VIVIENNE
“I do not know how to grieve someone I never knew.”
She said it before Sera had finished sitting down. Not as an opening to a conversation. As the thing that had been pressing against the inside of her chest since she pressed play on the first recording yesterday and heard her father’s voice for the first time in thirty years and discovered that it did not feel like recognition.
It felt like meeting a stranger she was supposed to love.
Sera sat across from her in Dr. Cole’s office. Eight o’clock exactly. The room was quiet. The recorder sat on the table between them in its metal case. Fourteen recordings. Forty-seven minutes total. A dead man’s careful documentation of his own destruction.
Vivienne looked at it.
“You grieve the idea of him,” Sera said. “That is different fro
