Of all the replies he’d imagined finding the next morning, none came close to the hurried scrawl that filled the front of the cereal box.

“Business trip, September, mum dies too, house on fire, trapped, SAVE YOURSELF”

He sat down heavily, unsure whether to view this particular message as comical or concerning. He imagined what would’ve happened had he read the message mid-sip: a cartoonish arc of coffee spraying from his mouth and his eyes popping from his head.

He shook himself and raised an eyebrow—perhaps it was just ominous language and fake foresight, like a fortune teller’s predictions. The business trip part was vague enough to be accurate in a number of circumstances, but her mum dying too…and a fire. Those parts seemed unnecessarily and worryingly specific.

Unsettled and late, he scribbled on the box “? I need more details” and as an afterthought, “Are you ok?”. He shoved the empty cornflake box back into the centre of the table next to the almost full one and hurried out to work, dropping the recycling on the curb as he went.

All day he sat with a notebook at his elbow projecting possible timelines “Grace died two weeks ago”, “business trip, September”, “lived here for 25 months”, “house on fire”. Despite the apparent simplicity of the task, he went over it again and again, until he was satisfied he had pinned down a danger window; the last two weeks of September and the first two weeks of October.

He left work early with a plan forming in his mind, all he needed was a few more details.

There was only one cereal box on the kitchen table when he got home. Frantically, he searched the bin, the recycling and the cupboards, nothing. He started texting Grace and Helena then stopped himself. It was over, the box was gone.

And yet it wasn’t over. Remembering the fire, he examined the table for ashes. He was slightly disappointed and relieved to find none, but then the spycam caught his eye.

He popped the SD card into his computer and played the last 24 hours of film at high speed, nothing. Helena normally dropped by to clean at around 10 am, it wasn’t her normal day but… he slowed the speed. As he watched, he realised the time stamps were jumping forward. Checking the settings, he realised that rather than motion-activated or continuous, he’d selected battery saving mode. Instead of video he had photos taken at 10-second intervals. Was 10 seconds enough for someone to run into the kitchen and leave a note or move a box without being seen?    

That night, he took his laptop to bed and fell asleep with tabs filled with searches for digital nomad jobs, rental villas, October holidays, and common causes of house fires, all crammed into his browser like sprinkles on a doughnut.

The next day he felt energised. He told Grace all about his plan for them to get away together in the autumn, for a whole month—to really reconnect with each other. He left off the part about it all being the result of cereal-box-induced fear of death.

In the coming months, he busied himself getting rid of candles, installing smoke alarms, sweeping the chimney, booking accommodation and flights and finding a fully remote job.

It was all organised, they would both be out of the country for the entire ‘risk period’. And if Grace never went on the business trip, her mum would also be safe. He did, however, arrange a long weekend with Grace’s parents before they left.

The day before the flight, Grace’s phone rang. He’d never seen her turn as white as when she took that call. Her mum had been rushed into intensive care following a stroke and wasn’t expected to survive the night.

There was still a choice, but it was a terrible one. Grace was unlikely to go on a business trip now, and if her mother died, maybe the cereal box was wrong. But he would still be in his house. Grace was in no state to drive, and so he climbed behind the wheel, deferring the decision to the morning.

A tense night turned into a week, then two weeks. Without ever making a conscious decision, they spent almost the entire risk period nursing her mother and helping her father around the house. As October rolled around, it seemed Grace was out of danger, though her mother was now battling pneumonia.  

On a grocery run for crunchy nut cornflakes of all things—he had a stockpile in the pantry at home—he got the call. “We lost her” was all Grace could manage to say. He hated that phrase.

In the coming days, he moved home to make space for grieving relatives. He was almost out of the woods, but given the circumstances, the whole thing now seemed absurd and delusional.

The day before the funeral, his phone lit up—Grace. In what he hoped was a sympathetic and reassuring voice he asked “How are you holding up?” there was a pause, then he heard her father’s voice, cracking and choking “I can’t believe I need to tell you this but we’ve lost her too” he went on to mumble something about the funeral still needing to go ahead and hung up. What else was there to say? The outcome hadn’t changed, just the specifics. In that moment, he made his peace and spent the evening drowning his sorrows.

Grace was inconsolable. Her mother’s death, the misplaced ashes, their eventual discovery—then this. For a long time, she couldn’t forgive herself for not calling him that night, but she’d been too upset to speak. She knew Mark had liked her mother. But to drink himself into a stupor—and remove the batteries from the smoke alarm? Some things were inexplicable. It seemed the fire had been started by an electrical fault in an old plug socket hidden at the back of the storage pantry where he kept his cereal.

The end