that a phone is plugged into the charging block, and it’s switched on, and fully charged. Elliot left his phone charging. Of course he did.
But the second thing I see is that he has an android, and mine is an iPhone. My phone is in my pocket, but I can’t use his charger.
I want to kick myself. I should have collected my own charger first—that was incredibly stupid of me. Do I have time? Ordinarily it would take me less than a minute to run to the other end of the corridor, slam through the staff doors, and grab my charger from beside my bed. But now, I can’t run. I can’t slam through the doors. I can’t afford to make a sound.
I make up my mind. I will try Elliot’s phone first. You can dial some emergency numbers from the lock screen—I just have no idea whether 112 or 17 are among them.
I pick it up and the screen jumps into life, but with a lurch of disappointment I see there is still no reception—just an x by the grayed-out scale. I can’t call anyone.
Still, there are a bunch of app notifications on the lock screen, and it’s with a flicker of hope that I scroll down them, trying to figure out if the phone has connected at all during the past twenty-four hours. If it’s getting even tiny blips of reception, that might be enough. If I can get into the phone I could send a text, which would just sit there in the outbox until the phone connected. I wouldn’t have to do anything. Just wait for it to send.
And there it is. A WhatsApp from six hours ago. And below that, a notification from Snoop. Anon101 is geoclose, whatever that means. Geoclose? I’ve never had a notification like that on my Snoop account.
I have no time to worry about that now though. The question is how I get into the phone. I have three tries before it locks out, and then I’ll have no choice but to go back and get my charger, and wait while my own phone powers up, which will take long enough to make Liz wonder where I am.
I’m racking my brains, trying to remember if Kate ever told me Elliot’s date of birth, and if so whether to try the year, or the day and month, but when I bring up the lock screen, I come up short. It’s not a pin pad, it’s a thumb scanner.
My stomach drops with disappointment, but then I realize what this means, and I experience a different kind of lurch, this one of nauseated horror, as it dawns on me what I have to do next. Oh God. Can I do it? And if I can, what kind of person does that make me?
I glance across at the desk. I force myself to look at the shape I have been trying to ignore, let my eyes skitter across: Elliot. Elliot’s body.
His hand is stretched out across the desk, and I feel my cheeks go hot and then cold and then hot again with a kind of deep piercing shame at what I am about to do. But I have to get inside that phone.
I stand up. I unplug the phone from the block, and I take a step across the room, closer to where Elliot is sprawled. And then another. And then I am standing by his desk, reaching for his hand—his cold, firm hand.
It is a little clammy, though that is mostly due to how cold the room is, and his arm is surprisingly heavy to maneuver, but the rigor has worn off, and it is without too much difficulty that I unfurl his fingers, and hold his long, bony thumb between my fingers, chill and firm as a joint of meat.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to him. “I’m so, so sorry.”
And then I press the tip against the lock screen.
For a minute nothing happens and I feel a piecing, shooting sense of disappointment. Can the phone somehow tell? Does it work off body warmth? Does it know that this is a dead man, not a living owner?
There is only one way to find out. Feeling even sicker, I put down the phone and rub the cold, clammy tip of Elliot’s thumb between my palms, chafing it roughly, trying to get a little of my own body heat into Elliot’s skin.
It’s surprisingly hard. My hands are cold too, and for a long time, all I