The Number You Have Called

"There's a difference between someone choosing not to answer and someone making it so you can't even ask the question anymore."

The phone was in my hand.

It was always in my hand now. I couldn't remember when that had started—when the device had stopped being something I picked up and put down and had become instead an extension of my body, a sixth finger, a growth I couldn't excise. The weight of it had become so familiar that I'd stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing the weight of your own bones.

My thumb moved across the screen.

I didn't tell it to. Didn't make a conscious decision to unlock, to navigate, to find Paul's name in the contact list. The motion had become automatic—muscle memory carved into flesh through repetition, through hours and hours of the same gesture performed over and over until the neural pathway was worn smooth as a river stone. My brain had stopped being involved somewhere around midnight. Now it was just my thumb, my hand, my arm, moving through a ritual that had lost all meaning but couldn't be stopped.

The call log scrolled past. I'd lost count long ago. Twenty calls? Thirty? Fifty? The numbers had blurred together, each entry identical to the last—Paul, outgoing call, 0:34. Paul, outgoing call, 0:28. Paul, outgoing call, 0:41.—a litany of failure, a monument to futility, a record of a woman slowly coming apart while the world slept.

I pressed his name.

The screen changed. Calling Paul... The words sat there, patient and familiar, as if this were a reasonable thing to be doing at—I glanced at the time—6:37 in the morning. The grey light of dawn had started to seep through the windows, turning the darkness into something murkier, something that wasn't quite night anymore but couldn't yet call itself day. The house looked different in this light. Unfamiliar. Like a photograph of a place I'd once visited rather than the home I'd lived in for twelve years.

The phone began to ring.

I lifted it to my ear. The sound was tinny, distant, filtered through satellites and phone towers and all the invisible infrastructure that was supposed to connect one person to another but kept failing, kept delivering me to the same dead end, the same cheerful recording, the same—

The ringing stopped.

Something clicked. A different quality of silence—not the pause before voicemail, but something else. Something that made the back of my neck prickle with a sensation I couldn't name.

Then the voice came.

Not Paul's voice. Not the greeting I'd memorised, the words I could recite in my sleep, the Hi, you've reached Paul Smith that had become a kind of torment over the past twenty-four hours. This was something else. Something flat. Something automated. Something that didn't belong to anyone at all.

"The number you have called cannot be connected. Please check the number and try again."

The words didn't make sense.

I pulled the phone away from my ear. Looked at the screen. Paul's name was still there, his contact information still displayed, the same number I'd been calling all night. I hadn't misdialled. I hadn't made a mistake. I'd called the same number I'd called a hundred times before, and instead of his voice, instead of his voicemail, instead of even the possibility of reaching him—

I called again.

My thumb moving before I'd finished processing, before I'd allowed myself to understand what I'd just heard. The phone rang. Once. Twice. Then that click again, that different silence, and—

"The number you have called cannot be connected. Please check the number and try again."

The same flat voice. The same automated message. The same absolute, impenetrable wall where a door used to be.

I called again.

"The number you have called cannot be connected."

Again.

"The number you have called—"

Again.

"The number—"

The phone kept saying the same thing. Over and over, that toneless voice delivering the same words in the same rhythm, as if repetition might eventually make them easier to hear. But they didn't get easier. Each time the message played, something inside me cracked a little further—a fault line spreading through whatever structure had been holding me together, whatever architecture of hope and denial and he'll call tomorrow I'd been living inside.

This wasn't silence.

This wasn't him ignoring me, choosing not to answer, letting my calls go to voicemail while he decided what to say. This was something else entirely. This was the difference between a closed door and a door that had been removed from its hinges, bricked over, erased from the wall as if it had never existed at all.

Paul hadn't just refused to answer.

Paul was gone.

The phone slipped from my fingers.

I watched it fall—a slow-motion descent through the grey dawn light, tumbling end over end until it hit the carpet with a soft thud. The screen stayed lit, showing me his name, his number, the evidence of what I'd just heard. I stared at it from above, unable to bend down and pick it up, unable to do anything except stand there and try to make sense of something that refused to resolve into meaning.

Cannot be connected.

The words echoed in the empty space where my thoughts used to be. Cannot be connected. Please check the number. Try again. But I had checked the number. I had tried again. I had tried again and again and again, and every time the same voice, the same message, the same wall.

