Chapter 2 - The Phone in the Pillow
Four months before I ended up in that hospital, I was digging through a kitchen junk drawer looking for batteries when I found an old phone shoved in the back corner. The screen had a crack running across one corner. The case was tacky with age. The service had been cut off years ago.
I almost tossed it in the trash.
Instead, I hit the power button, and the screen came to life.
The camera still worked. More important — the voice recorder still worked.
That night, I sat on the edge of the bed while Derek slept and turned the phone over in my hands. I knew recording him wasn't going to stop what happened the next morning. I knew if he ever found it, things could get a lot worse. But I also knew I needed something that didn't depend on how calm I sounded, how believable I looked, or how badly I was hurt whenever I finally worked up the nerve to ask for help.
I cut a small slit along the seam of my pillow and slid the phone inside.
The first recording caught nothing but fabric and my own breathing. The second picked up the back door creaking open. By the third, I could hear Derek's voice clear enough to make out every single word.
After that, I built a system. I charged the phone in short stolen bursts whenever I was alone in the house. I dropped the screen brightness all the way down. I killed the volume completely. Before dawn, I'd hit record while pretending to fuss with my pillow. At night, once he was asleep, I'd check the file, note the date, and tuck the phone back into the seam.
5:41 a.m. 5:38 a.m. 5:44 a.m.
The files stacked up into a calendar nobody else could see. They held the scrape of the door. The extension cord dragging across the concrete. The rope tightening. His insults. Carol's knife against the stone.
They held quieter things, too. Carol telling him not to leave marks where a doctor might see. Derek asking if my sleeves covered my wrists all the way. Both of them laughing the day I told them the baby had started moving.
I never listened to every recording start to finish. Sometimes ten seconds was more than enough to make my hands start shaking again. But I kept recording anyway, because that phone didn't get scared and it didn't second-guess itself. It didn't soften their voices. It didn't wonder if things were really "that bad." It just remembered.
As I got further along, Derek got more and more fixated on the baby's sex. He talked like the world owed him a son and I was the only thing standing between him and what he was owed. One night I told him the baby was healthy and that was really all that mattered.
He looked at me like I'd said something disgusting.
"What matters," he said, "is whether you finally did one thing right for once in your life."
May you like
Carol nodded along from the kitchen table.
Neither one of them had any idea the old phone was recording every word from the bedroom, three feet away.
