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“Yes.” My fingers are still wrapped around the device in my pocket.

Audrey holds out her hand. “Show it to me.”

Every instinct I have screams don’t. Unfortunately, refusing would look worse, so I pull it out slowly.

Audrey lifts her eyebrows. “A flip phone.”

“Yes.”

“You’re twenty-two years old.”

“So?”

“So twenty-two-year-old girls don’t carry flip phones. They use smartphones. This phone is an antique. Only old-timers still use them.”

“It’s mine.” My mind races. “I was brought up with older technology. My mom never liked smartphones. She said they were distractions. I guess I got used to it.”

That part is almost true.

My mother does hate smartphones. She says they make people rude, lonely, and incapable of using their own minds. Still, she owns one. We both do. They come in handy for research on her illness. And I’ll admit to the occasional game of Candy Crush. But other than that, I use it for phone calls and texts, nothing else.

My smartphone is in the other pocket of my apron, and I silently pray to the universe that it doesn’t ring. I’m careful never to text during shifts or take calls unless I’m on break…unless it’s my mother. Then I find a secluded place as quickly as I can and take her call. Of course, I can’t resist an important-looking text when it comes through, which is how I got myself into this mess in the first place.

Audrey steps closer. “You expect me to believe you voluntarily carry a twenty-year-old phone because you dislike distractions?”

“I didn’t say it was twenty years old.”

“Don’t be cute.”

“I’m not.”

“No. You’re not.” She holds out her hand. “Give it to me.”

I take one step back. “Why?”

“Because I told you to.”

I straighten my shoulders. “It’s my personal property.”

Audrey narrows her eyes.

There are things you learn very quickly in Vexley House, one of which is the kind of tone never to take with Audrey Steppe.

But sorry, she’s overstepping here.

“Your personal property,” she says softly.

I should apologize.

I should hand over the phone.

I should do anything except stand here with a burner phone in one pocket, my real phone in the other, and enough panic in my bloodstream to make me do something reckless.

“No,” I say.

“What did you say?”

“I said no.”