Months later, a colleague asked him why he still carried the bulky OnePlus as a secondary device. "The camera is mid," the colleague said. "The screen is only 1080p."

He didn't press it.

There it was.

Her voice had grown thin, a fragile thread of its old self. She lived three hundred miles away, and the daily call had become their ritual. "Just checking in, beta," she’d say, the word wrapping around him like a wool blanket in an air-conditioned room.