Thirty-one seconds should have meant nothing. During a late-night jazz session, an talkback microphone is accidentally patched into the studio desk, printing a fragment of a private conversation onto the multitrack. Decades later, audio restorer Mara Venn discovers that the speaker names a payment, a victim, and a person whose carefully maintained alibi depends on never having been in the control room. When the archivist who can authenticate the old exchange record is murdered, an engineering mistake becomes the most reliable witness in the case.

With engineer Tomas Vale, lawyer Celia Rook, bassist Ada Serrano, and producer Julian Cross, Mara follows patch cords, talkback clicks, console notes, catalogue assignments, and the inconvenient physics of sound leakage. Dryly comic and philosophical, Patched Through is a mystery about memory, marriage, authorship, and the dangerous possibility that technology may preserve the exact forty-seven seconds everyone else has spent a lifetime forgetting.