🔴 THEY SAID HE WAS INCOMPATIBLE, BUT NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THE TAPE RECORDER
I grabbed my purse, ready to leave, when I saw the small, silver thing glinting beneath his bed.
“What is that?” I asked, my voice tight as I picked it up; it felt cold and wrong in my hands. He mumbled something about forgetting it was there, but I pressed play — and a child’s voice filled the room, giggling, then crying, begging for “Daddy” to stop. The air in the room suddenly felt thick, suffocating.
He lurched towards me, but I shoved him back; the metallic scent of his cologne was making me nauseous. “You said she was just a… friend!” I screamed, but the little girl on the recording kept crying, her voice echoing his lies.
And then the tape clicked off, and I noticed the date scribbled on the side: today.
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He stumbled back, his face paling dramatically, eyes wide with something that looked less like anger and more like sheer, cornered panic. He reached for the tape again, but I instinctively backed away, clutching the small recorder like a shield. The child’s cries were seared into my mind, amplified by the date scrawled on the side. *Today*.
“Today?” I whispered, the sound barely audible over the ringing in my ears. “Why *today*? Who is this child? You said she was just a friend, Mark, you promised me!” My voice rose again, cracking.
He sank onto the edge of the bed, burying his face in his hands, his body shaking. The metallic cologne suddenly seemed pathetic, a thin veneer over something rotten. “I… I can’t,” he choked out, the words muffled.
“You *can’t*?” I echoed, incredulous. “You have a recording of a child begging you to stop, dated *today*, under your bed, and you *can’t*?”
He looked up then, his eyes red-rimmed and haunted. “It’s not… it’s not like that,” he whispered, voice raw. “It’s hers. The recording. Not mine. Not… happening *now*.”
My mind reeled. “Hers? Whose? And what isn’t happening now? The crying?”
He flinched. “It’s… from before. Evidence. I just… sometimes I have to hear it. To remind myself why.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “She’s… she’s my daughter. Sarah. The ‘friend’ was her mother. We’re fighting for custody. This tape… this is what she did. What she put Sarah through.”
He looked utterly broken, a stark contrast to the composed, charming man I thought I knew. The tape recorder, cold and heavy in my hand, suddenly felt different, but no less horrifying. A recording of abuse? Made by the abuser? And he kept it?
“You have a daughter?” I asked, the initial terror giving way to a cold, hard disbelief. “And you hid her? You hid *this*?” I gestured to the tape. “People said you were incompatible. They said you were distant, that you had… issues. I thought it was about commitment, or maybe just being a bit withdrawn. I didn’t think… this.”
He nodded slowly, misery etched onto his face. “It consumes me. This fight. What happened. I couldn’t… I couldn’t be with anyone properly. Not while this is my life. That’s why they said I was incompatible. Because I am. I lied because I wanted so desperately to be normal with you. Just for a little while.”
The air was thick again, but not with immediate threat, just with the suffocating weight of his confession and the horror contained on the tape. My hands trembled as I lowered the recorder. The child’s cries, begging “Daddy” to stop, were suddenly ambiguous, terrifying in a different way. Was he the “Daddy” in the recording, desperately trying to intervene? Or was this something else entirely? His explanation felt flimsy, a quick patch job over a gaping wound. Keeping a recording of your child’s trauma under your bed and listening to it on the day it was dated? That wasn’t grief or evidence-keeping; it felt like something far more disturbed.
I couldn’t breathe in the same room as that tape, as *his* truth. The man I’d fallen for was buried under layers of lies and a horror I couldn’t comprehend. “I… I have to go,” I stammered, backing towards the door, the recorder still in my grasp.
He didn’t try to stop me this time. He just sat there, head in his hands, the perfect picture of incompatibility. I walked out, the child’s cries and the date on the tape recorder echoing in my mind, knowing I would never come back. The incompatible man and his terrifying secret stayed behind, swallowed by the silence of the room.