Page 51 of Hot Mic

Beside her, Sienna was practically vibrating with tense silence, refusing to look anywhere near Robin.

‘Fire away, Zoe,’ Robin said.

‘Let’s talk about the cottage date,’ Zoe said.

Robin’s smile stiffened by a fraction of a millimetre. ‘Ah, right. Country air and zero phone signal.’

‘Obviously, not our most interesting episode,’ Zoe said. ‘Or so we thought. But our production assistant spent yesterday reviewing the raw, unedited audio transcripts. And right after Sienna finished talking about her past—specifically, that first real heartbreak—there’s a gap.’ Zoe leaned forward slightly, resting her elbows on the desk. ‘Sixty-two seconds of total ambient silence before either of you spoke again. Sixty-two seconds where nothing was picked up on the mic.’

Robin remembered those sixty-two seconds with total clarity. She remembered the fire crackling in the hearth. She remembered Sienna’s trembling voice as she laid herself bare. And, most vividly of all, Robin remembered reaching across and resting the flat of her palm firmly over the back of Sienna’s hand.

‘Was there something happening in that room, Robin, that the listeners couldn’t hear?’ Zoe asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Robin said, leaning into her mic and forcing a light laugh. ‘I was probably just checking the levels.’

Karen leaned into her microphone, her voice entirely flat. ‘Truth index: twelve point four percent. High probability of deception.’

‘Right,’ Zoe said, eyeing Karen with a small, knowing tilt of her head before turning back to Robin. ‘Care to try that again?’

Robin swallowed, the seat suddenly feeling hot and sticky beneath her.

Across the table, Sienna’s mask broke. She slowly turned her head, her gaze locking onto Robin. Don’t tell them.

But Robin wasn’t getting out of this.

‘Fine,’ Robin muttered, shifting uncomfortably as the cuff pinched her arm. ‘I reached over and pressed my hand over hers for a second. Just a basic human empathy gesture. A ‘sorry that happened to you’ sort of thing. It meant literally nothing, and then we moved on.’

She held her breath, staring at the wall as the amber line moved.

Karen adjusted her glass reading specs and spoke into her headset mic. ‘Truth index: thirty-one point eight percent. Partial truth.’

Robin wouldn’t have looked at Sienna at that moment with a gun to her head.

‘It was just a hand,’ Robin repeated.

Zoe didn’t press the knife in any further. She didn’t demand a full confession, and she didn’t force Robin to articulate what that silent pressure had actually felt like. She didn’t need to. Karen’s flat monotone had already stripped her bare.

‘Thank you, Robin,’ Zoe said softly. She looked at the camera in the corner. ‘We’ll leave that there for now.’

Forty-Three

Sienna kept her eyes fixed on the desk. Robin was unravelling beside her, and they hadn’t even gotten to the heavy stuff yet. Just a hand touch. Sienna didn’t know what it had meant to Robin, if anything.

She was wondering now.

But she needed to pull herself together, and fast. Robin’s usual bluster had totally backfired; trying to joke her way past Zoe’s softballs only made the sensor needles jump. Sienna knew she couldn’t just throw out a blatant lie. The polygraph picked up on the sudden spike in stress the moment you deliberately tried to deceive it. If she wanted to keep her baseline from spiking, she had to stick to facts. Strict, technical facts that omitted the stuff that actually mattered.

Zoe turned her steady gaze toward Sienna. In the control booth, Gemma leaned forward against the console, watching through the window like a hawk. Pip kept flicking nervous glances to her.

‘Sienna,’ Zoe began. ‘Let’s talk about the double date with your respective matches.’

Sienna forced herself to relax her shoulders. ‘Right. Yeah, okay.’

‘Did you feel like the date went well?’

Sienna took a slow breath, picking her words with caution. ‘I mean... the service was crap, and the food wasn’t anything special.’

‘Truth index: ninety-seven point eight percent confidence,’ Karen said.