Chapter 1.

1.

My phone lit up with the words UNKNOWN CALLER, which usually meant some kind of scam, but I guess I felt like talking because I answered anyway: “Hello?”

“Dad?”

I shot up so fast my knees banged against the kitchen table, sloshing coffee all over my bacon and eggs. “Maggie? Is that you?”

She answered but I couldn’t make out the words. Her voice was faint. The line hissed and crackled, like I was gonna lose her at any moment.

“Hang on, hon. I can barely hear you.”

The kitchen is the worst room in my house for taking calls. You never get more than a bar or two of signal strength. I carried the phone into my living room and tripped over some lumber I’d been trimming and sanding and staining. Just a little carpentry project to kill the time at night; it would all turn into a coffee table, eventually. But I could never motivate myself to finish the job, so there were screws and sawdust all over my rug.

I hopscotched through the mess and rushed down the hall to Maggie’s childhood bedroom. She had a tiny window overlooking our backyard and the old Lackawanna rail lines—and when I leaned against the glass, the signal popped up to three bars.

“Maggie? Is this better?”

“Hello?” She still sounded a million miles away. Like she was calling from overseas. Or from a cabin deep in a remote wilderness. Or from the trunk of an abandoned car, buried at the bottom of an underground garage. “Dad, can you hear me?”

“Are you okay?”

“Dad? Hello? Can you hear me?”

I mashed the phone to my ear and shouted yes, YES, I could hear her. “Where are you? Do you need help?”

And the line went dead.

CALL FAILED.

Our first conversation in three years, and it hadn’t lasted even a minute.