Wait... I'm back. Before the morning my mother takes the call from the 'bank'.

My mother turned from the stove, holding an empty porcelain mug, her brow furrowing with mild, maternal confusion.

"Took the day off?" she asked, her voice light, teasing. "Lucas, you haven't taken a sick day since you had your tonsils out in the ninth grade. Are you feeling alright? Your forehead looks pale."

She reached out a cool palm toward my cheek.

In my first life, I would have brushed her hand off with the casual, irritable arrogance of a twenty-six-year-old boy rushing to beat the morning traffic. I would have grabbed my lunch pail, muttered something about inventory counts, and walked straight out that door, leaving her completely alone in the kitchen to answer the executioner's bell.

Today, I caught her wrist in mid-air.

I didn't squeeze hard, but my grip was firm, unyielding, and rooted in the iron certainty of a man who had already seen her grave. I pulled her hand gently down to the laminate counter, holding it between both of mine.

"Mom," I said, looking straight into her soft hazel eyes, refusing to let her glance away. "Listen to me very carefully. Do not interrupt me. Look at the wall clock."

She blinked, startled by the strange, vibrating intensity in my voice. Her gaze darted to the clock above the pantry.

"It's... it's seven-forty-eight, Lucas. What on earth—"

"In seven minutes," I said, each word falling like a lead sinker dropped into deep, clear water, "that black telephone on the wall is going to ring. When you pick it up, a man is going to tell you his name is Investigator Bradley from First Heritage. He is going to recite your father’s service number from the Navy. He is going to tell you that someone in Florida is draining your savings account. He will tell you not to trust the girls at the bank window, and he will tell you to take every dollar we have to the Western Union counter at the pharmacy."

The color began to recede from my mother's cheeks, not because she believed the fraud, but because she thought her only son had suffered a sudden, violent psychotic break over his morning coffee.

"Lucas... sweetheart," she stammered, pulling back slightly against my grip. "You're having a nightmare. Sit down. Let me get you a glass of water. You've been working too many double shifts at the plant—"

"I am not having a nightmare, Mom," I whispered, leaning in until our faces were inches apart. "Do you remember the yellow envelope in your underwear drawer? The one with Father's military medals and the spare house key? You wrote forty-four-zero-two on the inside flap with a red felt-tip marker three months ago when you forgot your ATM code. Nobody on earth knows that except you and me."

My mother froze.

Her breath stopped in her throat with a tiny, dry click. The slight resistance in her wrist vanished, her fingers going limp between my palms.

"How... how could you know that?" she breathed, her pupils dilating until the green in her irises was swallowed by black. "I didn't tell you that. I didn't tell anyone."

"Because you told me on a Tuesday afternoon three years from now," I said, my voice dead and level. "Sitting on the floor of this kitchen while the gas company shut off the meter."

I didn't give her time to process the impossible horror of those words.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the pocket-sized recording unit I had modified with an inductive magnetic pickup coil, and stepped to the wall phone.

With two practiced motions, I slipped the coil behind the black plastic terminal housing, wedging it firmly against the interior transformer bell. I plugged the auxiliary output cable into the microphone jack of my laptop, which sat open on the small breakfast nook table behind the bread box.

Across the screen, a high-frequency audio spectrum analyzer flared to life in brilliant, pulsing emerald bars:

LINE MONITORED: BELL ATLANTIC POTS TRUNK 4 SAMPLING RATE: 96 KHZ / 24-BIT LOSSLESS CELLULAR UPLINK: ENCRYPTED VPN (LANGLEY GATEWAY)

Beside the laptop, I placed a clean legal pad and a fresh ballpoint pen.

"Lucas," my mother whimpered, her hands flying to her collar, clutching the quilted fabric of her robe as if the temperature in the room had plummeted below zero. "What is that machine? What are you doing?"

"We are going to answer his call, Mom," I said, turning to face her with a smile that felt like cold steel against a whetstone.

"And this time, we're keeping him on the line until the county sheriffs kick his door in."

The grandfather clock in the downstairs hallway gave its single, metallic half-hour chime.

7:55:00 AM.

R-R-R-I-I-I-N-G.

The mechanical brass bells inside the black housing on the wall slammed together with a sudden, violent shriek that rattled the teacups on the drying rack.

My mother flinched as if a rifle had been discharged beside her ear. Her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes darting from the vibrating telephone to my face in absolute, paralyzed terror.

R-R-R-I-I-I-N-G.

I stepped to her side, wrapping my left arm around her shoulders, feeling the frantic, galloping flutter of her pulse beneath her fleece collar.