During the drive, I’d been too focused on talking with him to notice its absence, which was honestly pretty typical for me by then. Unless I heard a notification go off, my phone usually stayed buried in my bag all the way home.
It usually stayed there for a while after I got in too, at least until I’d taken a long shower to rinse off the salt and the faint, clinging smell of aquarium work, because no, I still hadn’t gathered the nerve to use the ridiculously fancy shower attached to my office.
Maybe that could be next month’s goal.
So it wasn’t until I had wet hair dripping down my back and a towel slung low around my hips that I finally went to the kitchentable, where I’d dumped my bag the second I got home, and reached inside.
My hand found lip balm, three pens, my broken comb, emergency pretzels, and the backup security chip for Tobias’s estate, but no phone.
I checked the side pockets next, just in case my phone had somehow shrunk and wedged itself into one of the little coin-sized compartments, but it was one empty pocket after another.
Fuuuuuuuuuck.
I turned the bag upside down and dumped everything onto the table, then searched through the mess as if sheer desperation might cause my phone to reappear.
It did not.
What appeared instead was a receipt from a coffee shop I hadn’t been to in over a month, a hair tie tangled with strands of copper hair, a crumpled sticky note with “check nitrate drift in lower reef”written across it in my own increasingly unstable handwriting, and a granola bar that had suffered enough trauma at the bottom of my bag to qualify as powder.
“Okay,” I said, far too calmly. Which usually meant I was about thirty seconds away from not being calm at all.
It was probably still at the estate.
That was the obvious answer. The only reasonable answer, really. Even if I’d had it in the car and somehow left it there, Ben’s car was technically Tobias’s car, which meant the phone would still end up at the estate anyway.
I forced myself to think through the day.
I remembered having it during lunch because I’d taken a photo of Puff Daddy pressed against the glass, staring at me with his adorably stupid little judgmental face. After that, I must have set it down somewhere.
Somewhere safe.
Somewhere retrievable.
The problem was that I could not retrieve it using the thing that had been left behind.
My laptop seemed like a possibility for approximately forty-five seconds before I remembered that two-factor authentication existed, which meant that every attempt to log in to anything useful required sending a code to my phone.
My missing phone.
I groaned and dragged my hands down my face before remembering that I was still mostly naked and dripping onto the kitchen floor.
I could call Ben using a neighbor’s phone.
Except I couldn’t.
Because I didn’t know his number.
I didn’t know Tobias’s either.
That realization landed harder than it should have, considering both numbers were technically saved somewhere. Both of them had become part of the architecture of my life, and yet without one small rectangle of glass, I couldn’t reach either of them.
God, I bet Tobias knows my number.
I considered waiting until morning.
I really did.
For maybe an entire minute, I stood there and tried to convince myself that sleeping without my phone would not kill me. People had survived without phones for thousands of years. People had crossed oceans without alarms, maps, group chats, or the internet.
