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been put through, however, she was comforted to feel the device intact in her hand. For years she had reached instinctively for her phone whenever she felt scared, threatened, or lonely, searching it for the distraction, the connection, or the message that would calm her. The fact that her phone might now be the threat didn’t seem to matter. Or perhaps that was more than she was ready to think about.
    The roaring in her ears was gradually beginning to subside. Jennifer, however, remained paralyzed.
    PING!
    Yelping with fear, she hurled the phone from her body, stumbling slightly and banging into something when she did, causing multiple objects to fall to the floor with a clatter.
    Oh my God,
she thought,
what have I done?
Shaking, she got down on her knees and began to search madly in the dark, groping desperately until she heard the
ping
again. Then she saw it: a faint glow emanating from under a set of what were apparently metal shelves. Reaching underneath them, she managed to make contact with her fingertips and drag her phone toward her, scraping a bit of skin off the top of her right hand as she did. Exhausted and shaking, she raised her phone hand—she was beginning to think of it as such—level with her face. And there it was, in that distinctive Wishful Thinkingscript:
Guitar Recital, West End School for Music and Art, 55 Bethune Street, Tuesday, September 22, 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Arrived.
    Arrived?
    The cool light from her awakened phone began to awaken her senses too. Slowly she started to look around. She was able to make out the outline of a door in front of her, fluorescent light visible around its edges, and there was something plastic and yellow next to her that moved a bit when she nudged it. A mop bucket? She put her phone in flashlight mode, swung it around to her left, and saw brooms and shelves full of cleaning equipment—some of which was now on the floor.
    She was not in outer space. She was in a broom closet.
    She stood up. Reaching out, she placed her hand on the cold metal door in front of her. Should she open it? She was in a broom closet, yes, but she could be anywhere. She was probably in a broom closet on the abandoned eighteenth floor of 250 Broadway, having temporarily lost her mind, blacked out, and stumbled into one somehow. Could she have made her way from the bathroom to a broom closet without even being aware? Was the door locked, she wondered, or would she be trapped until it occurred to Tim to look for her here on the secret-bathroom floor—if it ever occurred to him? Her clock read 4:01 p.m. She’d already been gone at least ten minutes. Nobody would miss her, most likely, until the staff meeting. She had to find out where she was.
    Jennifer turned the knob slowly, carefully, to the right, opening the door a tiny crack.
    That was when she heard it: Julien’s voice, as clear as day.
    “I wish Mommy were here,” he said.
    “Mommy works very hard to take care of you, Julien,” a male voice replied, “and I know she would have been here if she could have.” Norman? Jennifer felt almost as shocked to hear Norman talk about her like that as she did to have beensucked into her smartphone and spit out halfway across town. The voices faded. Could it be? Was it possible that she was at the West End School for Music and Art, just as the app had said she would be?
    Peeking out of the closet to make sure the coast was clear, she saw them: Julien, Jack, Norman, and Melissa, filing into the recital hall.
    She did not know how she’d gotten there, and she couldn’t imagine how she would get back—not to mention what was happening right now, at 4:00 p.m., in the building where she had just been standing. But she could still see the top of her son’s head as a stream of parents and children pushed past her, and, knowing he was so near, she didn’t care. Something miraculous had happened, and she, Jennifer Sharpe, was going to make the most of it.
    “Julien!” she called, her whole