Page 52 of That Defining Moment

“This is for your calls?” Lysander asked.

“Investor calls. Board meetings. The occasional TV interview.” Diwa dropped into the main desk chair and spun it to face Lysander, one ankle hooked over his knee. “When you’re doing a pitch to sovereign wealth funds, they notice if you’re sitting in front of a bookshelf with a ring light. It needs to look like you take them seriously enough to have a proper setup.” He shrugged. “So I have a proper setup.”

Lysander ran his fingers along the boom arm of the nearest microphone. The metal was cool and precisely balanced, pivoting smoothly at the joint. The pop filter attached to it was professional grade.

“It does the job.” Diwa pulled a can of iced coffee, the imported Japanese kind, from a mini fridge sat next to the desk, and cracked it open. “You want one?”

Lysander took the offered can and settled into the leather chair beside the recording setup, crossing his good ankle over the splinted one. The acoustics down here were different from the rest of the house. Tighter. The ambient noise of the street above had vanished entirely, and when Diwa’s can hissed open, the sound was crisp and close, as though it had happened inside Lysander’s own head.

He took a sip of the iced coffee and turned the can in his hands, running his thumb along the condensation.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” he said. “One of the things I love about Hamish is talking to him. Our conversations. He’s the best interviewer I’ve ever watched. I know I’m biased, but I think he’s right up there with Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson. Hamish isn’t trying to catch you out. He’s not building towards a gotcha. He just sits there in his stupid glasses and he asks you a question, and somehow you end up telling him secrets that you’ve never told anyone else.”

Diwa smiled. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

“I’ve watched him do it with Cassian,” Lysander continued. “With me, honestly. He’s got this way of making you feel like whatever you’re about to say is the most interesting thought anyone’s expressed to him all day, and it’s not a trick: he actually believes it. Every time. That’s what makes it work.”

He picked up the coffee again, took a long sip, and put it back down.

“I’m not Hamish. I don’t have that talent right now, but I think I can learn it.” He unfolded his arms and looked at the microphone beside him. “People talk to me, Diwa, about the weirdest shit. They always have. It’s my OnlyFans history, partly. Once the world’s already seen your arse, nobody feels like they need to hold back around you. But…I also know what it’s like to have your worst moments be public, and when people clock that about me, they start talking because everyone wants to be listened to.”

He traced the edge of the pop filter with one finger.

“I want to do a podcast.” The words landed in that dead-air room with more certainty than they’d had inside his head, when he’d been typing out his ideas on the notes app on his mobile. “I want to talk to people with important stories they haven’t told yet, or ones that got told wrong. I’ve got my own story, obviously. That’s the starting point. But I don’t want it to just be me talking about myself for an hour every week. I want to be the person who sits across from someone and makes them feel safe enough to say whatever they need to so that they can move on.”

“What would you call it?” Diwa asked.

Lysander hadn’t expected the question, which was stupid, because Diwa was a man of action who regularly skipped past “that’s a great idea” and went straight to operational specifics.

“I don’t know yet,” Lysander admitted.

Diwa nodded. “I can help you with the production side. When you’re ready.” He gestured at the setup behind Lysander with his chin. “You’re sitting in a broadcast studio, Sander. It’s already here.”

He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

Diwa was already pulling up a complicated-looking dashboard on the main monitor, his chair rolling across the floor. “When you’re ready to build your own rig, Ryland and I can spec it out. He’s got opinions on microphone preamps, and I know a guy in Shenzhen who does custom audio interfaces, proper broadcast-grade, not the consumer stuff. We’d want to think about room treatment first, though, because your acoustics will make or break the whole thing, and most people skip that step and then wonder why their recordings sound like they’re presenting from inside a wheelie bin.” His fingers moved across the keyboard, tabs multiplying. “Ryland will want to build you a soundboard.”

Lysander watched the tabs proliferate. These alphas would want to run cable. They’d want to talk about bitrates, and about microphones at a level of granularity that would make his soul want to leave his body.

“Lovely,” Lysander said. “Can’t wait.”

Diwa glanced over his shoulder, caught the look on Lysander’s face, and grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ve learned my lesson about overdoing it.” He turned back to the monitor, closing the tabs one by one. “I nearly lost your father over a baby monitor.”

Lysander’s eyebrows climbed. “A baby monitor.”

“Colin mentioned that the monitor we’d bought for the nursery had a grainy picture. That’s all he said. ‘The picture’s a bit grainy, Diwa.’” He closed another tab. “So I sourced a thermal imaging camera from a defence contractor, hired two engineers to design a custom monitoring system with real-time respiratory tracking, and I personally developed a machine learning model that could differentiate between seven distinct types of infant cries.” He paused. “Colin came home from his antenatal appointment to find a man on a ladder drilling through the nursery ceiling to mount a sensor array, and he packed a bag and went back to Barking for eleven days.”

“Eleven days.”

Diwa’s mouth pressed together. “Ryland thought the system was brilliant, for what it’s worth. He wanted to add a spectrographic analysis layer for the crying classification. Stephen had to physically take his laptop away…so I lent him one of my spares.”

Lysander glanced at the browser tabs still open on Diwa’s screen. So that’s what all the shit in the nursery was…

“I’m starting to see a pattern here,” Lysander said.

Diwa grinned. “Ryland and I set it up in his nursery over a weekend. We’ll do it for you, too, when the time comes.”

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