A story · House of Bridges
Sorry, Again
A short interactive story about a family group chat that goes tense over a canceled dinner — a fight Ronnie didn't start and isn't in, but somehow ends up smoothing over anyway. You choose what she does; there are four possible endings.
It is 6:40 on a Wednesday and the family group chat has gone from planning dinner to a small war in the space of eleven messages.
Ronnie watches it happen in something close to real time, propped against her kitchen counter with a spoon still in one hand. It started small — her brother Jonah cancelling Sunday dinner for the second time in a month, her sister Mara replying with a single line that had four times more edge in it than the sentence needed.
Jonah
cool, noted, guess my stuff doesn't matter as much as usual
Mara
oh my GOD it's one dinner Jonah, not everything is about you
Ronnie: hey — should we just move it to next weekend instead? 🙂
Ronnie didn't start this. She isn't in it, not really — she's three texts away from the actual disagreement, standing at her counter with a spoon, watching two people she loves say sharper things to each other than either of them means. And yet there she is, eleven messages in, already the one asking whether they should just move dinner, already reaching for the thing that will make the tension go away.
Nobody asked her to fix it. She notices this, distantly, the way you notice a habit mid-motion — too late to stop it, early enough to see it happening.
The typing dots appear under Jonah's name. Then Mara's. The chat is still very much live, and somewhere in the next ninety seconds Ronnie is going to do something about it, the way she has done something about approximately every tense silence in this family since she was young enough to notice one forming.