I had never once used it.

I powered it up on the bathroom floor with the fan running to cover the sound, and I dialed the single number I’d known by heart since I was fourteen.

He answered on the second ring, the low, level voice of the man who had run my father’s security for twenty years — a former Navy diver, silver at the temples now, who had taught me to swim and to drive and to keep my head.

I had known him my whole life and never once seen him rattled.