The Daughter Allowed Only 10 Seconds of Voice Chapter 02

The Daughter Allowed Only 10 Seconds of Voice Chapter 02

The next morning, Corin excitedly announced that he’d spent the night building a family website around the Voice Archive.

He called it the Vale Family Archive.

The homepage featured our family portrait..

Mom and Dad sat in the front row, Mira stood in the center of the back row, Corin on the left, and me on the far right.

Whether it was a layout mistake or Corin simply hadn’t noticed, I couldn’t tell.

Only half my face was visible in the photo.

The other family photos were much the same.

Some caught only half of me, some showed a sliver of my profile, and a few left me out entirely.

Across the whole website, there wasn’t a single complete photo of me.

Corin walked us through the site’s features one by one.

Each family member had their own page.

There was an introduction, and you could play that person’s voice archive.

When you opened Mira’s page, the site seemed to turn into something else entirely.

Interactive buttons, animations, a timeline, photos of us growing up… it had everything.

Corin had recorded the first time she spoke up at Pack preschool, her first public speech, even every little milestone.

Mom was beaming.

“This turned out so well.”

My page? It was last. Plain and bare. No photos.

Just a few lines of text and that ten-second recording.

Mira’s page was sleek as an Apple product page, with animations, polished layouts, and interactive touches throughout.

Mine sat beside it like a blank page that had failed to load.

I stared for a few seconds, then shut off my phone.

There was no point asking.

This family had rarely seen me whole anyway.

…

That evening, relatives came over for dinner.

Dad cast the website to the TV and showed everyone the voice archive.

They found it fascinating, and everyone said they wanted a recording of their own voice.

Delighted, Dad opened a fresh recording page on the spot.

Uncle Galen talked for three minutes.

Aunt Della talked for five.

Even our three-year-old nephew babbled through forty seconds.

Everyone laughed and carried on, recording after recording piling up.

Until Aunt Mabel suddenly asked, “Why is Tessa’s voice only ten seconds?”

Mom waved it off. “She talks too much. We were worried she’d go on forever, so we gave her a time limit.”

I looked down at the website on my phone.

Mira’s page had been moved to the front. Corin had just done it.

Mine was still at the end.

I put my phone away, slipped away from the noise, and went back to my room.

With my headphones on, I opened my page again.

That ten-second voice played over and over.

“Actually, next month I’m going to…”

I opened the voice recorder on my phone and finished the sentence.

“Actually, next month I’m going to Northreach Academy, and I’ll be gone for at least three years.”

There was more I’d wanted to say.

But listening to the noise outside, I suddenly felt there was no point.

I downloaded the audio from the website and edited it together with the new recording.

I saved it to a USB drive.

Finally, I gave it a name.

“The Complete Me.”