Sarah ordered two coffees every Tuesday. The barista stopped asking why.
She carried the mugs to the corner table, the one with the wobbly leg and the view of the parking lot. Dennis always preferred that spot. He liked watching people struggle with their car doors, their shopping bags, their small failures.
"Tell me about your childhood again," she whispered to the empty chair.
The steam rose from both cups. The one across from her grew cold first.
Sarah discovered Dennis three months ago, buried in the margins of her notebook like a splinter working its way to the surface. He appeared during her worst writing block. Words felt like stones in her mouth, and she needed him. Her editor demanded a breakthrough, something raw, something that would make readers forget their own names. Dennis delivered.
At first, Dennis visited only during writing sessions. He perched on her desk lamp, invisible but undeniable, offering dialogue suggestions and plot twists. His voice carried the weight of cigarettes he'd never smoked and warmth from a childhood Sarah invented but Dennis remembered.
"You don't understand loneliness," he told her one night. “Write what you know."
"I know loneliness," she replied to her empty apartment.
"No. You know solitude. Different animals entirely."
The distinction mattered. Sarah began taking notes on Dennis himself, separate from the novel. She catalogued his preferences, his gestures, the way he drummed his fingers when thinking. His character notes grew longer than her actual manuscript.
Tuesday lunch dates became ritual.
Sarah arrived at Brewster's Cafe at eleven-thirty sharp. She ordered Dennis a black coffee and a turkey sandwich, hold the mayo. He never ate the sandwich, but he always appreciated the gesture.
"Your book's going well," Dennis said during their third Tuesday together. His voice carried across the table like ripples on still water.
"How would you know?"
The other patrons couldn't hear him. Sarah checked their faces for signs of recognition, for the slight turn of a head or raised eyebrow that would confirm Dennis's presence. Nothing. She was alone at a table for two, talking to coffee steam.
The barista, a university student with kind eyes, began leaving extra napkins at her table. He probably thought she was grieving someone. That was almost true.
Sarah's real life narrowed to accommodate Dennis's expanding presence. She cancelled dinner plans to spend evenings in conversation with him. She researched his favorite movies, watched them alone in her living room while he provided commentary from the armchair.
"That actor reminds me of my brother," Dennis would say, though she'd written him as an only child.
"You don't have a brother."
"Maybe you forgot to mention him."
The water was rising.
Her editor called on a Wednesday morning. Sarah almost didn't answer. Dennis discouraged interruptions during their coffee hour, which had expanded to fill most mornings.
"How's the manuscript coming along, Sarah?"
"Dennis thinks we need another draft."
Silence stretched across the phone line. "Dennis?"
"My protagonist. He's very particular about his story."
"Right. Well, I'd love to see what you have so far."
Sarah realized she hadn't written a complete scene in two weeks. Her computer held fragments. Dennis ordering coffee. Dennis walking through rain. Dennis explaining the difference between loneliness and solitude. Moments without plot or purpose, snapshots of a man who lived only in her mind.
"I need more time."
"Take what you need."
The editor's words followed Sarah to Tuesday lunch. She sat across from Dennis, studying his face: angular features she'd never consciously designed, eyes the color of winter sky.
"She doesn't understand the process," Dennis said, stirring sugar into his untouched coffee.
"Which process?"
"Birth. I'm crawling out of your subconscious, Sarah. It's messy work."
"You're not real."
Dennis smiled. The expression carried decades of disappointment she'd never given him, experiences from a life she'd never written.
"Real is negotiable."
That night, Sarah dreamed in Dennis's voice. She woke to find notes written in handwriting that resembled hers but slanted differently, as if someone else had guided her pen. The notes contained memories that belonged to neither of them. A childhood dog named Rusty, a first kiss that tasted like spearmint gum, a father who left when the snow melted. She added the memories to Dennis's file.
The Tuesday ritual evolved. Sarah began dressing for their dates, choosing clothes Dennis might appreciate. She wore the blue sweater he'd complimented, the one that brought out her eyes. She styled her hair the way he liked it, though she couldn't remember him expressing any preference.
"You look beautiful today," Dennis told her, and the warmth in his voice tightened her chest.
"Thank you."
"I wish I could touch your face."
