She didn’t sleep with the phone face down this time. She slept with it face up, on the pillow beside her, like keeping it visible might make the message less true.
Someone’s already three steps ahead of you. Maybe you should ask who.
By morning she had read it so many times the words had stopped meaning anything in the normal sense and started meaning something closer to a sound a tone she couldn’t stop hearing. She showed it to Noah first, before Adrian, before Amara, sitting on the low wall outside the café an hour before her shift wasn’t supposed to start because she still technically wasn’t allowed to work it.
He read it twice. Then looked up. “This isn’t from the same number as the others.”
“I know.”
“Different area code. Different everything. The others felt like one person.” He
