The phone rang at 07:12 in the morning, at the exact moment Daphne was making coffee and looking out at the empty street without really seeing it.

For months now her days had begun like that. Not with an alarm clock. With fear.

She looked at the screen. Unknown number. A year earlier she would have let it ring. Now she always answered. Her life had filled up with strangers who knew her son’s name, his age, where he had last been sitting, what he was wearing, who saw him alive for the last time, who issued a statement about him, who lied, who offered condolences with the eyes of someone in a hurry to leave.