Page 51 of ClickBack

I call before taking off my shoes. On the fourth ring, she answers.

“Jarrett.”

I had been looking forward to hearing her say my name again. I should have been more specific.

“I’m sorry I disappeared. Champagne got into my phone in the locker room. It wouldn’t turn on, and I couldn’t get your number.”

“For three days?”

“I kept being told they could get it working. Then I kept believing them.”

She lets me hear how that sounds.

“I should have had it replaced sooner,” I say. “I thought I’d be calling you the next morning.”

“I texted you.”

“I just read it.”

“And everybody else in your life? How were they finding you?”

“Through Graves. Cam could reach him. My family could reach him. You didn’t have his number, and he didn’t have yours.” I sit on the edge of the sectional. “That was the part I kept expecting to fix tomorrow. You got three days of nothing.”

“Yes.”

There is a television playing wherever she is, somebody laughing too hard for the conversation we’re having. I hear the volume go down.

“I didn’t change my mind about you, Giselle.”

“That would have been useful information on Tuesday.”

She could have said it angrily. The fact that she doesn’t makes me look down at the phone, at a device I can replace without thinking about the cost. I hadn’t considered what she would have to decide while I waited for somebody to fix it.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I tell her. “I still do.”

She is quiet. I leave the television off and wait.

“Zi Zi’s Gigi,” she says eventually.

“What?”

“My handle. Z-I-S-G-I-G-I. All one word.”

I put her on speaker and open the app. Her profile picture is of her and Zion at a baseball game, both wearing sunglasses, both grinning. There is no last name beneath it. I could have searched every Giselle in Philadelphia and missed her.

“He couldn’t say Zion when he was little,” she explains. “By the time he could, Zi Zi had stuck.”

“Found you.”

“You had excellent instructions.”

“I’m sending you a message.”

“Try not to drown this one.”

I laugh, more relieved than the joke deserves. She answers the message, and I save the thread. Then I give her Graves’s number, too.

“For emergencies,” I say. “Or poor decisions involving champagne.”