Chapter 8: Zero Nine One Four

Percy Wexford had not slept.

At ten the next morning he stood in Dylan's kitchen, looking at a cracked black phone on a charging cable.

"Camille told me it was dead," Dylan said. "It wasn't. It just needed a charge."

"Why would she tell you that?"

Dylan did not answer.

Percy picked the phone up.

The screen lit with a photo he did not recognize, a gray sky over a garden and a pair of mud-stained knees.

Under it sat a four-digit lock.

He tried 0000. The phone shook its head at him.

He tried the code he used now, and then the one he had used at twenty.

Three wrong guesses.

"Careful," Dylan said. "It might lock you out."

"I know."

Percy stood with his thumb over the glass and his mind blank.

He had spent three years learning not to reach for things he could not remember.

He stopped trying to think.

His thumb moved on its own.

*0, 9, 1, 4.*

The phone unlocked.

Neither of them said anything.

"What was that?" Dylan said at last.

"I don't know."

But he did know where he had seen it.

September fourteenth was the birth date on the marriage license.

His mother had slapped that license down in front of him three years ago.

*Imogen Castell. Born 9/14.*

He had read it so many times that he had never once thought of it as a date.

His hands were not steady.

He opened the notes app because it was the first icon his thumb reached.

Only one file was in it.

The title was a single line: *Ask.*

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