Turn 5 of 13

Ask Rae to play the Module Four recording now, with her listening

The room goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with sound. Rae's television is still scrolling captions about the water main, the kettle is still ticking as it cools, but the quiet is underneath all of that, in the space where the sentence sits — *the mirror was a good instinct* — and you can feel it settling into the room like something with weight.

"Play it," you say.

Rae stares at you. "What?"

"The recording. It's attached. Play it right now, here, with you listening. I want to know what's in it before I —" You stop. Before I what. Before I take it home and put the headphones on at the hour my hand already knows how to find. Before I go down again and lose another forty-four minutes. Before I move something else in my flat and wake up certain it was right.

"Just play the first few minutes. I need to hear what it sounds like with someone else in the room."

Rae is still holding your phone. Her thumb hovers over the attachment icon. She looks at you, and her expression is the one she wears when a resident at the care home says something that's either lucid or breaking — attentive, careful, weighing which.

"Sam, this could be — I don't know. A data breach. Someone who has access to your flat. A camera, maybe. This isn't just a weird email."

"I know."

"Do you? Because you're sitting there like it's a form you have to fill in."

That lands. You feel it land, somewhere behind the glass, and you can't tell if the glass is the calm or if the calm is something the calm is keeping out. You meet her eyes.

"Please play it, Rae."

She taps the attachment. The loading icon spins for a moment, and then the room fills with a voice — his voice, you think it's his, though the certainty wavers the way it always does, like a word you've said too many times — and it says, "Welcome to Module Four. Before we begin, I'd like you to make sure you're comfortable, and that you're alone."