His phone was disconnected.

The understanding arrived slowly, filtering through layers of exhaustion and medication and the particular fog that had descended sometime in the small hours. His phone was disconnected. Not off. Not out of range. Not buried in a bag or left in a car or any of the other explanations I'd been constructing to account for the unanswered calls. Disconnected. Terminated. Erased.

He'd cut the line.

That was the only explanation. Somewhere between my last call and this one—somewhere in the gap between 5am and 6am, while I sat on the couch in a drugged haze and let time slip past me in chunks I couldn't account for—Paul had made a decision. Had taken an action. Had reached out and severed the last thread that connected us.

Or someone had done it for him.

The thought surfaced from somewhere dark, somewhere I didn't want to look. What if it wasn't Paul? What if something had happened—an accident, an emergency, something that had resulted in a phone being disconnected because its owner could no longer use it? What if he was lying somewhere right now, hurt or worse, and I was standing here in my lounge room assuming he'd abandoned me when really he was—

No.

I couldn't think like that. Couldn't let my mind travel down that path, because if I did I would never find my way back. Paul was fine. Paul had simply decided to cut off contact, to make himself unreachable, to remove even the possibility of connection. That was cruel—unbelievably, devastatingly cruel—but it wasn't the other thing. It wasn't the thing I couldn't name.

I bent down and picked up the phone.

The screen was still lit. His name was still there. I could still see the call log, the endless record of my attempts to reach him, each one now revealed as even more futile than I'd understood. He'd probably watched them come in. Probably seen my name appear on his screen over and over, watched the notifications pile up, and instead of answering—instead of even sending a text to tell me he was alive—he'd turned off his phone. Disconnected the number. Made it so I couldn't even leave a message anymore.

I called again.

I don't know why. Some part of me still hoping the automated voice had been a mistake, a glitch, a temporary malfunction that would resolve itself if I just tried one more time.

"The number you have called cannot be connected. Please check the number and try again."

The same words. The same flat tone. The same absolute finality.

I ended the call.

The house was very quiet. The grey light had grown stronger, filling the lounge room with a pallid glow that made everything look slightly unreal. I could see dust motes suspended in the air, drifting slowly, going nowhere. I could see the furniture—the couch, the chairs, Paul's empty leather armchair—arranged in patterns that suddenly seemed arbitrary, meaningless. I could see my own hands, still holding the phone, the knuckles white with pressure I didn't remember applying.

I could see all of it, and none of it seemed to have anything to do with me.

Something was breaking.

I could feel it happening—a slow structural failure somewhere deep in my chest, load-bearing walls giving way, foundations cracking. The architecture I'd built over the past two days, the careful construction of he'll come back and this has happened before and we'll work it out—all of it was collapsing, folding inward, crushing whatever had been sheltering inside.

And underneath the collapse, something else was rising.

Something older. Something I'd spent years burying, years convincing myself I'd outgrown, years pretending didn't exist. It moved through me like a tide coming in—slow at first, almost gentle, and then faster, stronger, impossible to resist. I could feel it in my hands, which had started to shake. In my chest, where my heart was beating too fast, too hard, a rhythm that didn't match anything my body should be doing. In my head, where the thoughts were starting to fragment, to scatter, to lose the coherence that usually held them together.

No.

I tried to push it down. Tried to find the place I'd learned to go when this happened—the still centre, the quiet room, the space where I could wait out the storm without being destroyed by it. But the space wasn't there anymore. Or I couldn't find it. Or it had never existed in the first place and I'd only imagined it, the way I'd imagined so many things, the way I'd apparently imagined that my husband loved me.

The shaking was getting worse.

My whole body now, not just my hands. A fine tremor that ran through me like electricity, making my teeth chatter, making my vision jump. I was cold—freezing cold, despite the fact that I was inside, despite the fact that the heating had been running all night. The cold came from somewhere internal, somewhere that couldn't be reached by radiators or blankets or any external source of warmth.

I needed to do something.

The thought arrived with the force of an imperative, a command I couldn't disobey. I needed to do something with my body, with my hands, with the energy that was building inside me with nowhere to go. If I didn't, I was going to—

I didn't know what I was going to do. That was the terrifying part. I could feel myself approaching an edge, a boundary, a point of no return, and I had no idea what was on the other side. Only that whatever it was, I'd been there before. And that last time, I hadn't come back for a very long time.

