I pull off the highway into darkness that smells like resin and rain-cooled earth. The lake house porch light bleeds a tired cone across the steps. When I cut the engine, the night completes its swallow—no traffic hum, no aquarium buzz from the studio, just water shifting against the dock like a heavy sleeper turning over.
“I told you not to drive alone,” Tessa says when she opens the door. Her hands grip the frame, the old splinters polished by years of us leaning in and out of summers.
“I told you to keep the lights on,” I answer, and I bump my shoulder against hers to trade a little heat. My tote bag is heavier than it should be—two cameras, a coil of ethernet, a handful of fresh SD cards, promises I don’t know if I can keep.
She leads me inside. The house holds our swim towels’ ghost, coffee stale in the air, cedar paneling baked into every breath. The kitchen table wears a neat terror: a padded envelope, a vintage tape player, and a cassette with a sticker label written in the rounded block letters I used at eleven. Take Two.
“When did this arrive?” I ask, though she already texted the time stamp. I need to hear it.
“This afternoon.” She taps the envelope. “No return address. Local postmark.”
“Gloves,” I say, and we both laugh—the short humorless kind that lets fear pass through without breaking anything expensive. I slide on nitrile and click the player open. The springs sigh. We used to record rain with this thing and then pretend to sell storms to the neighbors.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Play.”
The tape rolls. First, hiss. Then the tiny mechanical chick of a stop-start. Then a whisper I could hear blindfolded in a crowd, because it belongs to my childhood friend Jill—the kid who shared her Walkman with me and taught me the habit of staying up late for voices. Only it’s wrong. The syllables have saw teeth. Words fall in little different rooms, stitched together until they make a sentence that cuts.
“Don’t—make—me—cast—your—understudy.”
I steady my elbows on the table. The house seems to shrink by an inch. Tessa reaches for the counter but doesn’t touch it; her hand hovers like a bird looking for a safe branch.
“That’s Jill,” she says. “But not Jill.”
“Spliced,” I say. “Pulled from her old voice messages or some garage recording. He’s teaching me that he can sample who made me.”
The tape scrapes on with breath, then clicks off. No more. No return cue. The absence is heavier than sound.
“You told me you wouldn’t bring the show here,” Tessa says, voice low, chin lifting like it weighs something. She’s barefoot, sleeves pushed, and she has our mother’s cornered look.
“I didn’t,” I say, and I hate how fast the defense arrives. “He followed me. He followed the work. He—”
“He was on our dock,” she says, cutting me clean. She reaches into the envelope with tongs, careful, and withdraws a Polaroid. Fresh chemicals still ghost the border. The photo shows tonight’s water with last night’s sky—cloud lid, no moon—and tape X’s faint on the dock boards from when I once marked a story beat by muscle memory. The house light spills in the frame at the angle I left it at midnight.
“Time stamp?” I ask.
She points to the back. In blue ballpoint, a neat hand: LAST NIGHT.
I swallow, and my tongue tastes metal. “He was here within twenty-four hours.”
The room registers that sentence and hangs it over the sink like a damp shirt. Outside, the water answers by bumping the posts once, twice.
“I’m done,” she says quietly. “I can’t be scenery in this.”
“You’re not scenery.” I look at the cassette, then at the photo, then at the line of small dings along the table where we ate birthday cake. “You’re the reason I do any of this with a spine.”
Her eyebrows notch. “You say that like a line you know the audience will love.”
I wince, because she’s right and because I’m tired of being good at sentences when what I need are locks and lights. I pull the cameras from my bag and set them down like medical instruments. The sticky pads smell faintly of citrus adhesive; the metal is cool. I slide a portable NVR from bubble wrap and thread cables with fingers that want to shake but don’t, not in front of her.
“He wants me in a script,” I say. “He wants me to perform fear by hitting the beat he wrote. I’m going to perform a boundary instead.”
“By what? Bolting a GoPro to a tree?” She’s not sneering; she’s exhausted and scared and trying not to beg.
“By building a wall I can see through,” I say. “Doors get heavier tonight. Cameras up. And I’m calling Elena for patrol passes, quietly, not on email. Dumplings for the paperwork later.”
“No cops blitzing my porch,” she says. “I don’t want cruisers teaching the lake how to stare.”
“You’ll get drive-bys, unmarked. A number to text if anything breathes wrong.” I keep my tone flat, no heroics. “You taught me to wear earplugs when the frogs get manic; let me teach you to like alerts.”
She watches me for a long beat, then picks up a screwdriver and a headlamp from the junk drawer. “Where first?”
“Eaves facing the dock,” I say, and the relief of doing floods me until even the floorboards feel less like ribs. “Then the path by the pines. And a mic.”
“A mic,” she repeats, one corner of her mouth moving. “Of course.”
“It’s not for a show.” I meet her eyes. “It’s for proof that doesn’t have to speak.”
—micro-hook— I step to the porch. Cold reaches the tender skin inside my elbows. The lake breathes a little fog, and the dock is a long tongue tasting the night. When I peel the adhesive back, the citrus scent cuts through pine and damp wood. I line the camera level and press until the mount surrenders its click.
“Angle?” Tessa asks from the ladder, beam of her headlamp cutting spokes through mist.
“Down-frame the far piling,” I say. “Leave the waterline. He likes staging. He’ll want to stay in the center of his own shot; give him nowhere to stand without stepping into ours.”
