The Call From An Unknown Number

Rowan Mercer had been halfway through a meeting in his Nashville office when his phone lit up with a number he did not recognize, and because he almost let it ring out, assuming it was one more vendor trying to reach him before lunch, he would remember for the rest of his life the strange, ordinary hesitation that came before the moment everything changed.

He answered with a distracted, “Hello?”

For one second there was only static, the faint rustle of movement, and then a little boy’s voice, tight with fear and exhaustion, came through the speaker.

“Dad?”

Rowan was already on his feet before he fully understood what he was hearing. “Micah? Why are you calling me from another phone? What happened?”

The boy sniffed hard, trying to be brave in the way children do when they have already been brave for too long. “Dad, Elsie won’t wake up right. She keeps sleeping and she feels really hot. Mom isn’t here. We don’t have anything left to eat.”

The conference room, the spreadsheets on the screen, the people around the table waiting for him to say something useful, all of it vanished from Rowan’s mind at once. His chair scraped backward so violently that one of his coworkers startled, but Rowan did not explain, did not apologize, did not even grab his jacket. He snatched his keys, his phone, and ran for the elevator while already dialing Delaney.

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