The words hung between them like a bridge she feared crossing. She reached across the table, her fingers moving through empty air where his hand should be.
Other cafe patrons began to stare. Sarah caught their glances in her peripheral vision. Concerned looks, whispered conversations. The barista approached their table one Tuesday, his young face creased with worry.
"Everything okay here, miss?"
"Fine," Sarah said. "Just having lunch with a friend."
The barista looked at the untouched sandwich, the second coffee growing cold. "I don't see anyone."
"He's shy."
Dennis laughed. Like water lapping against stone. Familiar and foreign.
The water reached her waist.
Sarah stopped answering her phone. Friends turned voices on her answering machine. Distant. Unimportant. The outside world thinned. Nothing like the rich interior with Dennis. Reality had sharp edges and ugly lighting. Her imagination offered softness.
She moved Dennis's coffee cup one Tuesday, setting it where her own belonged. The ceramic felt warm against her palms. She drank from his cup and tasted tobacco, though Dennis didn't smoke.
"I'm losing myself," she whispered.
"No," Dennis replied. "You're finding me."
The distinction mattered less each day.
Sarah's manuscript remained unfinished, but her understanding of Dennis grew complete. She knew the scar on his left shoulder from a childhood accident, could describe the way he held his cigarettes though she'd never seen him smoke. She knew his favorite song, his deepest fear, the words he whispered before sleep.
That Tuesday started like all the others. Sarah ordered two coffees. She carried them to their table and sat across from the empty chair. When she looked up, Dennis wasn't there.
She waited, sipping her coffee and scanning the cafe for signs of his presence. Minutes passed. Other patrons came and went. The barista wiped tables and refilled napkin dispensers.
"I'm here," she whispered to the chair.
Silence.
Sarah finished both coffees and ordered two more. She waited through lunch rush, watching families and couples occupy nearby tables. Their conversations felt foreign, their laughter hollow. They were real people living real lives, but they seemed less substantial than the man who had abandoned her.
The water reached her neck.
That night, Sarah sat at her computer and tried to write Dennis back into existence. She typed descriptions of his hands, his voice, the way he moved through space like smoke through water. But the words felt empty, mechanical. The Dennis on the page was a stranger wearing her creation's face.
She called his name until her throat was raw. She pleaded with the empty apartment, promising better dialogue, more complex motivations, whatever he needed to return.
Days blurred together without Tuesday markers to separate them. Sarah stopped showering, stopped eating regular meals. She lived on coffee and the fading memory of Dennis's presence. Her apartment filled with notes about him. Scraps of paper covered in observations, character sketches, fragments of conversations they'd shared.
*****
They kept her for seventy-two hours. The hospital room was white and sterile, designed to contain people who had drifted too far from shore. Sarah sat by the window and watched cars navigate the parking lot, their drivers wrestling with small failures Dennis would have found amusing.
"He's not coming back," she told Dr. Marín during their second session.
"How does that feel?"
"Like grief."
"Grief for someone who never existed?"
Sarah considered the question. Dennis had existed in every way that mattered. In her thoughts, her conversations, her Tuesday afternoons at Brewster's Cafe. He had filled the lonely spaces in her life, given shape to her solitude. His absence was a physical ache, a hollow where her heart should be.
"He existed for me."
"I killed him," she whispered.
"No," Dr. Marín said gently. "You set him free."
They released Sarah on a Tuesday. She drove to Brewster's Cafe out of habit, ordered a single coffee, sat at a different table. The corner spot with the wobbly leg felt like a shrine to something sacred and lost.
The barista approached with careful steps. "Good to see you back."
The barista left her alone with her coffee. Sarah opened her laptop and began to write, but not about Dennis. She wrote about a woman who fell in love with her own creation, who drowned in imagination until reality pulled her back to shore. She wrote about the space between loneliness and solitude, the difference Dennis had tried to teach her. The words flowed like water finding its course. Somewhere in the distance, she imagined Dennis reading over her shoulder, proud of the story she'd finally found the courage to tell. The water receded and left the memory of breathing underwater, finding life in impossible places, and loving someone so completely that letting them go became an act of grace.
Sarah saved the document and closed her laptop. Dennis would have been proud. That was enough.