The Daughter Allowed Only 10 Seconds of Voice Chapter 05

The Daughter Allowed Only 10 Seconds of Voice Chapter 05

The first to break the silence was Mira, who rarely spoke.

“Mom, did Tessa really leave?”

“Impossible!”

Mom cut her off firmly.

“Tessa must be joking. She’s probably off on some trip.”

“Just ignore her. She’ll come back when she’s ready.”

Her tone was certain.

But her eyes stayed fixed on the TV.

The interview had ended, and the screen had moved on to another show.

The TV was loud.

But no one turned it off, and no one said a word.

Mom suddenly stood, went to the entryway, and opened the door to look outside.

The doorstep was empty except for a pair of old slippers lying crooked by the shoe rack.

She stood there for a few seconds, then closed the door.

Corin shrugged.

“Tessa will probably come back on her own in a couple of days.”

Dad made the call.

“All right, enough of this. Breakfast first.”

Dad went into the kitchen and carried the breakfast plates out one by one.

He hesitated at the fifth plate.

There were only four people at the table.

He took the extra plate back to the kitchen and put it in the fridge.

Before closing the fridge, he glanced inside, as if checking it hadn’t gone bad.

Maybe he was still waiting for me to come back and eat it.

But by then, I was already on a plane to Northreach.

Once I reached Northreach, I quickly settled into a new life.

Classes, field training, and lab work filled nearly every hour.

We studied territory systems, tested Pack equipment in freezing conditions, then went back to the lab to analyze the data and refine our approach.

It was busy.

And it was the lightest I’d felt in years.

Because here, no one minded how much I talked.

Every word I said was actually heard.

On my first day, Rowan Keir, the instructor in charge of new students, walked us through the lab building.

He stopped beside a field sensor.

“This unit has been unstable in cold–weather tests lately.”

“Keep that in mind when you run your experiments.

I leaned in to check the model and specs, and the words came out before I could stop them.

“The seals on this model get brittle under sustained cold.”

“If the calibration frequency isn’t high enough, the data drift will keep getting worse.”

Once I started, I couldn’t stop.

I went from the unit’s design to failure cases I’d read about last month, then walked through several possible causes.

About ten minutes in, I suddenly caught myself.

“Sorry. Am I talking too much?”

Even my wolf instinctively flattened her ears.

Rowan, though, was bent over his notebook, writing.

He looked up at me.

“Why would you apologize?”

He flipped the notebook around. It was already full of notes.

Everything you just said was useful.”

“Keep going.”

I stood there.

The words lingered in my head for a long time.

“Keep going.”

Eighteen years.

The first time someone had listened to me talk for ten minutes without telling me to shut up.

Deep inside, the wolf who had grown used to silence slowly raised her head.

After that, whether in class discussions, lab analysis, or training briefings, people were happy to hear what I

thought.

Northreach was huge, but the classrooms, labs, and training fields sat close together, so you could find almost anyone with a few minutes‘ walk.

The North’s signal was also unreliable, so I gradually stopped checking my phone.

A week later.

While preparing to send my first week’s lab notes to my advisor, Corinne Mercer, I switched my phone back

on.
The screen had barely lit up when a dozen missed calls and a flood of messages poured in.