I know that voice. Don’t I?
Forget the stew, the steam. I am chilled straight through, remembering a time when I heard that voice—through my headphones, or through the speakers in my old Honda—week after week, on the wildly successful, wildly popular podcast everyone I knew seemed to be listening to.
Eventually—as everything in my life, in my sister’s life, was falling apart—I’d thought that voice was somehow speaking directly to me. Pressing closer and closer to those fallen-apart pieces.
I’d never wanted to hear it again.
I look up, and the giant’s watching me close. The woman with the familiar voice is waiting, just like I asked her to. In the space between them, behind them, I catch a movement on the driveway, a flash of white fabric, a familiar shock of red hair. Freshly trimmed.
It’s my sister, carrying a plastic bag from the pharmacy around the corner, walking toward us quickly, her face flushed.
Panicked.
“Jess,” Tegan says, and the giant and the woman both turn to face her.
“Jess!” the woman echoes, friendly recognition in her tone.
But then her brow furrows, too, and she looks between us.
“I’mJess,” I say to her, at the same time Tegan says, “This is my sister.”
The giant and the woman share a brief, concerned look. But she recovers quickly. She volleys her gaze between me and Tegan again and says, “Interesting,” and myGod, it is her. I’d recognize the way she said that word anywhere.
She used to say it at least once an episode.
Salem Durant. The woman whose hugely popular podcast series ended up being about something way too close for comfort.
Something way too close to home.
I’ve been working all these years to keep it far, far away. Especially from Tegan.
My sister and I speak over each other again. Me with a sharp, desperate, “There’s obviously been a mistake,” and her with a determined, unapologetic, “I can explain.”
Salem Durant smiles again. A cat that got the cream. A story that just became twice as interesting.
She says, “I’ve come to talk to you about your mother.”
Chapter 2
Adam
It’s a shame I haven’t learned to trust my instincts.
Because I had a feeling something was off.
Since last night, for sure, when we got off the plane here and I got recognized for the first time. It wasn’t necessarily unusual given my past, but still felt like a bad omen for this particular trip, when I’m working so hard to put some distance between then and now.
Since six days ago, when Salem announced these travel plans in the first place, a light in her eyes I’d heard about from others, but hadn’t once seen in all the months I’d been working with her, had appeared.
Since two months ago, when I first read a short email sent to the Broadside Media pitch account, promising new information on a story that was almost ten years old.
A story I knew Salem had never forgotten.
I had a feeling—even as I forwarded that email along—that there was something strange about it.
But instincts, I’d told myself, were not for thirty-three-year-old recent grads from J-School. They were for people further along in this career than me, for journalists who’ve been around on the actual job and who’ve seen more than I have. Instincts without experience, one of my professors once said to me, were a liability.
Salem has always been known for her good instincts.
