“Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I don’t keep my phone on me. And I was doing something else. And I don’t answer calls unless they’re planned. I’m a busy bee, Kate!”

He started to untangle this in his head as Kate continued talking at him. He’d learned to zone out “…and if it had been winter who knew…” knowing that he could catch little snippets and manage to piece together the conversation, fill in the blanks “…he’s a fucking idiot…” and make a passable case for having actually paid attention to her conversation, which was the same pretty much every time and always as one-sided. And so he untangled his explanation in his head, and recognised that, as much as he genuinely thought it might have been a little bit true, he realised he actually wasn’t a busy bee at all, more of a lazy locust, and was lying both to himself and to Kate. There are the types of people you pick up the phone to, and the types of people you don’t. And Kate was the latter.