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My thumb hovers over it but it won’t come down. It just won’t. All this time I’ve wanted this, and now I’m sitting on the floor of my shop with my phone in my hand, shaking like a leaf.

“I can’t,” I whisper. “Travis. What if she— What if I say the wrong thing? What if she sounds different? What if⁠—”

He reaches around me and takes the phone gently out of my hand. He turns it face down on his knee.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

“But she’s waiting.”

“She’s waited this long, honey. She can wait till you’ve slept.” He wraps both arms around me and puts his mouth against my temple. “And your teeth are chattering.”

I’d argue, but my stomach picks that moment to growl.

“Yeah,” he says. “That.”

I laugh tiredly.

He gets me up off the floor. He carries the shoebox in one arm and holds my hand with the other. He walks me up the outside stairs to his apartment and sits me down at his table. Then he makes me grilled cheese and tomato soup out of a can and cuts the sandwich into triangles.

He sets the shoebox next to my plate, where I can keep an eye on it while I eat.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Okay. You be Danielle,” Lindsey says. “Say hello.”

She’s standing in my kitchen in my Army T-shirt and a pair of wool socks, holding a spatula like a microphone. The shoebox is on my table next to the coffee maker. She slept nine hours. I know because I didn’t.

“Hello,” I say.

“No. Higher.”

“I’m not doing a damn voice.”

“Travis. She has a high voice. Kind of breathy. Like a Disney princess who smokes.”

I look at her over my coffee.

“Hello,” I say, exactly the same.

She points the spatula at me. “You’re a terrible Danielle.”

“I’m a terrible lot of things.”

“Not in bed,” she says, and turns back to the stove, where she’s cooking my eggs.

“Okay,” she says. “Real question. What do you say to somebody you haven’t talked to in seventeen years?”

“Hi.”

“That’s it? Hi? That’s your big advice?”

“It’s a good word. Works on everybody.”

She laughs. Then she doesn’t. She picks at the hem of my shirt.

“What if she sounds different?” she says, and her voice drops. “What if I call and some lady named Dani answers, and she’s polite, and she asks about my business, and we talk about the weather for six minutes, and then she says, ‘Well, it was so nice to catch up’? What if she’s a stranger, Travis? What if the girl I’ve been waiting for doesn’t exist anymore?”

Poor girl. I go stand in front of her and put my hands on the counter on either side of her hips.