"And then, one Saturday, she was there in the kitchen when I woke. She had made coffee and biscuits, and fretted that there was no proper jam, for I had been trying different kinds, and I had none of her favorite. We ate and bathed and dressed, and too easily we found ourselves walking the back ways to the market on our Saturday. I was afraid to arrive at the market, for then I would know if this was a dream, or perhaps worse, forgive me, if it was not.

"At the last turn before the market I took her hand. I remember that it was warm as mine, healthy and slightly dry in the cool wind like mine. I told her, 'Greta'. I told her that she should not be here, that she had gone on. I told her that I didn't know how to tell her, but there it was.

"She smiled and told me she knew that, but here she was, and we needed jam. Then she frowned. She said the strangest things: that she was sorry to be so light about it. She had no answers for me, she said. Only that she wanted to walk with me that day, and perhaps discover some new corner of things like we often did. I did not know what to say. We bought jam from Kasper, and he said nothing to us. I have not been able to ask him about it since, and he is careful with me now.

"On Sunday, I awoke to find she had laid out on Sunday clothes for Mass: my good suit, her favorite dress. She had laid them out on the dressing table like always. But she was gone."

The Mayor's fingers tighten Marco's hand. "Marco," he says. "What is happening to me?"