Chapter 2: The Phone in the Speaker
“He says she’s making it up because she wants to leave home.”
Officer Bell’s words stayed in the room after he finished speaking. I stared at the blanket over my legs. The paper sheet beneath it crackled when I moved, making even a small shift feel like an announcement.
Dean had used that explanation before. If I said something, I was dramatic. If I stayed quiet, I was fine. If I tried to get away, I was ungrateful.
Officer Ruiz lowered his notebook.
“Is there anything that might help us understand what’s been happening?”
I opened my mouth, but no words came.
Dr. Grant stood beside the monitor, giving me space. Officer Bell waited near the curtain. Neither of them told me to hurry. Still, Dean was in the hall, and my mother was somewhere nearby, and my body had learned to treat every pause as a countdown.
“There is something,” I said.
Officer Ruiz leaned forward slightly.
“What is it?”
“I recorded him.”
My mother made a small sound from outside the curtain.
I flinched. The movement tugged at my bruised ribs.
Dr. Grant noticed.
“Would you like the door closed?” he asked.
I nodded.
He stepped out and spoke to someone in the hall. A moment later, the voices moved farther away. The door clicked shut.
Officer Ruiz didn’t ask what my mother had said. He didn’t ask me to repeat myself.
“Take your time,” he said.
I looked at the officers’ faces, searching for the moment their expressions would change. For the look people got when they decided a story was too strange to believe.
“Six months ago, Dean smashed my first phone. He said I didn’t need one.” I swallowed. “I used money from tutoring to buy another one. It was secondhand. I hid it inside a broken speaker on my bookshelf.”
Officer Bell glanced at his partner, then back at me.
“Is the phone still there?”
“I don’t know.”
The words came too quickly. I pictured my room: the books arranged by height, the speaker with one torn corner, the narrow space behind it. I pictured Dean walking through the house while I was gone. He had searched my drawers before, but the speaker had been broken so long that nobody paid attention to it.
“Does anyone else know about it?” Ruiz asked.
“No.”
The room seemed to shrink around that answer.
I had thought about the recordings so many times that, in my mind, they were almost separate from me. A private store of sounds, waiting somewhere beyond Dean’s reach. Saying it aloud made them real—and made me wonder whether I had just handed my last protection to strangers.
“They upload automatically,” I said. “When the phone detects shouting.”
Officer Bell’s expression tightened, but he kept his voice even.
“You set that up?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know if it would work. I tested it when I was alone. Then I just left it there.”
The first time I’d heard the phone catch Dean’s voice, I had been standing by the stairs, trying not to cry. The sound of his shouting had come through the tiny speaker afterward, thin and tinny. I’d listened once, then shut it off. I hadn’t needed a recording to know what he sounded like. I needed one because I was afraid nobody else would believe me.
“What did it record?” Ruiz asked.
“Threats. Things he said after he hit me. A few times, he said what he’d done.” My hands knotted in the blanket. “And my mother. She helped make up the explanations.”
No one reacted as if that part surprised them.
Officer Ruiz set his notebook aside.
“Do you know how to access the recordings?”
“Yes. From another device. I can sign in.”
“Would you be comfortable showing us? You can stop at any time.”
I looked toward the closed door. There was a second when I thought I heard Dean’s laugh, low and muffled beyond it. My fingers went cold.
“I don’t want him to know.”
“He won’t come in here,” Officer Bell said. “We’ll keep him separate.”
That was not the same as promising what Dean might do later. I knew the difference. But Officer Bell’s hand stayed near the door, and he didn’t pretend the difference didn’t exist.
A woman in blue scrubs knocked softly before entering. She introduced herself as a patient advocate named Ms. Cole. She pulled a chair beside the bed, not too close, and explained that she could stay while we talked about safety and next steps.
“You don’t have to give every detail at once,” she said. “And you can ask for a pause whenever you need one.”
For a moment, I couldn’t answer. It was strange to hear that a pause belonged to me.
Officer Ruiz asked again if I wanted to show them the recordings. Ms. Cole waited while I thought about it.
I was afraid the recordings would be dismissed as incomplete, taken out of context, or somehow turned against me. I was also afraid to leave them unwatched, as if Dean could still reach through the silence and erase them.
“I’ll show you,” I said.
Officer Bell stepped out to speak with someone. When he returned, he carried a department tablet and explained that I could log in myself. He would document what I showed him, and investigators would need to preserve and assess any material they thought relevant. He didn’t promise the recordings would prove anything.
That mattered. A promise would have made me feel good for five minutes, then terrified when it failed.
Ms. Cole asked if I wanted her beside me.
“Yes.”
She sat where I could see her without turning my head. Officer Ruiz stayed on the other side of the bed. I entered the account information slowly, making a mistake on the first try because my thumb was shaking.
When the page loaded, I saw a list of dates and short audio files. Not all of them had titles. I’d given a few plain names so I could find them later—“Tuesday,” “Kitchen,” “Upstairs”—but I hadn’t labeled the ones that scared me most.
There were more than I wanted to count.
The number on the screen seemed impossible. Each file was short. Each one stood for a moment I had tried to survive by pretending it would never happen again.
“Do you want to select one?” Ruiz asked.
I scrolled past several dates. My pulse thumped in my throat. I remembered Dean shouting in the kitchen, my mother’s hurried footsteps, the front door closing. I remembered another night, another excuse. I couldn’t tell which file was which just by looking.
“Maybe that one,” I whispered, pointing to a date from a few weeks earlier.
Ruiz asked whether I wanted to play it aloud. I nodded.
He made sure everyone in the room was ready, then tapped the file.
At first, there was a soft scrape and the faint buzz of the refrigerator. Then a chair moved across the floor. I held my breath.
My own voice came through, small and distant.
“Please, just stop.”
The recording crackled. Someone moved close to the phone. There was a hard thump, then a stretch of silence.
Ms. Cole’s hand rested open on the blanket, near mine but not touching. She didn’t ask if I was all right. I was grateful for that. I didn’t know how I could have answered.
The clip ended.
Officer Ruiz stopped playback and wrote down the file name and date. He didn’t say it proved the whole story. He didn’t call it a confession. He asked if there was another recording I thought might show the threat I’d mentioned.
“There’s one,” I said. “I think.”
“You don’t have to listen to it,” Ms. Cole reminded me.
“I know.” I pressed my fingertips to the edge of the blanket. “But I want them to hear it.”
I searched the list until I found a file with no title, only a date. I recognized the week. The memory came back in pieces: Dean’s voice upstairs, my mother moving around in the kitchen, my feet fixed to the floor because I didn’t know where I could go without making things worse.
“Is that the one?” Ruiz asked.
“I think so.”
He asked again whether I consented to playing it. I said yes.
This time, the sound began with footsteps in the hallway. A door shut. The phone’s microphone caught a breath, then another. A voice rose out of the static, close enough that I knew it at once.
Dean.
He wasn’t shouting yet. That was what made the sound so familiar: the low, controlled tone that came before he decided how loud to get.
“If you tell anyone what happened—”
The clip cut off mid-sentence.
May you like
No one moved.
The screen still showed the file’s date, and Dean’s voice still seemed to hang in the air after the speaker went quiet. For the first time that night, the room was listening to him without letting him choose what the story meant.
