"My phone was dead," he said. "I didn't hear anything."
And I thought — God help me — I thought, his phone was dead because he'd been on it all night. I didn't think anything else. I thought it and I filed it away and turned back to my daughter, who was the one who'd been in danger, who was the one who could have — I won't write the rest of that sentence. I didn't write it then either. I just held on to her until she squirmed and said I was getting her Cheerios wet.
I called Abeyta from the parking lot of the Albertsons that afternoon because I couldn't make the call inside my house, where the kids might hear how my voice sounded.
She was kind about it. She was always kind. She pulled up Juni's data on her end while I waited, and I listened to her breathing and clicking, and then she said, "Okay. Okay, I see it." She asked me what phone Juniper was using, and I told her: my old one before my old one, a Motorola I'd bought refurbished three years ago, which I had handed down to Juni when she got the sensor because it was the only thing in the house that wasn't spoken for. Abeyta was quiet for a second. Then she said that the app had dropped support for that version of the operating system in the summer, and that on some of those older Android phones the battery-saving settings would quietly put the app to sleep in the middle of the night. The sensor kept working. The data kept getting recorded, and it would all come back and fill in later, which was why I could see it in the morning. But the alarm on the phone itself might not go off at all. It might buzz once and stop. It might do nothing.
"So she didn't sleep through it," I said. "It never rang."
"It's possible," Abeyta said. "I can't know for sure. But it's possible. I'd really like her on a supported device, Aileen. Soon. Or on the dedicated receiver at least, the handheld one. Do you still have the receiver?"
I did. It was in a drawer in the bathroom with the extra lancets, a gray plastic thing the size of a deck of cards that had come in the starter kit and that Juni hated because she said it looked like a pager from a movie about the eighties. It worked fine. It just didn't send anything to anyone. It only beeped at whoever was holding it.
"I'll get her a phone," I said.
"There's a list on our website of the ones that work," Abeyta said. "The newer iPhones are the most reliable, honestly. I'm not supposed to have opinions, but that's what I see."
"Okay."
"And Aileen? That was a long low. I'm going to have Dr. Ransford look at her overnight basal. Okay? Let's see if we need to back it off a little. She may be growing."
I said okay. I sat in the parking lot for a while after that with the engine off and watched a man load bags of water-softener salt into the back of a pickup one at a time, carefully, as if each one were a sleeping child, and I thought about how four years ago, in the pediatric unit at St. Luke's, a different nurse had told me that I would get used to it, and how I had believed her, and how she had been both right and wrong in a way nobody warns you about. You get used to the numbers. You never get used to the hours when you can't see them.