Say It Again, Slower

Chapter One: Forklift Safety, Module Four

The script on Erin Sheridan's stand said: *Never operate a lift truck with wet hands.*

She said it warmly. She said it like advice from a woman who loved you.

"Beautiful," said the client's voice in her headphones, thin and far away in a conference room in Schaumburg. "Can we get one more that's, like, forty percent more concerned?"

"Concerned about the hands or the forklift?"

"Both? The whole situation."

Erin closed her eyes for one second, the length of a held breath, and then let her face do the thing her face did when the money was small and the day was long. "Never operate a lift truck with wet hands," she said, and made it sound like she'd lost someone that way.

"Perfect. Perfect. You're a pro."

She was a pro. She had been a pro for eleven years. She had voiced a talking dehumidifier for a chain of hardware stores in central Illinois, and there were people in Peoria who could still do the impression. She had narrated safety modules for warehouses, tutorials for dental software, and one long, strange corporate history of a company that made industrial zippers. She had a warm, low, unhurried voice, a voice men in elevators sometimes turned around for, and it had bought her exactly one used Honda and a bedroom in a Logan Square walk-up with radiators that clanked like someone was being held hostage in the basement.

She was thirty-one. On the wall above her closet booth — a converted coat closet lined with moving blankets and a strip of acoustic foam she'd stolen from a defunct podcast studio — she'd taped an index card in her father's handwriting. *THE MONEY IS IN BEING NOBODY.* He'd written it when she was nineteen and had told him she wanted to act. He'd run a dubbing house on Grand Avenue for thirty years, and he'd meant it kindly, the way a man means a coat he hands you that doesn't fit.

She logged the session, invoiced the client, and made herself a fried egg on toast while the radiator clanked.

Rosa Padilla came in at four with a bag of tamales and a grievance.

"There's a man," Rosa announced, "who has been standing outside the laundromat for three days telling people about the war."

"Which war?"

"He doesn't specify. That's what makes it art." Rosa dropped the bag on the counter, kicked off her boots, and folded herself onto the couch with the boneless confidence of a woman who had lived here six years and paid a total of eleven months' rent across all of them. She worked at a nonprofit that helped restaurant workers with immigration paperwork, which meant she was underpaid on principle, and her contribution to the household arrived in the form of enthusiasm, tamales, and an encyclopedic willingness to listen. Erin had long ago decided this was a fair trade. "How was the forklift?"

"Concerned."

"Forty percent?"

"Sixty, in the end. He kept pushing."

Rosa peeled a tamale and pointed the husk at her. "You know what you should do? You should do audiobooks. Real ones. Novels. You'd be so good at the — the *panting* bits."

Erin's stomach did a small, private flip. "The panting bits."

"There are always panting bits. I read them. I'd know."

"I'll add it to the plan."

"You don't have a plan. That's your whole thing." Rosa said it fondly, chewing. "You have a *voice* and no plan, and it's driving me insane, and I love you."

Erin laughed, and went to change, and did not say: *I have a plan. It leaves at nine-fifteen. It costs twenty-two dollars in a rideshare to the West Loop and it pays four hundred a session and I signed a nondisclosure agreement so long it had a table of contents.*

At nine-fifteen she went downstairs into the January cold with a scarf over the bottom half of her face and got into a car.

The building on Sangamon had been a garment factory and was now four floors of companies with names like nouns. Smolder had the third floor: black carpet, warm lamps, a reception desk staffed by nobody after seven. Erin signed the log the way she always did.

*H. Vance* — no. She caught herself. Her sign-in name was **H. Marlow**, and she wrote it in the same slightly-forward slant she'd used for eighteen months, because inconsistency was how people got found.

Ruby — Lacey Gaddis, the engineer, who wore the same gray cardigan in every season and had the flat, unbotherable calm of a woman who had mixed live sound for touring metal bands in her twenties — was already at the board.

"Halo," Lacey said, without looking up.

"Lacey."

"Water's in the booth. Somebody put a lozenge in there, not me, I'd never insult you like that."

Erin went into Booth A and shut the door, and the world went to that particular dead silence that always felt to her like stepping inside a held breath. She put the headphones on. She adjusted the stand. She stood for a moment in the dark warmth with her palm flat on the pop filter's frame, the way another woman might touch a doorframe before going into a room where someone was waiting.

Then Lacey said, "Rolling on *The Late Shift*, episode seventy-four, Halo side," and Erin Sheridan stopped existing.

Halo had a lower center of gravity. Halo took her time. Halo said things Erin would never say and said them like they were obvious.

The script was the usual: two people in a stalled elevator, a lot of pauses marked *(low)* and *(breath)*, and the partner track — Cinder's track, recorded on another night, in another hour, by a man she had never met — playing in her left ear.

His voice was gravel with a wire through it. Not performed-deep. Just naturally set low and a little tired, the voice of somebody who'd been awake since before you got there and had made coffee.

*"Don't,"* said Cinder in her ear, from three weeks ago. *"Don't move. Just — say that again. Slower."*

Erin said her line into the dark, and four hundred thousand people, eventually, would hear it.

That was the arrangement, and it had been the arrangement for a year and a half: separate sessions, a scripted partner track, a false name on a clipboard, and a direct deposit twice a month from an LLC in Delaware. She had never told Rosa. She had never told her father, who would have died, and then come back to life to be disappointed. She had told exactly one person, a therapist she'd seen for four months in 2022, and even then she'd said *voice work for an adult platform*, which was true the way *a boat* is true about the Titanic.

What she had not told anyone at all was that it was the best work she had ever done. Not the most respectable. The *best*. The only place where she used the entire instrument. In a booth on Sangamon Street, saying filthy tender things to a man who did not exist, Erin Sheridan was the actress her father had told her not to be.

She finished at eleven-forty. Lacey walked her out and said, in the elevator, "You hear about the buyout?"

"What buyout?"

"Investor group bought Smolder in December. New head of content starts next week." Lacey pressed L. "Guy named Malcolm Larson. He did five years at a podcast network and left it, quote, *leaner*."

"Leaner."

"That's the word he used in the all-hands. Twice."

Erin pulled her scarf up. Outside, the wind came off the expressway like something with a grudge.

"Is that bad for us?"

Lacey considered it with the seriousness of a woman who had watched a lot of ships go down and had, each time, been the last one at the board.

"It's never good," she said, "when somebody buys a thing because they've read a chart of it."