Zack takes a deep breath. He dials his own phone. Luckily you don’t need a passcode to answer a phone; if the businessman hears it ring, he can just swipe and talk.

“Hello?”

All right!

Zack can tell by the quick answer. The guy doesn’t yet realize it’s not his phone.

“Hello, sir, my name is Zack Yellin…Uh, were you just at the GreenGirl at Cross Street?”

The businessman is silent. Careful. Then, “Do I know you?”

“Sir, we swapped phones. By mistake. You’ve got mine, and I’ve got yours.”

Silence. A pause. The businessman obviously trying to process this. Maybe holding Zack’s phone out in front of him to look at it, seeing it’s indeed identical. “But…you’re not calling from my phone, are you?” the businessman asks. Still confused. “You’d…you’d have to know my code.”

Zack feels a flash of shame. The impulse to hide. To simply hang up right now.

He sees no alternative but to tell him.

“Look, sir, I…” No way around it. “I happened to see you enter it.” He doesn’t say how dumb it is to use that code. How easy to see. Or all his passing thoughts about cognitive issues, memory problems, or just the arrogance, the sense of invulnerability, in using that code. Zack keeps all that to himself.

More silence on the other end. Alarm? Fury at being spied on? A silence Zack feels compelled to jump into, to push past the moment. “But…look…I mean, now we can each get our phones back, right? Sir, I’m still at the GreenGirl. I can come meet you with it somewhere if that helps—”

The businessman cuts Zack off. “No. Stay there. I can be back there in…twenty minutes. Maybe less.”

“I can wait. No problem.”

“Just sit tight,” says the guy. Kind of aggressively, Zack notices. Then, sounding suddenly a little warmer and more appreciative—or at least trying to be—“And, hey, if I get delayed or have some problem, what’s your code so I can call you?”

Zack pauses for a moment. But what’s really on his phone that’s so private or important? Goofy texts from his new girlfriend and his old pals. Dumb pictures of him and his friends you can see on Facebook anyway. Nothing so special. And they’ve got each other’s phones anyway. It’s a moment of human trust, of common humanity, human connection. Each other’s phones, each other’s private lives, that they’re returning to each other in twenty minutes. The guy is just some straight-laced New York businessman, after all, who only wants to get his phone back.

So Zack gives his own code. “Oh, and hey, what’s your name?” Zack asks.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. See you soon.”

Click.