The Echo of a Missed Call

The screen shuddered between Chris’s fingers as Lena’s name illuminated the glass for the third time in an hour. He stood paralyzed before the central console of their joint senior project, the final submission deadline for the evaluation committee shrinking to a mere forty minutes. Lena wasn’t there; she had fled the lab two hours prior, claiming she couldn’t handle the mounting pressure, leaving behind a catastrophic logic error in the code that threatened to collapse the entire demonstration. Chris placed the phone face-down on the cold metal workbench. The muffled vibration served as a rel...