A stranger’s crisis at two in the morning is not a thing you are obligated to walk into.

But Emeka was not, in that moment, weighing obligations.

He was hearing a specific frequency of fear that he happened to know by heart — the sound a person makes when the dark of a hospital room at night has convinced them, wrongly or rightly, that this might be the end and that they are going to meet it with no hand to hold.

He had heard Adanna make that sound.

He had made it himself, silently, in the chair beside her bed, in the months when the word terminal had turned every night into a country he was afraid to fall asleep in.

And so when it came down the line from a woman who had dialed a digit wrong, it did not reach him as an inconvenience or a wrong number.