She did not call her grandfather that night.
She almost did. She had the household device in her hand and the number in her contacts and she sat on the edge of her bed for ten minutes with both, and then she put the phone down.
The reason she put it down was not fear, exactly, and it was not the communication monitoring, which she was aware of and which she had factored in as a constraint she had agreed to. It was something more subtle than either of those things: she did not yet know what she would ask him. She had a feeling, a specific and growing feeling, that her grandfather's history was adjacent to something in this house in a way she could not yet name, and she had learned enough to know that calling someone about a feeling you could not name was how you lost the advantage of surp
