ON MY WEDDING NIGHT I HID UNDER THE BED TO SURPRISE MY HUSBAND

watched my husband of one day go white across the room. I watched Lorna’s hand fly off my wrist as if it had burned her. And I watched twenty people — her book club, his uncle, the family friends she’d spent a lifetime performing respectability for — hear exactly who the Whitmores were, in their own words, with no way to spin it.

Because that’s the thing about a recording. Lorna could have called me a liar. Grayson could have said I misunderstood. But you cannot argue with your own voice, laughing,