"Nobody calls at 3:12. That's the hour the town spends on itself, and it doesn't like witnesses. But the line blinked anyway, and Marla let it ring three times before she learned what kind of silence she'd answered."
"The replay tower on Kessler Hill needed an hour of maintenance a year and a decade of grudges to keep it standing. Marla inherited both."
"The station's last full-time employee was not the owner, the engineer, or the newsreader. It was the woman who talked to the dark between 1 and 6, when the only listeners were truckers, insomniacs, and people deciding things."