Chapter 12: The Code

I got out of bed with the sheet wrapped around me and went to him.

Up close, the phone was worse than I'd thought.

The screen was cracked in a spiderweb from one corner, and the bottom half was dark and cloudy under the glass.

"It hit the deck when she..." He stopped. "When it fell out of her pocket."

"Does it even turn on?"

"It did. The first year." He turned it in his fingers.

"I tried six codes. Her birthday. Our anniversary. Her mother's house number. It locked me out for an hour."

"And then?"

"And then I put it in a drawer." He looked at me. "Every time I picked it up after that, I put it back down."

"For seven years."

I held out my hand.

He looked at it for a long moment.

Then he gave me the phone.

It was dead, of course.

I went down the hall in his sheet with the phone in my hand.

The door on the left was still unlocked from the night I'd opened it.

In the bottom drawer of Elise's desk, under a stack of old drawings, there was a white charging cable.

It was coiled neat and tied with a rubber band.

The kind of woman who tied up her cables.

I'd have liked her, I thought.

I'd have liked her a lot.

Back in his room I plugged the phone into the wall by the window.

I sat down on the floor beside it, cross-legged, in the sheet.

Anson sat down on the floor across from me with his back against the bed.

Neither of us said anything.

The screen stayed black for a long time.

Then a thin red battery came up in the middle.

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