The seatbelt sign dinged somewhere above me, but I barely heard it. My thumb kept pressing replay on the voicemail Sarah had left the night before, the one that cut off mid sentence with a soft, startled “Mom, I need to tell you some—” and then nothing. Just dead air, and then the automated voice asking if I wanted to save or delete.
I had saved it. Of course I had saved it. I’d listened to those seven seconds so many times over three days that I could hear the exact texture of her breath before the word she never finished.
Three days in Chicago balancing spreadsheets for a client, three days of hotel coffee and conference rooms, and the whole time all I could think about was that half swallowed word. Some. Some what? Something. I need to tell you something. I need to tell you some news, some secret, some truth. My mind had filled that blank a hundred ways, and not one of them had come close to the truth, because the truth was something I couldn’t have imagined even if I’d had a year to try.
“You’ve listened to that thing ten times,” my coworker Lola said from the seat beside me, closing her paperback with a soft snap. Lola worked as a paralegal at the firm where I kept the books, and we’d been sent to Chicago together for the client’s quarterly close. “Everything okay at home, Maureen?”
“It’s fine,” I said, sliding the phone into my bag as though putting it away would make the worry go with it. “Just Sarah being Sarah.”
“Mm.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” Lola tucked her book into the seat pocket in front of her. “It’s just, you’ve been jumpy for months. Ever since the spring, really. You flinch when your phone buzzes.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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