Then I hear it. A snicker.
Not loud. Not cruel enough to be open. Just tucked into the space between two cubicles like a blade slipped under a door.
My stomach drops. I set my coffee down too carefully and look around. No one meets my eyes now. That is worse than if they stared.
“What?” I ask.
No answer.
I look at Owen. “What?”
He opens his mouth, closes it again.
Lina looks stricken.
And then, from somewhere behind me, a man’s voice I barely know says in a fake-whisper that carries way too well, “Maybe ask her for her rates.”
Laughter. Small. Nervous. Real.
For one second, I don’t understand.
Then I do.
And my whole body goes numb.
No. No, no, no.
Another voice, female this time, murmurs, “I mean, those were definitely her, right?”
A screen glows on a desk across the aisle. For half a second, before the person sitting there angles it away, I see a waveform.
An audio player. My throat closes. It’s out.
Somehow, impossibly, the voice recordings are out.
The ones with my voice all velvet and heat and confidence I had to invent because confidence didn’t come naturally to me anywhere else.
The room starts to tilt.
Someone says, not quietly enough, “So what, she was like a hooker?”
More laughter. My heartbeat turns violent.
I can’t feel my hands.
I can’t feel my face.
All I can feel is humiliation, hot and total and suffocating, rising so fast it makes me dizzy. This is it. This is the nightmare. Not abstract shame. Not the vague fear of being found out. This, exactly this: strangers looking at me and hearing those files and reducing me in one second to something dirty, laughable, disposable.
I can feel every year of trying to leave my old life behind crack open all at once.
The cheap recording booth. Jake’s approving thumbs-up. Cup noodles on my mattress while I applied to jobs I thought were real. The first time I heard my own voice played back and hated how much stronger she sounded than I was.
All of it. All of it exposed.
My eyes sting. I will not cry here.
I will die before I cry here.
