第4章 第4節 誰も信じない
No One Believes the Tape
That night, Nora sat alone in a cold room above the .
She had played the blank tape a dozen times in her head.
Every recording she trusted had turned into silence or lies.
"Maybe I have imagined all of it," she said quietly.
The thought frightened her more than Edwin ever could.
She had built her whole life on trusting what she heard.
Now even her own might be another false recording.
"The tape must have been real," she told herself firmly.
"I have heard my mother's voice; I could not that."
But is a quiet water that rises while you sleep.
She had not eaten, and she had not slept, for two days.
The room might have felt safe once, but not tonight.
Near midnight, a slow came at the wooden door.
Nora did not move, that it must be Edwin's men.
"Nora," said a voice she had not heard in this town.
It was old and tired, but she knew it at once.
She had not seen her father in Saltmere for twenty years.
Slowly she opened the door, and there stood Thomas Hale.
He looked smaller and greyer than she could have believed.
"You should not have come here," she whispered to him.
"And yet you must have known that I would," he answered.
Rain dripped from his coat onto the wooden floor.
For years they had spoken only of small and empty things.
Now the truth stood between them, too large to .
"We have very little time," her father said. "Let me in."