Dash dash dash. O. Dash dot. N. Then dash dot dash dot, which he had to search for and found: C. Dot dash. A. Dot dash dot dot. L. Dot dash dot dot. L.
ONCALL.
He was moving his lips. He did not care.
Another pause. Then: dot dash. A. Dot dot dot dot. H. Dash dot.
N.
He looked down at the card for a long time, longer than he needed to, though the letters were in his head as clearly as if they had been printed on the sky.
NO ONCALL AHN.
"Ahn," said Neha Kulkarni beside him, very softly. "That's right. That's — yes."
Denny did not say anything. He did not trust himself to. He stood under the green awning in the drumming rain with a little girl's flashlight in his hand and looked across the street at the window, at the shape of a woman standing in a lamp-lit frame with — he could see it now, now that he knew to look — something in the crook of her other arm. Something small and wrapped. A baby, held against her shoulder, with a line of something pale running from it out of the frame.
She'd been holding him the whole time. She'd been holding the baby the whole time and signaling with her free hand.
He thought about the woman he had imagined on the kitchen floor, and was ashamed, and was glad, both at once, the way you are when you are wrong in the direction you wanted.