Did I recognize her voice? I thought I did. But I still got crazy calls all the time from psychics, psychologists, and, for all I knew, psychotics, most of whom had something urgent to tell me—or sell me. Sometimes, it was burial insurance, or pet insurance, or a new mortgage rate. Sometimes, all I could hear was a growl or a scream or a sigh before the receiver on the other end crashed down. Sometimes strangers wanted to excoriate me for having given birth to a demon. But often, they had a message from Belinda or from Jesus and it was just for me, for $120 only to cover their time, and ZipCash would be fine. I’d given up trying to figure out how they got my cell-phone number. It was probably published in some dark web chat forum.

But this one...this was the repeat caller who would usually ask, How is Stefan? Then she’d hang up almost before I finished my answer. Last year, I stopped hearing from her. Now, here she was again. There was something naked in her voice that made her seem valid and caught my attention. For the hundredth time, I thought I would get a new phone number. For the hundredth time, I decided why bother—why confuse the people who actually knew me for the sake of crazies who would somehow find me anyhow?

We inched off the road to a rest stop, and Stefan woke up. He got out to fill up the car and buy more plastic window scrapers.

I won’t ever know why I took that call. The way the girl sounded, so desperate and young, lit some tuft of kindling in me. It reminded me of Belinda’s voice. The girl called again and I answered. I said, “Who are you? Do you need something from me?”

“I know everything she did. I know everything they did,” she said. “And I know about the drugs.”