The bathroom.

I was moving before I'd consciously decided to, my body carrying me down the hallway while my mind lagged behind, still trying to catch up with what was happening. The bathroom was small and white and fluorescent—I'd left the light on at some point during the night, and now it buzzed overhead, harsh and unforgiving, illuminating every surface with clinical precision.

The mirror showed me a stranger.

I looked at her—this woman with the wild eyes and the trembling hands, the tangled hair and the face that had gone grey with something that wasn't just exhaustion—and I didn't recognise her. She looked like someone who belonged somewhere else. Someone who should be supervised. Someone who couldn't be trusted to make decisions for herself.

I opened the medicine cabinet.

The shelves were cluttered, chaotic—bottles and boxes shoved in without system, accumulated over years of minor ailments and expired prescriptions and things bought for emergencies that never quite materialised. I pushed things aside, my hands moving with a certainty that surprised me, as if they knew what they were looking for even though my brain hadn't caught up.

Cold medicine. Bandaids. A box of plasters with cartoon characters on them. Cough syrup, half-empty, the expiration date worn away. Paracetamol. Ibuprofen. An antihistamine cream I didn't remember buying. More bottles, more boxes, more debris from a life lived in a body that sometimes required maintenance.

And there, pushed to the very back, almost hidden behind a dusty box of throat lozenges—

A prescription bottle.

I pulled it out.

The label was faded, the print difficult to read in the harsh bathroom light. But I knew what it said before I looked. Knew whose name was printed there, knew what date was stamped beneath it, knew what the pills inside were and what they were meant to do.

Quetiapine. 100mg. Take one tablet at bedtime for sleep.

Smith, Claire.

Dispensed: 14/03/2010.

2010.

Eight years ago. Eight years since I'd stood in a different bathroom, in a different state of mind, and had this bottle pressed into my hand by someone whose face I couldn't remember. Take these. They'll help. They'll make the thoughts slow down, make the fear manageable, make you into someone who can function instead of someone who needs to be watched every moment of every day.

I'd stopped taking them after six months. Had convinced myself I didn't need them anymore, had convinced Paul, had convinced Dawn, had convinced everyone that I was better, I was fine, I was the Claire they'd always known and not the broken thing I'd become after Mack was born. The bottle had migrated to the back of the cabinet and stayed there, forgotten, a relic of a time I'd trained myself never to think about.

But I was thinking about it now.

The bottle felt heavy in my hand. Heavier than its contents could account for—weighted with memory, with history, with all the things that had happened the last time I'd held it. I could feel the pills inside, shifting slightly when I moved, rattling against the plastic like a promise or a threat.

I shouldn't.

The Temazepam was still in my system—four tablets, maybe more, swallowed over the past few hours. I didn't know how the two medications would interact. Didn't know if it was safe to combine them, if the dosages would compound, if I was about to do something that couldn't be undone.

I opened the bottle anyway.

The pills inside were small and white, film-coated, innocuous-looking. I shook two into my palm. They sat there in the creased skin, twin circles that promised nothing and everything—silence, stillness, a few hours where the thoughts might stop and the shaking might ease and I could just exist without the unbearable weight of being myself.

Two wasn't enough.

The certainty arrived from the same place it had arrived earlier, with the Temazepam. Two was what doctors prescribed. Two was careful, responsible, the dosage calculated by people who had never felt what I was feeling right now. Two was for women who were managing their conditions, maintaining their stability, living ordinary lives with ordinary problems.

I wasn't that woman anymore.

I shook out a third pill.

The three of them sat in my palm—Seroquel from 2010, prescribed for a breakdown I'd spent years pretending hadn't happened, about to be swallowed on top of benzodiazepines by a woman who hadn't slept in twenty-four hours and had just discovered her husband had disconnected his phone.

I knew I shouldn't.

I swallowed them anyway.

They went down easier than the Temazepam had—I'd found a glass on the edge of the sink, filled it with water, used it to wash the pills past my throat without gagging. The water was cold. The pills were small. The whole operation took less than thirty seconds, and then it was done. Irreversible. Whatever was going to happen now was going to happen, and I'd set it in motion, and I couldn't take it back.

I looked at the woman in the mirror.

She looked back at me with those wild, unfamiliar eyes.

What are you doing?

I didn't have an answer.