The Hospitality

They come to dinner. They have come to dinner for three hundred years.

Every Saturday at seven o'clock, Edmund and Hester Harrison arrive at the Lambert family home. The candles are lit. The table is set. No one has ever cancelled. No one has ever been late.

And no one — not Robert Lambert, not his wife Ruth, who sets the table with hands that no longer quite belong to her — can remember what the Harrisons look like.

When their son Samuel returns home after three years away, he finds a gap in ...