Chapter 18 - The Fiftieth Call
Five years later, I changed phones.
The technician asked if I wanted old call history transferred.
I said yes.
That night, curiosity won.
Fifty outgoing calls to David.
Three hospital calls.
One voicemail.
The number fifty had become part of the story strangers told.
Fifty calls.
Fifty chances.
That was not exactly true.
Some calls were seconds apart.
Some were panic.
David could not have cured meningitis from the Bahamas.
He had one real chance.
Read the message.
Call back.
Come home.
He didn’t.
I deleted the visible call log.
Then regretted it.
Then remembered the cloud backup still had it.
I laughed at myself.
A little hysterical.
Very human.
I stopped checking after that.
At the nonprofit, a grieving mother recognized me.
“You’re the fifty-call woman.”
I hated that.
“My name is Maya.”
She looked embarrassed.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
It wasn’t.
But her son had died three weeks earlier.
I could survive one bad sentence.
The woman at the nonprofit later apologized again for calling me the fifty-call woman.
I told her not to worry about it.
This time I meant it.
She had remembered the headline because headlines are easier than names.
Lily had become a headline too for a while.
I stopped searching her name online after the second anniversary.
She asked how I kept going.
I said, “I didn’t. I kept stopping. Then starting again.”
She nodded.
May you like
Maybe because it did not promise anything.
