My fingers hovered over the keyboard before I typed in our shared mobile account password.
Julian had always been casual about passwords, leaving them written on a yellow sticky note inside the pantry cabinet door. He was a man who believed there was nothing in our lives that required a lock or a secret.
The page loaded slowly, the little blue wheel spinning in the center of the screen while I waited.
I clicked on the usage log for Julian’s phone number, scrolling down to the hour-by-hour ledger for yesterday afternoon.
There was nothing there.
Between two o’clock and five o’clock on Thursday, there were no outbound calls, no text messages, and zero kilobytes of data used.
For three hours, his phone had been completely silent on the network.
The silence on the screen was absolute, as if he had simply vanished from the face of the county the moment he left his office.
I closed the laptop lid with a soft click and stared at my reflection in the dark glass of the microwave.
The digital clock on the stove showed ten past eight.
I had exactly twenty minutes to get to the medical clinic, but my car keys remained untouched on the counter next to the breadbox.
The drive to work was a blur of wet asphalt, red brake lights, and the steady sweep of the windshield wipers.
The reception desk at the clinic was busy enough to keep my mind occupied until the lunch hour, with patients filing in to escape the cold dampness of the Ohio autumn. I checked in three appointments, filed insurance claims for a local schoolteacher, and tried not to think about the empty ledger on my screen.
At half past twelve, I finally sat in the breakroom with a turkey sandwich that tasted like cardboard.
