Actually…
July 27, 2026 2026-07-27 9:38
Actually…
The onions needed another minute.
Ada stirred them once, turned the heat down and reached for the lid.
Her phone buzzed.
She wiped her hands on the dish towel before picking it up.
The message wasn’t long.
She read it.
Then she read it again.
It wasn’t what had happened.
She knew that.
She stood there a moment with the phone still in her hand.
“Actually…”
The word came out before she realised she’d said it.
She reached for the wooden spoon.
The onions were beginning to catch.
She stirred them.
Added the tomatoes.
The smell changed almost immediately.
She crumbled a seasoning cube into the pot with her fingers and watched it disappear.
“…that’s not exactly…”
The sentence thinned in the middle.
Then it wasn’t there anymore.
Usually, it didn’t stop there.
Usually, the second conversation would already be starting.
The one after the real one, where nobody interrupted, and she remembered everything the first time.
She would tell them what she’d meant. Then, because that hadn’t quite landed, she would tell them again, a little better. There was a calm version in which she explained herself so clearly that the other person went quiet and saw it at last. Thirty seconds later, there was a sharper one, where she wasn’t calm at all, and that one was more satisfying, and she knew it.
She would answer the reply they hadn’t sent yet. Then decide the reply was weak, and improve it on their behalf, so she could defeat the better one. She would remember the thing from two years ago that proved her point, and bring that in too, though nobody had mentioned it. She would produce the sentence she had been saving, the one that ended things, and feel it land in a room that wasn’t there.
She would mutter half of it aloud over the pot. “And in any case—” to the tomatoes. Notice the onions had caught while she was mid-word with someone who wasn’t in the kitchen. Win it.
Lose the thread. Start again from the top with a small adjustment, the way you restart a song to hear one line again.
Sometimes it was an argument she thought she’d finished the day before, beginning again on its own, unprompted, while she rinsed a plate.
Some of it followed her into the shower. Some of it into bed. Sometimes she woke with the closing line already waiting, fully formed, before she had opened her eyes.
She tasted the stew.
Needed a little more salt.
Added some.
Too much.
A splash of water settled it.
Someone called from another room.
“Is dinner nearly ready?”
“Almost.”
She lifted the lid off the rice.
The water had almost gone.
She turned the heat lower.
Covered it again.
Rinsed the spoon.
The phone stayed where it was.
She filled two glasses with water.
One for herself.
One for whoever had asked about dinner.
She carried them to the table.
Straightened a placemat without thinking.
Folded the dish towel over the oven handle because one corner had slipped loose.
The rice finished cooking.
The stew thickened.
The extractor hummed.
Outside, someone closed a gate.
A neighbour laughed.
A generator somewhere down the street coughed into life.
She switched off one burner.
Turned another lower.
Tasted the stew once more.
This time it was right.
Later, wiping the counter before bed, she noticed the phone where she’d left it.
She picked it up.
For a moment, she waited.
Not for another message.
She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for.
There was nothing there.
No half-built sentence.
No second conversation.
Nothing waiting behind the screen until she had both hands free.
She looked at the message once more.
It still wasn’t true.
She knew that.
She locked the phone.
Set it back on the counter.
Turned the heat off.
Dinner was ready.
