He took a personal day for it and was ninth in line at the carrier store by 7:41 a.m. The trade-in came to $240 against a $1,199 device, spread across thirty-six months at zero percent, which he explained twice to the woman behind him as though it were a strategy. The case and screen protector he had bought in advance.

The old phone stayed in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus. It held four years of photos he had never moved, including the last ones of his father, and it worked fine — a fact he mentioned to his brother, unprompted, the following Sunday. He had eleven payments left on the new one when the next model leaked in March.