At 6:17

Every Thursday evening, Arshdeep Brar arrived at Mill Woods Town Centre around 5:45.

The routine rarely changed. He parked his blue Ford F-150, bought a double-double from Tim Hortons, and spent a few minutes watching people move through the early evening. Some headed toward the transit centre. Some crossed the parking lot toward the library. Others disappeared into the mall carrying shopping bags.

By six o'clock, the coffee was finished. The empty cup went into the garbage bin outside the Mill Woods Public Library entrance. Then Arshdeep went inside.

At 6:17 p.m., his phone vibrated.

The reminder had been there for fourteen years.

It had no explanation now. Only one word appeared on the screen.

Remember.

He never deleted it.

At forty-eight, Arshdeep was not a man people usually associated with unfinished business. He worked in residential construction and had built houses across southeast Edmonton, in Silver Berry, Larkspur, Tamarack, Wild Rose, and farther out as the city kept stretching. He knew how to read drawings, argue with trades, calm homeowners, question delivery dates, and notice bad framing from twenty feet away.

He liked construction because it made sense. A footing was either level or it wasn't. A wall was either plumb or it wasn't. A roof either held through winter or somebody had made a mistake.

Life, unfortunately, had no inspection checklist.

Inside the library, Arshdeep usually chose a table near the large windows. From there he could see Mill Woods Town Centre, the broad parking lot, and the movement of people between the mall, the transit centre approach, and the library. The LRT platforms were farther away, not visible from where he sat, but the area carried the restless rhythm of people arriving, waiting, crossing, leaving.

In summer, people lingered outside on the benches near the library entrance. Some read books. Some waited for rides. Some simply sat in the long Edmonton evening as if daylight itself were a luxury to be used carefully.

In winter, the benches emptied. By late October or early November, the first snow usually arrived, and people hurried indoors with their shoulders raised against the cold. Boots left damp marks on the library floor. Jackets steamed faintly. Children entered red-cheeked and loud before remembering where they were.

Arshdeep noticed all of it.

He had spent much of his career building homes for people he would never know. Streets that had once been mud, survey stakes, and stacks of plywood now held minivans, bicycles, flowerpots, basement suites, and families arguing about garbage day. Sometimes, while driving through Tamarack or Silver Berry, he passed houses he had helped build and wondered who slept behind those windows.

He had built hundreds of homes for others.

That did not mean he knew where he himself belonged.

Before entering the library, he often passed the familiar groups of seniors inside Mill Woods Town Centre. Many arrived by Edmonton Transit buses and spent part of the afternoon on the benches before heading home. Yellow No Frills bags rested near their feet. Their conversations moved easily between Punjabi and English, from grocery prices to grandchildren, from Alberta politics to what was happening back home in India.

One Thursday, the subject was cricket.

A fifteen-year-old named Vaibhav Sooryavanshi had apparently broken enough records in a single IPL season to convince several retired men that they were witnessing history. As Arshdeep passed, one of them was insisting that neither Jasprit Bumrah, Pat Cummins, nor Josh Hazlewood had managed to intimidate the teenager. Another replied that courage was easier when one was too young to appreciate consequences. The argument showed no sign of ending.

Arshdeep smiled and kept walking.

He liked that about Mill Woods. The place had its own soundtrack. Buses sighed. Shopping carts rattled. Children shouted. Seniors debated New Delhi as if cabinet decisions could be corrected from a mall bench in Edmonton.

At 6:17 that evening, his phone vibrated.

Remember.

He silenced it and looked out through the windows.

A woman crossed the parking lot toward the library.

For one foolish second, his breath changed.

Then she came closer, and she was only a stranger in a red parka.

That had happened so often that disappointment had become almost polite.

The person he had once waited for was named Marina D'Costa.

He had met her nineteen years earlier, when he was still moving between job sites with mud on his boots and ambition in his voice. She had worked in planning, sharp-eyed and impossible to fool. They argued over drainage, sidewalks, setbacks, landscaping, and whether builders understood communities or merely subdivisions.

At first, Arshdeep thought she disliked him.

Later, he realized she disliked easy answers more than difficult truths.

After one public meeting near Mill Woods, she had looked at him with a half-smile and said, “Have we met before?”

“No,” he had said.

“Strange. You look like someone who owes me an apology.”

“I probably will by next week.”

She laughed.

That laugh changed the architecture of his life.

They never became what others might have called a couple. Not exactly. They met for coffee, walked through half-built streets, argued about trees, and spoke about leaving Edmonton as if departure were a form of courage. Marina wanted work in Vancouver. Arshdeep wanted stability but called it responsibility because it sounded better.

Then his father fell ill, and every plan became conditional.

Marina left in November.

Before leaving, she met him outside the Mill Woods library. It had snowed that morning, thin and wet. She checked her watch.

Six-seventeen.

“Remember it.”

“I will.”

“I’ll come back.”

He believed her.

People believe the sentence that allows them to keep standing.

A year passed. Then five. Then ten.

He kept the reminder.

Every Thursday, it vibrated.

Remember.

Eventually, the waiting became smaller, quieter, easier to carry. He no longer expected Marina to appear. Not truly. But deleting the reminder felt like removing the last nail from a wall that had not yet fallen.

Then Anne McElroy entered the story.

She first appeared during a cold November week, not long after the first snow had turned the parking lot grey at the edges. Arshdeep was sitting near the windows with a construction deficiency list folded inside a book he had no intention of reading.

Anne stood beside the neighbouring table with a cloth bag over one shoulder.

“Is this seat taken?”

“No.”

She sat down and removed a paperback.

The title caught his eye.

The Distance Between Frames.

Anne noticed him noticing.

