I was twenty-eight weeks with triplets and bleeding on a hotel sofa when my husband adjusted his tie and went downstairs. Four days later a man I had never met put a small black recorder on my hospital bed.

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PART 5 — THE FOURTH RECORDING

The suites at the Corven record audio. It is in the tariff and nobody reads the tariff.

There were four recordings.

The fourth one is from the March, in the same suite, and it is not my husband and Verena. It is my husband and a man who has never been identified and who is now the subject of a federal matter I am not going to write about.

You've got seventy-two hours.

And if I don't?

Then your wife finds out why the fourteenth of June matters to us.

That is the actual line. It has been played in a closed hearing and it is in a transcript.

For four months I believed there was a sentence on that tape about my daughters being targeted, because that is what I heard the first time I listened to it in a hospital bed on four days of morphine.