Chapter 13: What the Phone Held

Finbar was on the step at seven the next morning with a shoebox under his arm and the look of someone who had not slept either.

"Don't be angry," he said. "I should have brought this the first night."

I let him in.

He put the box on the kitchen table and took out a phone with a cracked corner and a charging cable wound around it.

"It was in your skating bag in the boathouse," he said. "Under the spare laces."

"I don't remember hiding it."

"You must have, the night before you left. I found it in the spring and charged it."

"Did you read it?"

"Once, and then I shut it again, because it wasn't mine to read."

He pushed the phone across the table.

The passcode was our mother's birthday, and my thumb knew it before I did.

The screen woke on a thread with a single letter for its name.

There was no conversation in it.

Every line was grey, an unsent draft, and the scroll bar was a hairline.

"Over a thousand," Finbar said quietly. "I'm sorry."

I opened the first one.

I saw you at the Custom House and you didn't see me, and that's fine, I only wanted to say the room was nicer with you in it.

The next said: I won't come to your office again, I said that last week, I'm sorry.

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