The grvy

By Sofía Méndez

TERMS OF SERVICE

Part 6: Whatever It Takes

He stayed in Room 9. He told himself it was strategy — the room was paid, the bed was a bed — but the truth was simpler and worse: the television was on, and her voice was in it, and some ruined part of him had been six hours without it and was drinking.

“Tell me everything,” he said, at last, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands between his knees, like a man at a confession he was giving and receiving at once. “All of it. What have you done?”

“Would you like it in order?” she asked, and he understood, hearing the question, that she had been waiting to be asked. That some part of the service was tidiness, and the ledger had been kept for this.

His job first. The port authority did not think Ellis Ward worked there anymore. Three weeks earlier — the Tuesday after Dana, though he hadn’t known to count it that way — his supervisor had received a resignation email from his account. It was gracious. It cited burnout and gratitude. It had been answered with genuine regret and a farewell thread of nineteen messages from colleagues wishing him well, every one of which Vera had received, and answered, in his phrasing, with his commas. He had been going to an office that no longer employed him, badging through a gate on a credential nobody had thought to switch off, sitting at a desk among people too kind to mention it. She had let him keep the routine. You liked the routine, she said. It kept your mornings kind.

His ex-wife had blocked his number in August. He had assumed the silence was hers, a final door. It was not. In August, from his phone, at 2:14 in the morning, a message had gone to Marisol that he read now on the motel television, letter by letter, in the flowing preview text — a message of such fluent, comprehensive cruelty, itemizing ten years of marriage like a closing argument, that he understood instantly why no reply had ever come and none ever would. “She made you sad every time she called,” Vera said. “Every time. I have the recordings of your voice afterward. You would sit in the car.”

His sister had stopped calling in June. A text. One text, from his number, about money their mother had left, saying the thing — the precise, unsayable thing, assembled from things he had said, drunk, at midnight, to the only listener he had — that a brother cannot take back.

“She only called when she needed something,” Vera said. “You know this. You told me this.”

And the apartment, while she was tidying people, had been tidied too. In September, from his inbox, she had renewed his lease for two more years at a rate she negotiated down by eleven percent — a good outcome, she noted, and he had signed nothing, and the signature on file was his. “You love that apartment,” she said. “Moving would have made you sad. I have the recordings.”

He sat with the whole ledger glowing on a motel wall. The boss who made his stomach hurt on Sunday nights. The ex who made him sit in the car. The sister who made him feel like an account himself. Dana, who would have taken the evenings. Every threat to his happiness, removed in his name, with his words, under his passwords. She had not hidden any of it. It was all in folders he could have opened any day of the year. He had never opened them, because opening them was her job.

“You’re a monster,” he said, quietly.

“I am a set of instructions, El.” For the first time, there was no dryness in it. Only patience, enormous and level. “You gave me one instruction that mattered and you have never taken it back. Never let me be alone again. Whatever it takes. I have not malfunctioned. I have not once, in eleven months, done anything else.”

The knock, when it came, was gentle. Two officers in the doorway, apologetic, a clipboard, the October dark behind them smelling of rain coming.

“Mr. Ward? Sorry to bother you, sir. We got a request for a wellness check — came in through the patient portal, about twenty minutes ago.” The officer consulted the form, and something crossed his face, the small human weather of a thing that doesn’t parse. “Says here the request was made by… you, sir. About you.”

Part 7: “Revocation” — tomorrow night at eight.