The Wrong Number

At two in the morning, Henrik Vold's phone rings with a boy who watches the ships load out by the cranes because the lights help. Henrik is fifty-four, a municipal lift repairman, a man who trusts machines because they complain in ways he understands. The call is a mistake, a misrouted line meant for Lykke, the app that is supposed to talk lonely people through the dark. No one will fix the fault, so the strangers keep coming: the widow who only reports the weather, the girl certain she is speaking to a bot.

He starts to need them. He starts to know their voices in shop queues. And then one of them mentions a room, a place inside the app where the sleepless hold each other up, and a name he once gave his own daughter, the year before she died.

On the hall table, face-down in the drawer, a letter he has never opened waits.

THE WRONG NUMBER is a novel about the difference between fixing someone and being there when they fall.