You decline the call and shove the phone back in your pocket.
"It's nothing, just a spam caller," you say, but you're sweating profusely and you know it. "I need a water fountain."
Once you find a fountain, you drink as much water as you can just to give yourself time to calm down. What if answering that call would have been the end to all this? What if the person on the other end would have come through more clearly this time? Are you going to spend the rest of your life wishing you had taken that call, wondering what you might have learned from it?
"What do you think?" Anuja asks.
"About what?" you ask.
The look she gives you tells you that she's been talking to you for a while. You just haven't been listening.
"Never mind," she says, and walks off.
The call from Rex deals a blow that the rest of the day just can't recover from. Anuja stops talking to you, not so much out of anger as out of melancholy, it seems. Your attempts to distract her fall flat, and eventually you give up altogether. It's a relief when you get back in the car and head home.
You're almost halfway through the drive back when it happens again.
Anuja's phone is dead, so you have GPS pulled up on yours. As the phone sits in your lap, there's a ping and the screen fills with Rex's name. He's texting you this time.