He Left Me at a Rest Stop on Halloween, So He Came Home to No Wife novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Recording

Cassidy's POV

Travis was sitting on the stairs above the bakery when I got there at seven, with a laptop bag on his knees.

He looked like he hadn't slept since the church.

The lawyer stood behind him in the doorway with his coat over his pajamas.

"Don't hit him until he's done talking," the lawyer said. "I'll want it on the record."

Travis stood up.

"I'm not here to ask for anything," he said. "I brought you something."

He opened the bag and took out a small black box with a cracked label on it.

"This is the infotainment module out of the SUV," he said. "The service manager at the dealership pulled it for me at five this morning. He didn't want to. I told him it was my vehicle."

The lawyer took it in both hands.

"It keeps the last ninety days of calls," Travis said. "Audio, too. I didn't know that until Monday."

"Why would you give us this?" the lawyer said.

"Because I've been telling myself for two weeks that I never said it," Travis said. "And I want to know."

He didn't look at me.

The lawyer plugged it into a cable from a drawer, and the three of us stood around his desk while a speaker clicked on.

I heard road noise first.

Then a little girl singing about candy.

Then Kendra, close to the microphone: "Is she going to be mad?"

Then Travis, in the voice he used on his mother.

"Cassidy has loved me for ten years. She would never leave me."

Kendra laughed.

The lawyer stopped it.

Nobody spoke.

I had thought that hearing it again would hurt.

It didn't. It was only a man in a car who had been wrong about the one fact he'd built his life on.

Travis had covered his mouth with his hand.

"That's what I sound like," he said through his fingers. "I didn't know that was what I sounded like."

"It's what you sounded like," I said.

"I'm going to say that in court today."

The lawyer looked up.

"You'll be a party to your own mother's motion," he said. "You'll be under oath. Your own lawyer filed that evaluation."

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