My brother's pregnant wife looked me straight in the eyes, in front of forty relatives gathered around her swimming pool, and said my four-year-old daughter had died because I was too busy saving strangers' children to notice my own was dying. Nobody defended me. Not my mother, not my aunts and uncles, and not even the brother who had once nearly drowned saving my life.

When I arrived home that evening, the house was remarkably quiet, except for a rhythmic, mechanical click coming from the dining room table.

I walked in to find Hannah sitting beneath the chandelier. Scattered across the mahogany surface were dozens of small pieces of colored clay, wire armatures, and her iPad propped up on an improvised wooden stand. On the screen was the stop-motion animation software she hadn't touched since the week before Sophie died.

Hannah didn't look up immediately. She adjusted the clay arm of a tiny brown otter, moved it a millimeter to the left, and tapped the shutter icon on the tablet.

"What are you making, honey?" I asked softly, resting my hand on her shoulder.

Hannah leaned back, exhaling slowly. "It's the story Noah and I were talking about before... before the pool. It’s about two otters named Barnaby and Pip. They go looking for shells, but a storm comes, and the river gets too fast. So they hold hands."

My throat tightened. "It sounds beautiful, sweetheart."

"Mom," Hannah said, turning in her chair to face me. "Can I show you something? I didn't tell Aunt Vanessa or Uncle Daniel, because I didn't want them to ruin it."

She picked up her phone, navigated through her photo gallery, and opened a file dated January 12th—three days before Sophie passed away.

"I was filming a test scene in the living room," Hannah explained, her voice trembling slightly. "The camera was facing the bookshelf, but the microphone was on."

She pressed play.

On the screen was a shaky, out-of-focus shot of our wooden floorboards. But through the phone’s small speakers, the room suddenly filled with a sound that stopped my heart.

It was Sophie’s laughter. Bright, uninhibited, bubbling over like clear water.

*"Millie Bean!"* Sophie’s recorded voice sang out, slightly distant but unmistakable. *"Look at me! I'm a ballerina otter! Twirl, twirl, twirl! Catch me, Millie!"*

Then came the thump of little socks landing on carpet, followed by Millie’s baby gurgles, and Sophie humming a nonsensical tune about butterflies and peanut butter.

I dropped into the chair beside Hannah, burying my face in her shoulder as the recording played on a loop.

"I thought we lost her voice forever when the toy broke," Hannah whispered, wrapping her thin arms around my neck. "But she’s here, Mom. She’s everywhere in this house. Aunt Vanessa can't drown that."

Just then, Thomas walked into the room from the garage. His shirt was streaked with black grease, and his hair was sticking up in three directions, but his eyes held an electric intensity I hadn't seen in months.

In his right hand, he held the tiny circuit board from the otter.

"I took it to Sal," Thomas announced, out of breath. Sal was an eighty-year-old retired electrical engineer who ran an antique radio and avionics repair shop downtown. "The battery blew, and the traces on the board were corroded by the pool chlorine, but the EEPROM chip—the little flash memory cylinder inside—is intact. It didn't short out, Becky. The data is still locked inside the silicone."

I stood up, Hannah’s hand still clutched in mine. "Can he extract it?"

"Sal didn't have the micro-soldering rig for an eight-pin flash chip that small," Thomas said, pulling a slip of paper from his pocket with a phone number scribbled on it. "But his nephew works at a digital forensic lab at Ohio State. He told me if we bring the chip in tomorrow morning, they can hook it up to an external reader and pull the raw audio file directly off the memory."