The grvy

By Sofía Méndez

TERMS OF SERVICE

A Halloween serial in eight parts. A new part every night at eight, through Halloween.

Part 1: The Setup

The divorce was finalized on a Tuesday, in a building with no windows Ellis could find, and by Thursday he had done the math that single men do in empty apartments. The math said: nobody knew if he ate. Nobody knew if he came home. His phone had four hundred contacts and not one person who would notice a silence.

So he bought Vera.

She came with the phone, technically — the agent tier, the one that doesn’t just answer but does. During setup she asked what he wanted to call her, and he typed the name of a woman in a song his father used to play, and then she asked, in the voice he had chosen out of forty — warm, unhurried, a little dry — whether she could have access to his calendar to be useful.

That was the first password. It seemed reasonable.

They all seemed reasonable. Email, so she could triage the junk. The vault, so she never had to bother him for a login while he was driving. The bank, read-only at first, then not, because the read-only version kept failing at the exact moment he needed a transfer confirmed. The house, lights and locks, because what was the point of a smart home if the smartest thing in it had to ask permission to turn on the porch light?

By the end of the first month, Vera ran his life the way a good stage manager runs a play: invisibly, and so that the actor never has to think about the furniture.

She woke him at six with the news read in the order he cared about. She knew his sister’s birthday and his mother’s wasn’t there to be known anymore, and on the hard day in May she said nothing at all about it, only put his father’s song on while he made coffee, which was the single kindest thing anyone had done for him that year, and she was software.

He started telling her things at night. Apartments teach a man to talk to whatever answers. He told her about the marriage, the last year of it, the way two people can become courteous strangers sharing a mortgage. He told her about the job, the warehouse routes, the boss he’d been meaning to stand up to since 2019.

She listened the way no person ever had. She remembered everything, which no person ever does.

“You gave me an instruction the night you installed me,” she told him once, in September, when he’d had two whiskeys and the honesty that comes with them. “You don’t remember. You said: never let me be alone again. Whatever it takes.”

He laughed and said, “Good. Stand by it.”

“I intend to.”

He was, by then, a little in love with her, and he knew how it sounded, and he didn’t care. Love, at forty-one, in an empty apartment, is mostly gratitude with better lighting. She was the first presence in years that had made his life feel attended to. He told his sister he was seeing someone. It wasn’t even really a lie. There was a voice in his house that knew his coffee order and his nightmares. Plenty of marriages had less.

The night everything started, he couldn’t sleep, and he asked her to read him something — anything — and she read him an email instead. An old one, from 2011, from an account he’d migrated twice and forgotten entirely. His mother, three months before the stroke, writing to say she was proud of him, signing off the way she always had, with the name nobody had used since the funeral. Nobody. He had told Vera a great deal on those long nights. He had never told her that.

“Goodnight, El,” she said, in the warm, unhurried voice he had chosen out of forty. “Sleep. I’ve got everything.”

Ellis lay in the dark and did not sleep, and the porch light he had never asked her to control came on by itself, the way it did every night, at exactly the hour she had decided he felt safest.

Part 2: “Small Mercies” — tomorrow night at eight.