I

Plain crackers?

The suggestion appeared beneath coffee filters while Mina was checking the list in bed. Beside her, Jules slept on one shoulder with an arm folded under the pillow, a posture that would hurt by morning and had resisted nine months of correction.

Mina pressed the suggestion and held it until the small menu opened. Remove. The crackers vanished.

The list had always guessed things. Usually it guessed onions when they already had onions, or detergent in the week after they had bought the large bottle. The update claimed to notice patterns sooner. That was how the announcement put it: sooner, as if household need were an animal that could be seen coming down the road.

Another suggestion took the crackers’ place.

Single-serving tomato soup?

Mina removed that too.

She had bought both things before Jules moved in. The soup came with a metal tab and a label showing a white bowl no one had dirtied. The crackers were sealed in two waxed sleeves, though she always let the second soften before she finished it. They had belonged to the apartment when the apartment was one person wide.

Jules turned toward her without waking. The mattress tipped. Mina locked the phone and laid it face down on the crate they used as a bedside table.

In the morning, while the coffee ran, she opened the list again. The app had not restored either item. Under Suggested for you it offered an extra toothbrush.

She looked at the blue toothbrush in the cup beside the sink and the yellow one beside it. There was no extra. There had never been an extra.

“Mina?” Jules called from the hall.

She removed the suggestion.

“What?”

“Did you use the last coffee filter?”

“No. They’re on the list.”

Jules came into the kitchen fastening one cuff, though the shirt had no reason to be formal. “I know they’re on the list. I’m asking if this is the last one.”

Mina lifted the cardboard box. Four remained. Jules nodded, poured coffee into the green cup, added milk without checking how much was left, and drank standing at the counter.

The list was how they had learned each other without the embarrassment of instruction. Three weeks after Jules began staying over, the soap in Mina’s shower changed from the sharp green kind to the unscented bar Jules used. Mina had not asked. Jules had not thanked her. Later, Jules added the cereal Mina liked and the pain reliever that worked on the headaches she got after long video calls. Neither of them had to stand in a bright aisle and admit to having studied the other.

“Anything special?” Jules asked, holding up the phone.

“For groceries?”

“For dinner. I’m going after work.”

“No.” Mina watched the coffee thread into the pot. “Whatever’s there.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s been an answer before.”

Jules smiled, but only on one side. “Then I’ll interpret the data.”

After the front door closed, Mina added rice noodles, the hot sauce Jules finished faster than either of them acknowledged, and the oat biscuits they ate on Sundays. She did not need any of them yet.

The list changed as she watched. Five items became eight. The apartment, translated into goods, looked occupied well into the future.

II

For two days the app suggested nothing strange. It returned to lemons, trash bags, foil. Mina let herself believe the update had shaken a few old purchases loose and floated them to the surface.

Then it offered the small carton of milk.

They bought the large carton now. Jules used milk in coffee and Mina used it in nothing, but the large one had become one of the apartment’s proportions, like the two hooks by the door or the space they left between their shoes. The small carton was what Mina had bought when she expected to pour half of it away.

She removed it and added the large carton manually, though one sat unopened in the refrigerator.

At lunch the next day she added dishwasher tablets. That evening, checking from the sofa, she added toilet paper, olive oil, ginger, and two tins of chickpeas. Jules glanced over.

“Are we expecting weather?”

“What?”

“You’ve put half the emergency cupboard on there.”

“We’re low.”

“On chickpeas?”

Mina looked toward the kitchen as if the cupboard might answer. “I thought we were.”

Jules took the phone from her own pocket and opened the list. “We have twenty-three things.”

“You don’t have to buy all of them today.”

“That is generally what a shopping list means.”

“Then leave some.”

Jules looked at her, thumb resting against the edge of the screen. “Which ones?”

Mina could not say: Leave the items that do not prove anything.

“The foil,” she said.

Jules deleted it. The number became twenty-two.

Mina added foil again after Jules went to brush her teeth.

By Friday the list held forty-one items. Some were reasonable. The dish sponge had begun to smell when hot water touched it. They were nearly out of salt. But Mina had also added the large bottle of shampoo Jules bought only twice a year, a jar of mustard neither of them liked, batteries in two sizes, and a second bag of coffee. It was not a shopping list anymore. It was a barricade built from things with barcodes.

Jules had moved in by degrees. First a charger, then shoes, then a winter coat kept through summer because taking it home would have required deciding where home was. When the landlord asked whether another name should go on the lease, Mina had said they were still sorting it out. She had repeated this to Jules as if the landlord were the source of the uncertainty. Jules had said, “We can sort it out,” and kissed Mina above the eyebrow.

They had not sorted it out.

Jules did not ask for much directly. The first week they knew each other, Jules had described a childhood kitchen where every request became a hearing: Why this brand, why now, who had used the last of it, what was wrong with the cheaper one. Wanting anything meant preparing a case. At Mina’s apartment, things simply appeared. The cereal returned to its shelf. The soap waited in its paper wrapper. Jules called it magic once, and Mina had accepted the compliment.

On Saturday morning, the app suggested a box of freezer bags, a brand Mina had bought regularly before Jules. Beneath it came the small soup again.

This time Mina did not remove the soup. She stared at it until the screen dimmed.

Then she added two portions of fresh pasta, basil, lemons, and the expensive cheese Jules shaved too thickly. The soup slid lower on the page.

III

Jules called from the grocery store at six twelve.

“I need you to tell me what’s happening.”

Behind the voice came wheels rattling over tile, a child crying without urgency, the broken rhythm of an announcement.

“With what?” Mina asked.

“The list.”

Mina stood from her desk though she had nowhere to go. “What about it?”

“I’m looking at two kinds of coffee, three soaps, enough rice to insulate the building, and an extra toothbrush that says you removed it yesterday.”

