She is the only person in the room who can hear it.

Hạnh Trần has spent twenty-one years as a court interpreter, and twenty-one years being invisible. She does not speak in the first person. She does not explain. She does not soften. She renders what is said, faithfully and completely, and then it is gone.

On the ninth day of jury selection in a Texas capital murder trial, the defendant says one word to her — a single syllable in the north-central dialect her mother has been losing to dementia, a dialect no one else in that courthouse can parse. And over the weeks that follow, Hạnh understands that he has been speaking to her, and only to her, inside his own testimony.

She also understands that the State's star witness is lying. Not in what she says. In her grammar.

Hạnh can prove none of it. What she hears cannot be recorded. The code of ethics that governs her has a word for fatigue, and a word for not being able to hear, and a word for not knowing the terminology — and no word at all for a message that arrives perfectly. To speak is to become a witness, to be removed, and to leave a man with no one in the room who can hear him. To stay silent is to watch it happen.

So she begins to choose her words.

A novel about the small, unrecorded distance between what a person says and what a record shows — and what it costs one woman to close it.

This book was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence, working from a human-directed premise, outline, and editorial brief, and was reviewed and approved by the author before publication.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, courts, cases, and businesses are invented.