“Do you read books,” she asked, “or only inspect their covers?”

Arshdeep laughed.

“That depends on whether the cover passes inspection.”

“Construction?”

“Too obvious?”

“The boots helped.”

She was in her mid-fifties, with short grey-blonde hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the calm confidence of someone who had stopped performing for strangers years ago. She drove a silver Hyundai Elantra and worked part-time with adult literacy programs. She liked quiet libraries, ordinary coffee, and asking questions that sounded casual until they reached bone.

“What’s the book about?” Arshdeep asked.

“Memory,” Anne said. “Friendship. The things people miss because they keep staring at the centre of the picture.”

“That sounds like work.”

“Most useful things are.”

By the third Thursday, he expected her.

By the third month, he worried about that.

Anne became part of the ritual without trying. Sometimes she arrived before him. Sometimes he saw the Elantra in the parking lot and felt a relief he pretended not to feel. Sometimes she brought books and placed them on the table like clues she did not explain.

One evening, the book was The Gift of Uncertainty.

Arshdeep snorted.

“That sounds like something people say when they don’t know what to do.”

Anne opened the book.

“Most people don’t know what to do. Some are just better at invoices.”

“I know what to do.”

“On construction sites, yes.”

He smiled despite himself.

She never asked directly about Marina. That was Anne’s gift and her danger. She allowed silence, and silence made room for truth to move around.

Years passed in Thursdays.

Arshdeep watched snow arrive, melt, return, harden, and disappear again. He watched students grow taller, children stop holding their parents’ hands, stores change signs across the way, and the seniors inside the mall continue their debates with undiminished confidence. He watched Anne’s hair become a little greyer and his own beard do the same.

One evening, Anne arrived carrying a slim book called At 6:17.

Arshdeep stared at the title.

“That is oddly specific.”

“Some times are.”

“Not that one.”

Anne looked at him.

“Your phone disagrees.”

He said nothing.

At 6:17, the phone vibrated.

Remember.

Anne watched him silence it.

“Old reminder?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“For what?”

He looked out through the windows. A bus had pulled into the transit centre approach. People moved through the evening like loose pages blown from different books.

“Something I haven’t decided whether to forget.”

Anne nodded.

“That’s not the same as remembering.”

After that, neither spoke for several minutes.

The following spring, Anne disappeared.

The first Thursday, Arshdeep assumed she was busy.

The second Thursday, he assumed she was sick.

By the fourth Thursday, he stopped offering explanations to himself.

Her phone went to voicemail. Her email received no reply. The Elantra did not appear in the parking lot. Her usual seat remained empty. The library did not change, which somehow made her absence worse.

At 6:17 each week, his phone vibrated.

Remember.

He began to hate the word.

Summer came. People returned to the benches outside. Tim Hortons cups appeared in hands. Children carried library books against their chests. The seniors at Mill Woods Town Centre kept arriving by bus with No Frills bags and opinions. The city went on being ordinary, which was one of its cruelties.

Nearly a year after Anne vanished, Arshdeep arrived on the first Thursday of November. Snow had fallen that morning, light but serious enough to remind everyone what was coming. He parked the F-150, bought his double-double, finished it on the walk, dropped the cup into the garbage bin outside the library, and went in.

On their table lay an envelope.

His name was written on it.

Inside was a photograph.

Three people stood outside a half-built house in Silver Berry.

Arshdeep recognized the site first. He remembered the framing delay, the city inspector, the argument about drainage. Then he recognized himself, younger, beard darker, hard hat pushed back, smiling like a man who believed time would wait.

Beside him stood Marina.

Beside Marina stood Anne.

Not the Anne of library Thursdays, but Anne nearly twenty years younger, wearing a city ID badge and looking directly into the camera.

Arshdeep turned the photograph over.

Written on the back were six words.

You finally looked at everyone.

A folded letter slipped from the envelope.

Arshdeep unfolded it carefully.

Arshdeep,

I should have told you much earlier.

I was there the day Marina left. I was also there the day she came back.

You remember a promise. That part is true.

But memory kept only the part you could survive.

She returned three months later. She came to the library at 6:17 on a Thursday evening. She saw you sitting beside your father near the windows. He had fallen asleep over an open book. You stayed where you were, waiting for him to wake.

She watched for longer than she admitted.

Then she left.

Later, she told me that in that moment she finally understood the kind of man you were.

I argued with her.

I lost.

Years later, I found you here.

At first I wanted to tell you. Then I thought I had no right. Then I thought perhaps you did not need truth as much as company.

Forgive me for all three.

At the bottom, one final line waited.

6:17 was never the time she promised to return.

It was the time she decided not to.

Arshdeep read the letter twice.

Then a third time.

Outside the windows, people crossed between the mall, the transit centre approach, and the library. Some were arriving. Some leaving. Some merely passing through one part of life on the way to another.

At 6:17, his phone vibrated.

Remember.

For the first time in fourteen years, Arshdeep did not touch it.

He looked instead toward the parking lot.

A silver Hyundai Elantra sat near the far row.

Or perhaps it was only another silver car in falling snow.

Near it stood a woman in a dark coat.

Too far away to identify.

Too still to ignore.

Arshdeep placed Anne’s letter inside his jacket and picked up the photograph. He walked out of the library slowly, past the holds shelves, past the front desk, past the warmth and the quiet.

Outside, the cold met him like a fact.

The woman near the car had not moved.

Or perhaps she had.

Snow thickened between them.

Arshdeep stood beside his F-150 and looked across the lot.

He had spent his life building houses from drawings, but no one had given him a plan for this.

After a long moment, he began walking.

Not quickly.

Not certainly.

But toward her.