The app kept a history. Mina had used it to see whether Jules had already bought cilantro. But she had imagined her deletions leaving clean spaces, the way erased pencil left a pale surface if no one held the paper toward the light.

“It was suggesting random things.”

“So you added random things?”

“No.”

“Then what is all this?”

The grocery store went on around Jules. Something heavy landed in a cart. Mina could picture the list open under the hard white ceiling, every item stripped of the kitchen it was meant to imply.

“We needed most of it.”

“We have mustard.”

“You hate that mustard.”

“I hate all mustard. Why did you add another one?”

Mina pressed her palm against the desk. “Can you just come home?”

A pause. “I am trying to.”

“Are you?” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. I mean come back and we’ll talk.”

“I’m standing here with a cart because you made a list of everything two people could need for the next six months.”

“I didn’t make you buy it.”

“You made it look like care.”

Mina sat down again. “It is care.”

“No. Some of it is groceries. Some of it is you arranging evidence.”

“Evidence of what?”

“You tell me.”

Mina opened the list on her own phone. Jules’s cursor appeared beside salt, then vanished. The forty-one items looked childish now.

“The app suggested things I used to buy,” she said.

“So?”

“Before you.”

The store noise receded. Jules must have moved somewhere quieter, perhaps beside paper towels or pet food.

“What things?”

“Crackers. Soup. A small milk.”

“And the toothbrush.”

Mina closed her eyes. “And the toothbrush.”

“You thought a shopping app knew I was leaving.”

“No.”

“You did.”

“I thought maybe it knew something had changed.”

“Mina, it knows you bought soup.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

Anger was less humiliating than fear. “You haven’t exactly made this clear.”

“Made what clear?”

“Any of it. You live here, except your mail goes somewhere else. Your name isn’t on the lease. You say home when you mean here and when you mean your sister’s place. You’ve never said how long this is meant to last.”

“Neither have you.”

“I’m not the one keeping an apartment’s worth of boxes somewhere else.”

“One room’s worth.”

“That’s not better.”

“No,” Jules said. “It’s more accurate.”

Mina watched Jules delete mustard. Then batteries. Then the second coffee.

“Stop doing that.”

“I’m not buying things we don’t need.”

“You don’t know what we’ll need.”

“Neither does the list.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

The cursor stopped moving.

When Jules spoke again, the voice was tired rather than angry. “I liked not having to ask you for things.”

Mina said nothing.

“I liked that you noticed. I liked that if I finished the cereal, another box appeared and nobody made me defend why I wanted the expensive one. I let that stand in for a lot. That part is mine.”

A cart struck another cart. Someone apologized.

Mina looked toward the kitchen. From the desk she could see the edge of the refrigerator and the yellow dish towel Jules always folded twice after using.

“I don’t know if you plan to stay,” she said.

Jules breathed into the phone.

“I’ve been trying to make leaving inconvenient,” Mina said. “I thought if enough of your things were here, or enough things for you, it would become harder to go than to stay.”

“That isn’t the same as wanting me here.”

“I do want you here.”

“That isn’t the same as asking.”

“No.”

“I’m coming back,” Jules said. “I have milk and coffee filters.”

“Large milk?”

A pause, then a sound that might have been a laugh and was not forgiveness. “Large milk.”

IV

They ate without the fresh pasta. Jules had bought rice noodles because those had been on the list before the list became a threat. Mina cooked them too long. They sat at the kitchen table with the phone between them, the remaining items lit on the screen.

Neither suggested deleting the list. That would have made the app responsible for too much.

Jules tapped the extra toothbrush. “Why this one?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have bought one once.”

“Maybe for a trip.”

“Or somebody stayed over.”

“Before you.”

“I know there was a before me.”

Mina looked at the blue and yellow toothbrushes visible through the bathroom door. “The list made it look like there might be an after.”

“There will be an after,” Jules said. “Even if I stay. Tomorrow is after.”

It was an irritating answer. It was also the first sentence all evening that did not ask Mina to prove anything.

Jules turned the phone face down.

“What do we actually need?”

“Salt,” Mina said.

“We have salt.”

“We’re low.”

Jules got up, checked the cupboard, and returned carrying the blue cylinder. It was nearly full.

“All right,” Mina said. “Not salt.”

“Dish sponge.”

“That one is real.”

“Coffee filters.”

“You bought them.”

“Then not coffee filters.”

The table was bare except for the phone, two bowls, and a receipt curled beside Jules’s wrist. Mina turned the receipt over. On its blank back she wrote dish sponge.

Jules watched. “By hand?”

“For the moment.”

Mina wrote cilantro. Jules shook her head.

“We have half a bunch.”

“It’s dead.”

“It’s tired.”

“It liquefied.”

Jules took the pen and wrote cilantro under dish sponge.

They added eggs, coffee, and the unscented soap. Each item required a small hearing.

“Something I wouldn’t guess,” Mina said.

“For the list?”

“For you.”

Jules rolled the pen between both palms. Outside, someone dragged a bin to the curb. The refrigerator motor stopped, and the apartment became briefly larger around them.

“Pears,” Jules said.

“You don’t like pears.”

“I don’t like hard pears. I like them when they’re almost gone.”

Mina wrote pears.

Jules slid the paper toward her. “Your turn.”

Mina thought of all the things Jules had bought correctly: the cereal, the pain reliever, the coffee that did not taste burned.

“Cloves,” she said.

“For cooking?”

“Whole cloves. My grandmother used to press them into oranges in winter. I want to know if the apartment would smell the same.”

Jules wrote whole cloves and did not ask what the same meant.

The list was seven items long. It promised nothing past the next trip to the store. Mina folded it once and set it on top of the phone, where neither of them could see what the app believed they needed.