Chapter 30
Becca
“Somebody said in Sweetbriar that things are going to change. I say they don’t have to.”
Iset up the equipment. Laptop open. External mic plugged in, the little green light blinking its patient readiness. Voice disguiser loaded, settings checked, and then, for the first time, I looked at the settings for a long moment and closed the application without enabling it.
I sat with that for a second. Then I opened a new audio profile and left it clean. My voice. Just my voice, unaltered, the way it actually sounded in the actual world. The way Levi had heard it across a kitchen counter and a campfire and a porch railing in the dark.
If I were going to do this, I was going to do it as myself.
Levi was on the small couch behind me. I could hear him breathing. I could feel his attention, that steady, unhurried focus he brought to everything, and it was both grounding and slightly unnerving. Probably because I wasn’t used to this kind of focus. On me.
“You don’t have to hover like my personal bodyguard,” I said, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t crack.
Levi didn’t move an inch. “I’m not hovering. I’m strategically positioned.”
“Six feet is strategic?”
“Very. Gives me the optimal view of you pretending you’re not nervous.”
I shot him a look over my shoulder. “I’m not nervous. I’m focused.”
“You’ve got this. You know you do. I’m proud of you, you know. So damn proud.”
I felt the corner of my mouth lift despite myself. Turned back to the screen.
The document I’d opened this morning was still there. One line at the top: What do people deserve to know about the place they live?
I’d been building off it since—careful notes, specific questions, the names I could use and the ones I couldn’t yet, the shape of what I wanted to say and what I wanted people to do with it.
Matt had reviewed it this afternoon. He’d made two suggestions, both of which were correct, and then he’d looked at me for a long moment and asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this.
I was sure.
I wasn’t sure.
Both of those things were true simultaneously, and I had decided that was fine. Certainty and fear were not mutually exclusive. I had learned that from a man who ran into burning buildings for a living and did it scared or not.
I looked at the mic. The green light blinked. I hit record. “Welcome back to Somebody Said in Sweetbriar.” My voice came out steady. My own voice—not the altered version, not the careful construction I’d built to keep myself safe—just me, in my trailer, talking to whoever was listening.
“I’ve been quiet for a while. Some of you know why. Some of you have probably figured it out, and some of you are hearing my actual voice for the first time right now, which—hi. It’s me. Becca Hartford. I live here. I’ve always lived in Sweetbriar. And I have something to tell you.”
I talked for twenty-two minutes.
I talked about Riverside Pines—not as a quirky backdrop, not as the setting for raccoon stories and knitting circle gossip, but as what it actually was, a community of people who had found each other at the edge of a river in a small Oregon town and built something real out of proximity and stubbornness.
Of people who had run out of other options and discovered that sometimes that was how you found your actual life.
I talked about the planning documents. The public records request that had been denied.
The pattern across three valleys—careful, I was careful, Matt’s voice in my head the whole time.
I asked questions. Specific, documented, public-record questions that anyone with a county assessor’s login could verify.
I told them where to look. Told them to ask their neighbors if they’ve had unusual visitors, to ask what the local planning commission and a regional corridor study mean for their property.
I tried to make them believe that we are not alone here.
That we had never been alone in Sweetbriar.
And that it was time we stopped acting like we were, and if they lived in the Sweetbriar River valley, they needed to pay attention.
I hit stop.
The green light went dark.
The trailer was very quiet.
I sat there for a moment with my hands in my lap and the ringing silence in my ears of having said something that couldn’t be unsaid, out loud, with my own voice, attached to my own name, where anyone could hear it. My heart was going absolutely insane.
“Okay,” I said. “I did it.”
Levi was beside me before I’d finished the words, the couch cushion shifting as he stood and crossed the narrow trailer and crouched down in front of my chair so we were eye level.
His hands wrapped around mine in my lap, warm and certain, and he looked at my face with that quiet, thorough attention.
“You did it,” he confirmed. “How are you feeling?”
