The cassette is a Sony HF-90, a ninety-minute blank tape in a cracked plastic case. Clementine has moved it twenty-seven times. She knows the number because she started counting when she was twelve, the year she almost lost it crossing a flooded bridge east of Richmond, and she has kept counting since. It lives in the left interior pocket of whatever bag she is currently using. She has never put it anywhere else.

Lee recorded the tape in the Crawford school, in the hour before everything went wrong. He had found a working recorder in the music room — a cassette deck someone had left on a shelf, batteries still good, blank tapes still in the box. He had forty minutes before he needed to be somewhere else. He used thirty-eight of them. Clementine does not know what he said. She has deduced some of it from context, from the weight of the silences he left in other conversations, from the things he started to say and didn't.

She has almost played it seven times. The first time was in the motor home, the night after Savannah, when she was nine years old and alone and the tape was the only thing of his she had left. She held the recorder for two hours with her thumb on the play button. She did not press it. She told herself she was waiting until she was older and would understand it better. She has been telling herself versions of that for seventeen years.

The reason she has not played it is not grief, exactly, and it is not fear of what she might hear. It is something more precise than either of those — a calculation she has been making since she was nine years old, which is this: the tape is the last place Lee still exists. Playing it uses him up. As long as it is unplayed, he is still mid-sentence. She is not sure she is ready for him to finish.