She stayed on the bed for a long time after the call ended.
The phone was face-down on the duvet beside her, which was where it had been for most of the last four hours — she'd stopped holding it somewhere around the second hour, when the conversation had settled into the kind of rhythm that didn't require her to pay attention to the physical object, only to the voice coming through it. She'd been lying on her back with one knee bent and the other leg stretched out, looking at the ceiling of her room with the unfocused gaze of someone whose attention is entirely elsewhere, which it had been.
Four hours and twenty-something minutes.
She'd checked when she heard the knock through the phone — the crisp, non-negotiable quality of it, the voice behind it like a door being closed — and had re