“Scared,” I said. “Which I know is backward. It’s already done, so the scared part should be over, but it’s sitting heavier now than it did before I pressed record, and I don’t entirely know what to do with that.”
“It’s not backward.” He shifted his weight, settled in, like he had nowhere else to be and wasn’t pretending otherwise.
“Doing it gave you somewhere to put all that energy. And now, it just has nowhere to go. You’ve sent it out into the world, and now you have to wait and see what the world does with it.
” He squeezed my hands. “What you’re feeling makes complete sense. ”
I looked at him for a moment. At the steadiness of him, crouched on the floor of my small trailer, as if it was the most natural place in the world to be.
“The voice thing,” I said. “I didn’t turn on the disguiser. I just—started talking. My actual voice, from the beginning. I made the decision, and then I was doing it before I’d fully made the decision, if that makes any sense.”
Something moved through his expression, slow and warm. “I know,” he said. “I was sitting right there, and I could tell, the second you opened your mouth, that something was different. That it was just—you.”
“Was that—” I stopped. My thumb moved against his knuckle without my meaning it to, a nervous thing.
“I did it before I could think it through, and now I can’t tell if it was brave or just reckless, and I can’t take it back either way, and Matt said it was my call, but I keep turning it over and wondering if I just—”
“Becca.” His hands tightened around mine.
“Stop. Listen to me for a second.” He waited until I met his eyes.
“It wasn’t reckless. It was the most honest thing you could have done, and I think part of you knew that, which is why you did it before your brain could talk you out of it.
And I know everyone listening felt that. ”
I let out a relieved breath. He was right there. Crouched in front of me in my small trailer with the mic still sitting on the table and the laptop screen glowing, and he was steady and warm and completely, absolutely certain of me in a way that I was still getting used to.
I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against his. He stayed still and let me.
“Stay,” I said. Same as the night before. Same word, same trailer, different weight.
“Yeah,” he said. Same answer as always.
Soon enough, podcast comments started rolling in.
I watched the listener count from the couch, Levi’s arm around me, his thumb moving in that slow, absent way across my shoulder, and we didn’t talk much.
The count climbed the way it always did after a new episode—not a spike but a steady rise, the kind that meant people were sharing it, passing it along, finding it through someone else who thought they needed to hear it.
Then they started rolling in, in earnest. Fast. Notifications pinging one after another.
I live in lot twelve. I’ve been wondering about those cars too.
Someone else: Sharing this with the county commissioner right now.
A third: Thank you for saying this out loud.
“Okay,” Levi said, gently, and closed my laptop. “That’s enough of that for tonight.”
“I was reading them—”
“I know.” He set the laptop on the table and turned back to me, and there was something careful in the way he was looking at my face.
“I watched you while you were reading, and what started as relief turned into something else about four comments ago. Those first responses tell you everything you need to know, and refreshing for the next three hours won’t make it more true than it already is. ”
“I know that,” I said. “Intellectually, I know that.”
“Emotionally, you want to keep checking.”
“Yeah, I can’t seem to stop,” I agreed.
He set the phone face down on the cushion and opened his arm without another word, and I didn’t argue.
I tucked myself against his side, and he pulled me in, warm and solid, and I tipped my head back against him and looked at the ceiling of my small trailer—the familiar water-stained map of it, the scuff near the light fixture I’d never gotten around to fixing—and just breathed. Let the quiet settle around us.
“What happens now?” I said, after a while.
“Tonight? Nothing.” His thumb moved against my shoulder, that slow, deliberate rhythm.
“Tonight you were brave, and you did something that mattered, and now you let your nervous system catch up with the rest of you. You don’t have to be the person who just did something major for at least a few hours. ”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, we deal with whatever comes. Could be a lot, could be quieter than you expect—you genuinely can’t know yet.
But trying to predict it tonight won’t change it; it’ll just eat the rest of your evening.
” He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, unhurried.
“You’ve done your part. Let it go do its work. ”