The message from Tuesday, answered

It's Sunday evening again, a month on. The phone is out because someone's sent something and you've picked it up to answer it, which you did, in two lines, in the time it took the kettle to boil. The list is clear. It's been clear for most of the month, apart from a Tuesday when a message arrived during something and you left it unread, on purpose, and answered it at four.

The oldest one from chapter 1 is still there, because I asked you to leave it. Open it now. It's the cake, and October, and it's been five weeks, and every reason in this book for not answering it has been at some point true. It's been too long. She'll have thought you'd gone off her. A reply now needs to explain the five weeks, and the explanation would be long and a bit shaming, and a Sunday evening isn't the moment.

Two lines. "That cake. Your mum's face. Yes to October, are the weekends of the tenth or seventeenth any good?" Send it. Don't read it back. Don't add the third line about the five weeks. Put the phone on the side.

It'll buzz before the kettle's cooled. It'll say something like "Ha, I thought you'd fallen off the earth, the seventeenth is perfect", and you'll notice that "fallen off the earth" is the whole five weeks, delivered as a joke, by someone who was glad to hear from you and had been keeping the turn herself. Then you'll notice something else, which is that the reply you've just sent is roughly what you were going to send on the first Tuesday, before the standard got attached, and that everything in between was the surcharge, paid by you, for nothing.

Friendships aren't kept by the messages you mean to send. They're kept by the ones you send, in the size they fit, on the day they come. The thinned list at the back of your phone was made of days like this one. So was the friend who's just replied. One of those is fixed now, and it took the time a kettle takes, and the next one will take less.

Answer the oldest one. Then put the phone down and go and find something to watch, and this time there's nothing heavy on the side, and October's in the diary.