When the Phone Rang

Maya Riley is walking across the stage at her high school graduation when her phone rings. The number is wrong - too many digits, strange characters she can't read. She silences it. It rings again. And again. She answers. On the other end: a girl named Ji-Yun, calling from inside North Korea on a smuggled phone hidden beneath a floor panel. The call was an accident. What comes next is not. Over one summer, the two girls build a friendship that should be impossible - conducted in stolen minutes, coded messages, and music sent across an ocean.
Maya sends Beyoncé. Ji-Yun asks if it's God. Maya describes the sky. Ji-Yun says hers is always gray. But every message is a risk. Every signal can be traced. And as the connection deepens, both girls begin to pay the price - Maya in the friendships she's losing, the lies she's telling, and the secret that's consuming her ordinary life. Ji-Yun in the surveillance closing in, the detection vans on her street, and the shrinking window between the world she knows and the one she's heard through a cracked phone speaker.
When the signal goes dark, Maya is left holding a thread she can't pull and can't release. And Ji-Yun must decide whether the voice on the other end of the line is worth walking into a river for. A novel about what it costs to hear someone - really hear them - across every distance the world can build.