The Podcast

Chapter 37

Wednesday evening

Sumner can feel the rattling within her, a barely contained system of loose screws, swinging violently within their ridges. She has a slight dampness under her arms, a stickiness between the bare backs of her thighs and the leather of the recording chair.

Ina would call this move, talent going rogue.

But she hadn't exactly left Sumner with a choice.

Sumner grasps the base of the studio-grade microphone like a lifeline. These may be the last words she ever speaks into this microphone, this material thing that connects her to millions and millions of fans every week, faces she' can't see...a scale she can't fathom. It's not the same for performers and singers on stage who can see the magnitude of the crowd, the adrenaline rush from their presence. It's a hard fame dynamic to understand, impossible to visualize.

But today, she's not speaking to all of them. Not really, anyway. Just to one. The one. The only channel she has left, technically on borrowed time. If Ina knew Sumner was here right now, about to speak these words, she'd send in security to drag her out, degrading her to the nobody she was when Ina first granted her a fifteen minute meeting to pitch herself.

Sumner inhales fully, then exhales with as much control and calm as she can muster. She doesn't have much time, but she only needs a few minutes.

Glancing up at the glowing red recording light, a presence that exists within her like the beat of her own heart, she closes her eyes once before opening her mouth to speak.

—

Hours before going to the AudioHaven studio, Sumner paced restlessly in Lucas' home, avoiding her phone like the plague. Instead, she turned her focus onto Lucas, to better understand the mysterious, mercurial man who very well held the rest of her life in his hands. She snooped through his closet, the drawers of his nightstand. He'd piqued a deep, unfamiliar curiosity in her over the past week and it served as a welcome distraction to the rest of her life falling apart around her.

She wanted to know more about him—about his family, his personal life. Was he in a relationship? What kind of woman did Lucas Saba date? He hardly struck Sumner as the wine-and-dine romantic type. His closet was relatively sparse, a series of dark gray and black v-neck t-shirts, a few thick flannel shirts she imagined he'd look great in during the cooler months. She found his old military trunk and gear tucked near the back corner. It was easy to imagine him in a war zone, assertive and in control, uncouth but strategic. She found only a handful of framed photos, one she assumed to be Lucas and his sister with their parents who had passed and another with Lucas and what appeared to be his pre-teen niece. No obvious signs of a woman's things or a girlfriend.

When she'd combed through everything she could, she felt the restless nausea rise up in her again. Making her way over the war wall, tracing this mystery through the lens of Lucas' mind, increased her sense of guilt and dread.

Then seeing her father's photo, knowing Lucas had gone to visit him, trying to imagine them seated at her childhood dining room table, talking about her...talking about Chloe. Sumner clutched her stomach and raced for the bathroom, falling to her knees and retching over the toilet but nothing came out. Just painful dry heaves and the reality of her situation weighed impossible on her body.

How had it gotten this out of hand? How much of all this was really her fault?

She rested her sweaty forehead on the cool, porcelain lid of the toilet, hoping she'd hear from Lucas soon. Perhaps they'd apprehended the killer based on the crime scene evidence alone. Maybe it could all end with her safely tucked away in the cozy, masculine home of a man she was starting to feel uncomfortably attached to.