The 3 a.m. cart.

The first thing he added to the cart was a single banana. He did not need a banana. He had a banana already, in the fruit bowl, which he had been intending to eat for two days. It was 3:14 a.m. and the apartment was the kind of quiet that has its own colour.

The second thing he added was a stainless-steel kettle, the kind with the small whistle his mother had owned and which he had never inherited. He did not have kettles on his mind. The kettle had been suggested to him by the site, with what he felt was a faint air of accusation.

By the time he was on the fourteenth item — a French press, a paper-leaf calendar for next year, a set of three small ceramic bowls — he understood that he was not going to check out. He had never been going to check out. The cart was not, in fact, a cart. The cart was a list. The list was, he saw, a kind of confession he had not realised he was making.

...

He began removing things. The banana, first. The kettle, with some difficulty. The French press, easily. The ceramic bowls, only after he had imagined them, briefly, sitting on a small wooden table he did not own, in a flat he did not live in, in a city he had been thinking, lately, of moving to.

The cart, after he had finished, contained one item. He had not added it. He did not recognise it. It was a single hardcover copy of a novel he had not, technically, ever read but which his ex-wife had read out loud to him, once, in 2018, on a train.

He stared at the screen. The cart updated. A note, small, polite, appeared underneath the book: "you may also like." Below that, the kettle returned.

...

By 4 a.m. the cart contained twenty-three items, none of which he had added. He removed them, one by one. The site, with no visible delay, added each one back. It was not aggressive about it. There was no pop-up. There was no notification. There was only the quiet, attentive return of the kettle, the bowls, the French press, the book.

He sat in the chair for a long time. The kettle stayed in the cart. The kettle had decided to stay in the cart. He could feel, dimly, that some kind of disagreement was being conducted between him and the kettle, mediated by a third party which did not have his interests at heart, but which had, he had to admit, paid attention.

He clicked, finally, on the kettle's image. The page loaded slowly, for a 3 a.m. page. The kettle, in the photograph, was sitting on a small wooden table he did not own, in a flat he did not live in, in a city he had been thinking, lately, of moving to.

The cart waited. He waited with it. Outside, the dawn began, very slowly, to suggest itself.