This Story Might Save Your Life(85)

She does. Again, an error message. My veins thrum as the next few do the same. I close my eyes, praying this wasn’t all for nothing when Joy’s voice punches through again. “Today’s episode is a departure from the norm…”

“Skip,” I say. “Skip skip skip!”

Sarah pauses the feed. The image is heavily pixelated, but I can see our silhouettes. Me, in my chair beside Joy, as she speaks into the mic.

“We don’t have to do this right now,” Luna says, reading my mind. She knows what I said to Joy that night.

Philip won’t hear of it. “We only have a few left.”

Sarah nods, and offers me a sympathetic frown. Unpausing the feed, she quickly scrubs forward. My voice says, “Do you remember the time we dressed as Waldo and Wenda for Halloween, and we spent the whole night hiding from each other?”

“Skip. Skip, skip!” I edge my sister out of the chair. I manage to grab the mouse in time to bypass the worst of it.

I press play when my pixelated form exits the frame. Joy remains at the desk, but in this distorted bird’s-eye view I can’t see her face. She doesn’t move for roughly thirty seconds. I’m beginning to wonder if either she’s fallen asleep or the file is frozen when she says, “I’m leaving Xander. You might ask why I’m doing this so publicly, and that’s because—I guess you could call it an insurance policy. I don’t know what Xander will do to stop me. Believe me when I say he’ll try, but there’s no turning back now.”

Sarah rests a hand on my shoulder.

“I’m not sure what will happen to the podcast. I think it’s probably going to be ugly, so please bear with us. We’ll do our best.” Joy pauses. “What doesn’t kill you…” She leaves it at that.

The next sounds make it clear she’s editing. Blips of audio feed come through as she cuts, replays, cuts, replays. There’s another stretch of silence before she exits the screen.

It’s a struggle to speak. “She was just gonna say we were taking a break…”

I can sense the rest of them exchanging glances over my head. Luna wrings her hands beside me as I hover the pointer over the next file.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Philip says.

The following recording is from ten minutes later. The same indistinct mosaic. Joy takes a seat again. Silence. It’s impossible to say for sure, but it looks like she might be typing. Her phone rings. She picks up. “I thought you were at your dinner thing.”

Xander. I fast-forward until she ends the call. We watch her sit at her computer for another minute before she leaves the room.

There are three more from that night. The first two give error messages. I turn my head before trying the third. “Someone else do it.”

Sarah reaches over my shoulder and presses play.

“What’s happening?” I say after an extended silence.

“Can’t tell,” Sarah says. “The picture is really bad.”

I turn back to find only stripes of red and green.

“Can we make it any louder?” Philip asks.

I hold down the volume key. “This is as high as it gets.”

We all lean in.

“I’m not catching anything,” Philip says.

The recording finishes. Sarah and Luna let out synchronous exhales.

“What’s the time stamp?” Luna asks.

I double-check. “Eleven fifteen.”

No one comments on what we didn’t find, what questions remain unanswered, but the disappointment is palpable.

“I’m so sorry.” Sarah looks miserable. “I knew it was hot, but I—there was so much going on.”

“Don’t blame yourself.” I press my palms to my eyes. “The other SD card reader rejected it on the way to the ER. Could’ve already been damaged.”

“In any event, I should probably hand it over to the police,” Philip says. He promises to do so first thing tomorrow, and suggests we call it a night. “I’ll have my aides follow up on everything we just discussed, and we can pick up where we left off in the morning.”

Before he leaves, I copy the SD card onto my computer. Just in case.

Luna hugs me tight. She’s still a little shaky. “Well,” she breathes. She surveys my messy house once more, and ruffles the dogs’ heads on her way out.

“What a day,” Sarah says when we’re alone.

“You can say that again.”

Sarah fills a glass with water, hands it to me, and turns me toward my room. “Go to bed.”

My pillow is miles away, but I do as I’m told.





Joy Moore


Day Seven

Shivering, I half doze for hours, trapped in the margins of sleep. When I finally rise to use the bathroom, the building is quiet. No hissing pipes. No footsteps. No distant chatter.

If Mitali returned, she didn’t make herself known, and in her absence the wrongness has grown. It occurs to me with a tingly sense of dread that I know almost nothing about her apart from what I learned in the computer lab, and that doesn’t amount to much. Since, I’ve done almost all the talking. I’ve entrusted her with my deepest, darkest secrets, and enlisted her help, and all I know is that she intends to have babies with the man whose bad behavior led her to seek refuge in a shelter. That, and she’s a very big fan of the podcast.