He hangs his head. Lifts Junior higher on his shoulder. He lets the cop lead him down the hall, through the waiting room, and out to the parking lot. All the while, the cop talks in that hasteless farmhand way, relaying platitudes about parenthood and perseverance so earnestly that they vaguely ebb toward wisdom or solace. He even checks the squad car’s glove compartment for Advil. When the bottle turns up empty, the idiot tells Henry he’s in luck and happily points to the Walmart across the way.

One quarter. Two nickels. Three pennies.

For absolutely nothing, Henry thanks the cop.

“Why, sure thing,” he says, straightening his posture. “And don’t you worry none. Seen with my own two eyes that this little guy is in good hands. Y’all gonna be just fine.”

Setting Junior in the passenger seat, Henry notices the phone charger cord dangling down to the cup holder like a lifeline into a well. By now the phone has got to have charged some. Just a little life. A desperate thought occurs to him: What if Jorge has called about the forty dollars?

Holding his breath, he reaches into the hole. He flips the phone open, his teeth grinding as it boots up, and a blocky animation welcomes him to the device. Only one bar of the battery icon has filled in. Besides four voicemails from the school, nothing. Call log as blank as before. Not a single text. He’d been a reckless fucking moron to have trusted Jorge, to not have even thought of taking down the stranger’s number.

As he folds the phone shut, its screen flickers as if turning off, but then the signal icon sprouts a second bar. The phone vibrates once. Twice. Now a third time.

Three texts, all from the same unknown number, dated two weeks back. A 415 area code. The first word he reads is Hen.

A nostalgia wallop. His intestines tangle. Before actually reading the three-bubble-long message, he’s transported back to nights spent on the living room computer, reading Michelle’s emails like a detective combing through old evidence for new clues, parsing her run-on sentences and scrutinizing their every last word in search of some hint that might reveal she was secretly as smitten as him.