Only You Can Hear This

Calloway’s voice. Another man’s voice she didn’t recognize. A figure — two hundred thousand. A name she recognized now because she had seen it in the news three weeks ago: a city councilman under investigation for fraud. And then a third voice, quiet, in the background, almost inaudible beneath the room noise.
Her own voice.
Saying: ‘I’ll keep the session running. No one will know.’
Mara pulled the headphones off.
She sat very still.
She had no memory of saying those words. No memory of being in the room during that call. She had been in the control room, behind the glass — or so she had believed. But audio does not lie. She had spent her career knowing that. Audio does not lie.
The radio said, gently: ‘You were there, Mara. You just won’t let yourself remember.’
Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number. Four words: We know you have it.
And then everything she had been holding at arm’s length — the exhaustion, the buried files, the voice, the amber glow — collapsed inward like a wave.
She had not been hearing a radio. She understood that now, with a clarity that felt like cold water poured directly on her spine. The radio was a prop, a focus point, something her own mind had constructed to deliver what she already knew but could not face directly. The voice was hers because it had always been hers. Her memory, locked behind four months of deliberate not-looking, trying to surface.
But the text was real.
The text meant someone outside her own head knew about the files. Someone who had been watching. Someone who knew she had them and had been waiting to see what she would do.
Mara looked at the radio. The amber light went out.
The silence it left behind was enormous.
She picked up her phone. She did not call Deshi. She did not call her ex-husband. She opened a new message and typed the name of a journalist she had met once at a sound design conference — a woman who covered financial crime, who had given Mara her card and said, with a look that Mara had not understood at the time, ‘If you ever hear something you’re not supposed to, you know where I am.’
Mara typed: I have audio files you need to hear. She paused. Then she added: I think I’ve been waiting four months to send this.
She hit send.
She sat in the quiet kitchen for a long time after that, the unplugged radio dark and small on the counter, and she wondered which was more frightening — that her own mind had been trying to protect her from a truth she already knew, or that it had taken a voice from a dead machine to finally make her listen.

0 likes

About the Author

Rowan Vale — a student of occult symbolism, for whom every abandoned church is hiding something. Never leaves house without Daisy … his little doll.

— Rowan Vale

Full author profile

July 15, 2026

10min-stories