The Daughter Allowed Only 10 Seconds of Voice Chapter 07

The Daughter Allowed Only 10 Seconds of Voice Chapter 07

I didn’t expect Mom to call again the very next day.

When I picked up, it turned out Mira had called behind everyone’s back.

She said the interview had blown up, but people were accusing her of deliberately making her sister look bad.

She wanted me to defend her.

I didn’t see what there was to say. I refused.

Later, I went online and saw it had escalated faster than I’d imagined.

After the interview went viral, people found the recording I never got to finish on the website.

They spliced my audio next to Mira’s words.

The contrast was too obvious.

Pack media came knocking at the Vale house again.

This time, the cameras were pointed at Mom, Dad, and Corin.

“Mira believes her sister caused her speech anxiety. Do you agree?”

“If you truly cared about every child’s voice, why is Tessa’s Voice Archive only ten seconds long?”

Every one of them choked on their words.

In the end, Mira was the one who came out and told the reporters to leave.

When it counted, they all went mute.

“I’ve fixed up your page. Come home, and I’ll record a new voice archive for you. Deal?”

Corin’s message appeared out of nowhere, probably assuming I’d left because of all this..

I ignored him.

The messages kept coming anyway.

After the backlash, Dad smoked a lot and played the raw recording over and over.

He went through it frame by frame, hunting for traces of me, and found fragments he’d never noticed.

In the background, there was always my quiet voice, and the protests that came after I was cut off.

They kept listening to it on repeat.

I didn’t reply to Corin.

Because I was meeting my friends to celebrate a small breakthrough in our research.

Someone held up a phone and asked everyone for their thoughts.

When my turn came, I meant to keep it brief.

But everyone knew I loved to talk, so they told me to say whatever I wanted.

I ended up talking the longest.

I thanked every one of them for their help and wished them all well.

Thank you, Nessa, for actually writing down what I said when you showed me around on day one.

Thank you, Damon, for bringing me coffee while I stayed up organizing project data.

Thank you, Dean, for always bringing me a thick wool coat for field tests.

As I spoke, Nessa set down her glass, Damon raised his phone to film, and everyone else turned to face me.

No one looked at their phone. No one was impatient. No one interrupted.

The only sounds in the room were my voice and the howls drifting in from the training grounds.

That wasn’t noise. It was Northreach’s heartbeat, proof that everything here was alive and working.

And my voice was part of that rhythm too.

No one muted it.

No one pressed pause.

No one said, “Keep it short.”

They listened to every word, patient and happy.

When I finished, Dean was the first to raise his glass. “Tessa, talk more at every gathering from now on. We love hearing your voice.”

They all raised their glasses in agreement.

In that moment, I felt happier than I ever had in my life.

So it had never been my talking that made people dislike me.

I’d just been living in a house that didn’t want to hear me.

Speaking was never a flaw.