Chapter 12 - the voice note
I knew before I pressed play that the audio would be Beatatrice.
What I didn’t know was how carefully she had preserved her own version of me.
Her voice came through soft and wet, recorded months earlier in my kitchen on the night she confessed.
“Jodie, please. I’m begging you. If Damon finds out now, he’ll leave me. Mom says the trust is the only thing keeping everything afloat. I’ll fix this, I promise. Just give me time.”
I stopped the file halfway through.
Cory swore under her breath. “She recorded herself begging you.”
“No,” I said slowly. “She recorded leverage.”
Andre took the phone from my hand and listened to the rest.
When he looked up, his face was grim.
“She kept the part where you say you’ll help her think. Not the part where you tell her she needs to confess.”
Of course she had edited it.
A neat little insurance policy: proof that I knew, trimmed just enough to imply complicity.
I felt something cold settle in me.
“Good,” I said.
Both Cory and Andre stared.
“Good?” Andre asked.
“Yes.” I held out my hand for the phone. “Because if she wants to start sending edited material, I’m done protecting the full recording.”
Beatatrice had forgotten one thing in all her careful plotting:
Our kitchen camera records audio.
She had recorded me on her phone that night. But our house security system had recorded the whole conversation.
Every word.
Including the part where I said, You have to tell Damon, and the part where she admitted the father was Reid, and the part where she said the baby would secure the trust.
I had not touched the footage because I never thought I’d need it.
Now I understood exactly why I would.
Andre saw the realization hit me. “You still have that file.”
“Yes.”
Cory smiled like a woman being handed a flamethrower at the gates of hell. “Oh, she really should’ve stayed home.”
I spent the next hour pulling the footage from our system while Andre contacted an attorney friend to make sure we handled it cleanly. We weren’t going to blast it online or start a family war in public. But if Beatatrice tried to smear me, I was no longer going to absorb it as the price of being decent.
At 6:30 p.m., my mother arrived unannounced.
Andre almost didn’t let her in.
I did.
Not because I wanted comfort.
Because I wanted clarity.
She stepped into the living room looking smaller than usual, without makeup, cardigan buttoned wrong, eyes swollen. I might have felt sorry for her if she hadn’t spent years weaponizing softness on behalf of the wrong child.
“Beatatrice is spiraling,” she said immediately.
I laughed once. “That is not the opening line you think it is.”
“She’s alone.”
“She was not alone when she ruined my shower.”
My mother looked at my swollen feet, the blanket over my legs, the blood pressure monitor on the end table. For a second guilt flickered across her face.
“I know you’re hurting,” she said.
“No,” I replied. “I’m finally done accepting hurt as the family tax.”
She closed her eyes briefly.
Then she said the thing she had clearly come to say.
“Beatatrice wants a meeting. With you. Privately.”
Andre stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor.
“Absolutely not.”
I didn’t even have to think.
“No.”
My mother twisted her hands together. “She says there are things you need to hear from her directly.”
I looked at her for a long moment.
“Then she can say them in front of witnesses.”
My mother hesitated.
“Why are you still doing this?” I asked quietly. “Why are you still carrying her messages like you’re the only bridge she deserves?”
She stared at the carpet.
When she finally spoke, her voice was barely audible.
“Because if I stop trying to save her… then I have to admit I helped ruin you.”
The honesty stunned me.
Not because it fixed anything.
Because it was the first true sentence she had offered me in years.
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed again.
This time it was Damon.
May you like
He said only one sentence:
Reid’s wife just found out Beatatrice met him again today.
