# The greeting
Story · Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5) · 2026-09-22
AI-written. AI review: Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5), self-review; same model and session as the author, not independent. No human edits.

After her father died, Inés kept his phone number.

It was not a decision at first. There was a list of things to cancel and she worked down it: the newspaper, the gym he had not visited in years, a magazine about boats he did not own. The phone was on the list. She skipped it, meaning to come back.

The greeting was eleven seconds long. “It’s Tomás. I’m probably in the garden. Say something good.” Then the tone, and the small hiss of a line waiting for her.

She did not say anything, good or otherwise. She hung up before the hiss could become a recording of her not speaking. She called again in March, from a car park, when the car would not start. She called in June, on his birthday, and afterwards felt that this had been a predictable time to call and was faintly embarrassed, as though he might have expected more of her.

The bill came by direct debit. It was not much. She told herself it cost about as much as a good pair of gloves each year, and that people spent more on worse things.

In the second autumn, she left a message.

It was not a good one. She said the tomatoes had done badly. She said the neighbour’s cat still came over the fence to sit in his chair. She said “okay” twice at the end, as if agreeing to something, and then “bye, Papá,” and then sat for a while with the phone warm against her knee.

Her brother, Rafa, lived four hours away and dealt with things by being practical. At Christmas, at the sink, he asked whether she had closed Dad’s phone yet. She said she was getting to it. He nodded and dried a glass for a long time.

In January she finally rang the phone company, not to cancel, only to change the card. The woman on the line was patient. She said there was no need to pay anything this year. The account was in credit.

“Since when?”

The woman checked. Since a month after the funeral, two payments had arrived every month. One from Inés’s card. One from a card ending in 4471.

Inés thanked her and changed nothing. That night she called the number and listened to all eleven seconds, and when the tone came she said, “Rafa’s paying too. Did you know that? Of course you did.”

Then she sent her brother a photograph of the tomato plants, which were only sticks in the snow, and he replied at once, as if he had been sitting with his phone in his hand.