POV: CASSIE
At 10:22 a.m., the text arrives.
She was driving seventy-two miles per hour in the middle lane of the highway, forty minutes from Riverbend, with the heat on low and a half-drunk coffee in the cupholder that has reached the point where it is no longer worth finishing. The radio isn't on. The recorder is still going on the passenger seat. She does this sometimes on long drives after interviews, letting it run through the silence. She has learned to trust what she hears in the silence after two hours of hearing someone's truth.
The cup holder lights up on her phone.
She doesn't look at it.
When she drives, she has a rule about her phone. She has broken or bent most of the rules she has set for herself over the years, but this is one of the few that she always follows. She has learned, though not easily or quickly, that the rules she always follows are what keep her together.
The phone lights up once more.
The same number. Or more like—no number. A string of zeroes where a contact name should be means that it is not a contact. This means that it is either spam or something that doesn't want to be known, and Cassie has found that these two types of things are very similar but not the same.
She points. Goes into the slow lane. She takes the next exit she doesn't need, pulls into the front of a petrol station she's never been to before, and parks between a white transit van and a car that's been around for a long time.
She answers the phone.
One text. Not a known number. No text.
One attachment.
A note with your voice. Lasts fifty-three seconds.
For a moment, Cassie looks at it. There is a small microphone, a play button, and a timeline that she can't see yet in the middle of the screen. Fifty-three seconds isn't a long time. This is shorter than the intro to her podcast, which is 53 seconds long. It's shorter than the average time it takes someone to decide if they want to say what they called to say.
Someone made a choice very quickly.
She raises the volume on her phone.
She hits play.
She hears breathing first.
Not laboured breathing, like someone who is in pain, but the breathing of someone who has been crying and then stopped, the kind of breathing that is working harder than it looks, that has been doing a different job and isn't quite back to normal yet. Two breaths. Then a third one. Then a voice came.
A voice of a woman.
Not high. Be careful. Trembling in the way that voices do when they are scared of the words they are about to say, not the person they are talking to. When the sound of the thing said out loud will make it more real than the thing itself. "My name — " A pause. Cassie has sat in a lot of silences, but this one was shorter than a second and heavier. "— my name is—" Another pause. "It doesn't matter. You can find out if you want to. I'm not going to say it.
A breath. "I just killed my husband."
The forecourt is very well lit. Someone is filling up their tank two pumps over, with their back to Cassie. This is completely normal. A kid in the back seat of the car next to her is watching something on a tablet with headphones on and swinging their feet. The world is moving on as if nothing happened.
Cassie doesn't move.
She listens. "I listen to your podcast." Last Words. I've been listening for a long time. I think since the second season. Possibly the first. I don't remember exactly. The woman's voice changes a little, as if something has entered it that is almost like talking to someone, almost normal, as if saying the word "podcast" has taken her to a place she knows. "I was listening to it when it happened." When I did it. It was playing in the kitchen, and then I went to the bedroom, and then— She stops.
Four seconds of breathing.
"I had to tell you first," she says. "I don't know why. I just had to tell someone, and you're the person I tell things to. I know how that sounds. I know how that sounds because I've heard you talk about it on your show. About people who don't understand the relationship. Who believe you're their — I know. I know that's not you.
A sound that isn't quite a laugh or a cry. Something caught in the middle, short and awful. "But I still needed it to be you."
Cassie's thumb is digging into her palm. "The body is in the bedroom." Our room. He's on the floor next to the bed. I'm in the kitchen. I'm actually sitting on the floor of the kitchen right now. I don't know why, but that's where I always end up when things go wrong. The floor.
A break. "I'm going to call the cops." Yes, I am. But I needed one hour. One hour before they get here, everything changes. "Something that doesn't belong to me anymore." Her voice drops, gets quieter, and goes somewhere private. "I wanted one hour where only you knew."
The voice note's time is almost up. "The address is —" she says. Name of the street and number of the house. A suburb of Washington D.C. that Cassie knows because she drove through it once on the way to an interview. It's a normal, residential stretch of houses with small lawns and recycling bins that looks like people are managing their lives instead of living them. The woman says, "You have one hour." "Before I call."
One breath.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I don't know who I'm saying sorry to."
The voice note is over.
Cassie is sitting.
She will count this later, and the total will be eleven seconds. She has to sit completely still in a car for eleven seconds after the recording ends and before she moves. That's a long time for her to sit still while the world fills up petrol tanks, watches tablets and does all the other normal things that people do when they're not listening to a woman confess to murder on a forecourt outside a city that doesn't know what's in one of its bedrooms.
She doesn't think about anything during those eleven seconds. They are not meant for that. They are the eleven seconds during which her body and brain are passing things back and forth. The body is holding something the brain hasn't caught up to yet, the brain arrives, the handoff happens, and the two of them agree on what to do next.
Next, she moves.
She listens to the voice note again.
She listens to it like she would any other piece of audio evidence, not to feel it (she's already felt it and is putting that aside for later), but to get something out of it. How good the recording is. There is no background noise, just breathing. There is no TV, no traffic from an open window, and no other noise from the house. A house that is quiet. A floor in the kitchen. A woman who just did something she can't take back is sitting in the same place she always goes when things go wrong.
The sound. The rhythm. When she talks about Final Words and changes the subject, she becomes briefly conversational, like people do when they find something familiar in something unbearable. At the end, the apology. I don't know who I'm saying sorry to. You don't write this. You don't plan for this. You say this when you're sitting on the kitchen floor and don't have anything left but the one true thing.
Cassie knows the difference between a stage and a kitchen floor.
This is the floor of the kitchen.
She opens the app for notes. Types in the address. Reads it to herself once.
She types in the time the message came in: 10:22 a.m. figures it out. If the woman keeps her word, and if she is able to keep her word, the police should get a call at about 11:22, which is one hour after 10:22.
The time is now 10:34.
Four hundred and eight minutes.
She grabs her recorder from the front seat.
"Received voice note at 10:22," she says. Her voice is calm. She taught it to be steady a long time ago, and it still is even when other parts of her are doing different things. "A woman called from an unknown number with a string of zeros and no way to tell where it came from. Fifty-three seconds. She says she killed her husband. She gives an address." Cassie reads the address into the tape recorder. "She says she hears Final Words. She says she will call the police in an hour. It's 10:34 right now. I have 48 minutes.
She stops making a record.
She checks the address on her phone.
She can see the entrance to the highway thirty meters ahead.
Later, not now, but later, during the 3 a.m. examination of decisions she will do in the weeks that follow, she will ask herself what she was thinking at this moment. If she thought about calling the police herself. If she thought about the choices, the duties, the legal, personal, and professional framework of what she was about to do.
The truth is that she didn't weigh anything, and she will write this down in her private notebook and never tell anyone.
She remembered the woman's voice saying, "I needed it to be you."
She remembered Damian Cross leaning over the table forty minutes ago.
She thought, "Something is going on, and it's bigger than I can see right now. The only way to see more of it is to move toward it instead of away from it."
She turns on the engine.
She leaves the forecourt.
She drives.
Before she gets on the highway, the recorder on the passenger seat picks up one more thing.
She said in a quiet voice, "I should call the police."
A break. Four seconds. Five.
"I will," she says. "After."