Autumn in Philadelphia Trilogy

The Return: First Strike

AN: I just wanted to clarify a word I sometimes use here particularly when Shawn speaks and that is chirp. If you aren't familiar with hockey slang you may see "Shawn chirped..." and think of it as a high-pitch, sing-song way of speaking. However, I use it in the hockey sense and a chirp in hockey means trash talking an opposing player.

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He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious."

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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Sure, we'll be over Saturday.

What about Audrey?

She doesn't need to know. I'll just tell her I have to work.

Shawn landed squarely on his tailbone the next morning when his phone finally succeeded in throwing him off of the top of the bunk. He felt like he was going to vomit, not from the fall, but from the message his phone delivered that caused the fall. The offending device lay partially under the lower the bed, quiet and harmless. Pulling his knees slowly up to his chest Shawn hung his head, his chin resting against his chest with his arms limply over his knees. The nauseated feeling slowly passed and he slid his feet away from him. The moment he reached for the phone the wave slammed into him again almost sending him under the bed. He forced himself to pick up the phone and the unlock it. His hands, cold and clammy, shook as he opened DeAndre's app and checked Jon's messages again.

He waited.

And waited.

As the app discreetly synced to the other phone, Shawn noticed that there were no current messages and the the timestamp it retrieved the last message was 7:38pm the night before. But he was sure the time of Jon's response to Katherine was some time early this morning. It didn't make sense.

When the app was finally done syncing, it produced a myriad of emails and texts from various principals and one from Eli. There nothing from Katherine. Shawn frowned deeply confused. The messages he saw were vivid and clear and he knew he had not deleted them. He tried to no avail to force the app to sync again and again but it gave him nothing but a few additional emails. Suddenly, worried that Jon may deleted the texts, Shawn had the app scan for recently deleted texts. It did as it was told and produced a long list of deleted messages. There was nothing from the day before. The texts that Shawn had so clearly seen; the ones that had thrown him from the bed were no where to be found.

Could DeAndre's app have malfunctioned?

Suddenly the phone began to buzz, silently letting Shawn know that Jon had an incoming call. It was Katherine. Her name sent chills down his spine and he felt sick again. Just below her name the app flashed an option to listen to the call without being detected.

At this time of the morning, Jon would no doubt be in the kitchen going through his morning routine, but it was too early for Julia to be out of the bathroom and to be in with him. Shawn engaged himself in a furious argument over whether or not he should use the listen in feature the app provided.

The app stopped flashing indicating that call had been picked up.

Shawn's heart began to race as he was in limbo about what to do. He knew it wasn't right to eavesdrop on the call; but then even having the app itself was worse than that. As the time the length of the call began to climb, Shawn stopped thinking and hit the green listen button on the screen.