“You forgot to end the call,” I said.

I watched the meaning of it land on him.

I watched him go back through it — the FaceTime, the decorations, dusty rose, my mom’s calling me, the screen going dark — and arrive at the one small mistake on which his entire three-year plan had just died.

His face went white.

There was something almost fitting about it, and I think he saw that too, in the horror of that moment: that a scheme so patient, so meticulous, so carefully built over three years, was undone not by a detective or a lawyer or a suspicious relative, but by a single careless thumb that failed to press a red button.

He had thought of everything.