“It means the battery is dead,” Julian said, his voice dropping into a flat, empty register. “The last recorded location was three hours ago, but the signal is too weak to pinpoint the building. It could be anywhere within that half-mile radius.”
He closed the laptop with a soft click, the blue light vanishing from his face and leaving him in the dim warmth of the kitchen. The sudden darkness in his features was more unsettling than his earlier panic.
“It is just a phone, Julian,” I said softly, though my own chest was beginning to tighten with a slow, cold certainty that he was not telling me everything. “We can call the carrier tomorrow and suspend the line until we find it.”
“No,” he said, looking straight ahead at the dark window. “There are things on that phone I cannot replace, Dani. Important files that I cannot easily recover from the server.”
“Like what?” I asked, the silence stretching between us until it felt heavy enough to bruise. I waited for him to name a client or a project, some dull piece of real estate data that would put my mind at ease.
