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 one and six, when the only listeners were truckers, insomniacs, and people deciding things.
Marla kept the studio the way lighthouse keepers kept lamps: a logbook nobody required, spare fuses labeled in pencil, the microphone at the exact height where her voice stopped sounding written. The station, WQRZ 92.7, cost more to run each month than it earned in a year, and the gap was paid by an inheritance from a man who had never once visited the building. She had opinions about that arrangement. Mostly gratitude. Some resentment. Gratitude and resentment live in the same room more often than people admit.
Chapter one is about the night the phone didn't ring at all — the first in nine years — and about how an absence can occupy a room better than a sound. She filled the hour with records, then with reading the weather for towns whose gas stations closed, then, at 4:40, with nothing, deliberately, to see if the quiet would file a complaint. It didn't. It took notes.
The chapter ends with her writing in the logbook, date, time, one line, no explanation, the way lighthouse keepers logged weather, ships, and later, war: 3:12. Quiet. Answered anyway.