Oh, he could lie to Emma over the phone! ...it just probably wasn't worth the explosion when she found out about the lying.

There was silence on Emma's end of the line, broken only by the sounds of her rummaging in a drawer for pants and shimmying into them. "Here I thought you were going to tell me you'd decided to drop out of college and do something typically collegiate and self-indulgent, such as travel the world or work in a soup kitchen for a year or go build houses in South America."