“You talk like this makes you feel better.” She climbs down and hands me the second camera.
“Talking makes the world hold still while I bolt it,” I say. “That’s been true since I was nine and interviewing the heron.”
She huffs a sound that might be a laugh and might be pain, then points to the tape X still faint on the boards. “You left that.”
“I did.”
“He photographed it.”
“He did.”
We work. Screws dig into grain. Tiny silver shavings smell bright, like a storm starting. Mosquitoes find my wrists and I ignore them; the sting is punctuation. I run cable, tack it, route to the living room where the NVR waits cabled to power that hums like the studio’s glass cube. The monitors I brought are small, one for the porch, one for the dock, one for the path. When pixels flicker into place, I breathe for the first time like the air got wider.
“Password me,” Tessa says, standing at my shoulder.
“You pick it.”
She thinks a second. “NoBows.”
I nod and type. The keys have a soft travel; the letters feel like a vow my fingers make before I know how to keep it.
I take photos of the envelope, tape, Polaroid, and cassette—front, back, edges, anything a future argument could lean on. I bag each separately, label by time, tuck them into a plastic bin I bought on the way up because I’m learning to anticipate my own caution.
When I’m done, I pour water into two chipped mugs and set one in front of her. The lake sends a small slap through the boards. Somewhere in the trees, a night bird clicks its metronome.
“Tell me the thing you’ve been avoiding,” she says.
“He was here last night,” I say again, but quiet, the way you say a diagnosis that already knows its name. “He knew where to stand to catch the porch light flare. He knows which voices to lift to hurt me without touching me. He wants me to read the line.”
“Then read mine,” she says, and her hand lands on the Polaroid. “Stop.”
I look at her and feel the old hinge between us—my ambition turning, her safety catching. “Stopping won’t make him stop,” I say. “But I can stop feeding him.”
“Your show is a buffet with a spotlight,” she says, and she doesn’t say it to shame me; she says it because she loves me enough not to varnish it. “The Night Choir trades pins like prayers to you. They’ll swarm this lake if you put one syllable of this on air.”
“I won’t,” I say, and the sentence surprises me by not scalding. “Not this. Not here.”
“I need more than sentences,” she says.
“You’ll get patrol passes,” I say. “You’ll get a safe word to text me that means I call Elena and not you. You’ll get my promise that the lake stays off the feed. We keep our mother’s house out of the theater.”
She closes her eyes like she’s sampling the shape of that and opens them with her jaw set. “Okay,” she says. “But if another box arrives, you move me to the city and you sleep in my doorway until the show is over.”
“Deal,” I say, and the word lands like a nail head.
I step into the hallway and dial Elena. I don’t need her to answer; I need the record of me asking without broadcasting my need as content. “It’s me,” I say after the tone. “Off record, no email. I have a package at the lake house: cassette, Polaroid of last night’s dock, local postmark. I’m securing the perimeter. I need patrol passes, no cruisers, night drive-bys for the next week. I’ll bring the items in chain tomorrow. Please don’t put a press bow on this.”
I hang up and text a signal emoji we agreed on during dumplings. It sends with a tiny bubble and a relief more practical than prayer.
When I return to the living room, Tessa is watching the monitors like they could teach her sleep. The porch camera holds a square of light and moths practicing chaos. The dock camera is a painting of stillness with a single wavering line where a spider is testing cable for its own network.
“He chose Jill’s voice,” she says, not looking away. “He could have chosen mine.”
“He won’t get yours,” I say. “He can only sample what we leave unattended.”
“You left everything unattended when you made the show bigger than you.” There’s no venom in it. It’s arithmetic.
“Then I make it smaller,” I say. “I feed what helps. I starve what harms. Exposure heals and burns. Tonight we dim the house to keep our skin.”
“You don’t dim when the sponsors call,” she says, but softer now, eyes shining not with tears but with a light that comes from deciding to live. “Promise me you’ll choose the quiet when the crowd screams.”
“I promise to choose you,” I say, and it’s the only sentence that feels like I earned it.
The NVR chirps softly when the first recording block writes to disk. On the dock monitor, a ripple bends toward the shore, then breaks on nothing. I exhale. I become aware of the small ache at the base of my skull, the caffeine sour in my mouth, the mosquito welts cooling into welts I’ll forget until the shower tells me where I bled.
“We should sleep in shifts,” she says.
“You take first,” I say. “I’ll sit with the monitors and make a list of everything I can do without touching the mic.”
She stands, hesitates, then steps into me with a hug that is fast and full. “Don’t make me your understudy,” she mutters into my shoulder, trying on a joke that doesn’t quite fit.
“Never,” I say.
She goes down the hall. The floor carries her weight like a metronome that refuses to be hijacked. I sit on the couch and watch the tiny lake inside the screen be smaller and keep being itself anyway. I open my notebook and write: No bows.
The house is quiet enough to hear the refrigerator’s old click and the pine sap popping in the fireplace where ashes remember our last winter. I let the silence be the show I can live with.
The dock camera chimps a notification: motion. I lean in. The frame holds still, but a single new thing glints—a coin on the far board, catching the porch light.
I stand so fast my knees bark and the mug thumps the table. I don my coat and reach for the door.
Behind me, the cassette’s motor wakes by itself and turns.