The woman at the café counter asked if I wanted room for cream. I said yes, then watched her pour the coffee all the way to the rim anyway. A small lie, the kind we tell to be agreeable. I thought about that while I walked home, the cup burning my palm through the paper sleeve.
In my notebook, there's a character who does the same thing—says yes when she means no, smiles when she's uncertain. I wrote her three months ago and couldn't figure out why she felt hollow. Today, watching my own hand accept a cup I didn't really want, I understood. She was lying to herself about bigger things: a marriage, a city she claimed to love, a version of her life she kept performing for no particular audience.
I spent the afternoon rewriting her. Not the plot, just the texture of how she moves through rooms. The way she touches doorframes. How she looks at her phone before unlocking it, already bracing for disappointment. Small gestures that reveal the gap between what she says and what she means.