Signal returned somewhere around the halfway point of the drive home, both vans erupting almost simultaneously into the soft chorus of phones buzzing back to life, a full night and day's worth of missed notifications arriving all at once.
Ivy watched Lex's face change from across the aisle of her own van, three cars back in the small convoy, though she didn't need to see his phone screen to know exactly what kind of messages were flooding in. His jaw had gone tight, his shoulders drawn up around his ears, the careful ease of the last twenty-four hours evaporating in real time as whatever his father had sent piled up, message after message, on a screen she couldn't see.
Her own phone buzzed too — a dozen texts from Priya, increasingly frantic (WHERE ARE YOU / are you dead / update me the
