The thing that finally reached past that guard had not come through the front door at all.

It had come as a mistake — a misdialed digit, a stranger’s voice, a wrong number in the dark.

If Ifeoma had dialed correctly that night, she’d have reached a man who wanted nothing to do with her dying, and Emeka would still be asleep behind his wall, and none of them would be lying in the bed of a pickup under a sky with their own satellite crossing it.

Everything he now could not imagine living without had arrived by accident, through an error, at the moment he was least prepared to receive it.

And maybe that was the truest thing the whole strange year had taught him: that you cannot armor yourself against loss without also armoring yourself against everything that might yet arrive, and that the people who change your life are rarely the ones you were expecting the call from.

Two people who had each been so afraid of the dark had somehow become, for each other and for a sleeping ten-year-old between them, the thing the signal was looking for all along — not the right number, just someone who answered.

THE END.