I hadn't. I didn't even know there was a voicemail. I didn't check voicemail. Nobody checks voicemail.
"And she came up," he said, quieter. "She came up. She was at sixty and then seventy-eight and then she was okay, she was talking normal, and she said don't call Mom, Mom will quit, and I sat with her till like six and you came home at seven, and she was eating Cheerios, and you asked me did I hear anything." He looked right at me. "And I said no. Because I didn't. That was true. I didn't hear anything. That's the whole point. That's the whole thing. I didn't hear it."
The kitchen was very quiet. The tacos were getting cold on the table, and the pink box sat between his plate and his water glass where his sister had pushed it, and the furnace ran, and the old phone sat on the counter under my daughter's thumb with its two green stripes and its single red sliver, still following her, still holding on.
"The oven timer," I said. I don't know why that's what came out. "In September. When I took it. I heard the oven timer."
He nodded. "Every hour," he said. "I set it for an hour and went in and looked at her phone. She went to sixty-eight at one. And sixty-five at three. I got her up and gave her a juice. She doesn't even remember."
"I don't," Juni said.
I thought about lying in my bed that night with his phone face down on my nightstand, buzzing at one and then again at three, and me not turning it over, feeling righteous about it. Feeling like a good mother. Feeling like a woman who doesn't snoop. My own phone had been lying right beside his that night, and it hadn't made a sound, because back in May, when the alarms going off inside locker one-fourteen kept draining my battery before I could even see them, I had turned my low alert down to fifty-five, and nothing that night had gone below sixty-five. I opened his settings later and looked. His was set at seventy. Of course it was.
I thought about the graph the next morning. Beautiful. Right down the middle of the gray. Look at her, I'd thought. Look at my girl.
"Why," I said. "Why on earth wouldn't you tell me? Either of you. For six months."
I was looking at Juni when I said it, because Juni was the one who'd started it, in April, at ten years old, with her thumbs. She let go of the plug. The old phone went dark on the counter, and this time nobody grabbed for it.
"Because you'd quit," she said.
"Quit what?"