The area code was right.

The prefix was right.

And the last three digits were completely, entirely wrong.

It was the exact same false number that had been submitted to her school.

My mother had altered both contacts.

She had given my daughter a fake number to reach me, and she had given the school a fake number to reach me, and then she had spent five years filling the silence between us with poison.

Every text Maya sent to her father had gone to a dead number, into nothing, into the void, and she had sat there, week after week, year after year, watching her messages go unanswered, and concluding the only thing a child could conclude.