Memories Without Him novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Night Before

I played the Dream memo nine times before lunch.

Every time, it stopped on the same word.

Don't ever trust the man who.

I held the phone against my ear and tried to hear the rest underneath my own breathing.

There was nothing there but a little hiss.

"Say the exercise helps," I told Vincent. "Say it will come back."

"It might," he said. "We start tonight."

The tech man came to the brownstone that afternoon in a delivery uniform with a case of cables.

I handed him my phone first.

"Can you pull the end of this?"

He listened to it twice and shook his head.

"It stopped when you stopped, miss. There's no end on the file to find."

Then he swept the kitchen.

It took him four minutes to find it.

He held it up in his gloved palm, a gray disc the size of a button, and Vincent looked at it for a long time.

"It was glued under the lip of the lamp," the tech man said. "Over the table, with a transmitter."

"How long has it been live?"

"Since at least the week you got married."

"Who's been in the kitchen that week?"

"The cook," I said. "The new one."

Vincent turned his head.

"She started Monday," I said. "Aldo sent her. He said you'd been eating badly."

"Aldo sent her," Vincent repeated.

"Do I take it out?" the tech man asked.

"No. Put it back exactly where it was."

He didn't blink.

"I want Aldo to keep hearing what I want him to hear."

That night, at the long table, Vincent poured two glasses of wine and talked to me about nothing.

He said Mount Sinai had set the surgery for Friday morning, and that he would be in the room until the anesthesia.

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