The macro lens clicks into place with a small plastic sigh that somehow feels ceremonial. Jonah steadies the coin in tweezers under the gooseneck lamp, and I hold my breath until my ribs hurt. Light skims the rim and turns the tarnish into a halo. The phone screen becomes a planet with an alphabet for continents.
“Don’t blink,” he says.
“I can’t,” I answer, palms flat against the console to keep from grabbing. The aquarium hum of the Glassbox still clings to my ears, even out here in the van; I miss the lie of its calm. Outside, the tidal creek hisses over the curb and throws back the streetlights like broken strings of pearls. I taste burnt sugar, a sweetness the air didn’t earn.
Jonah angles the lens, breath shallow. Tiny characters bloom in the magnified circle, not engraved but etched into the ridge: little scars aligned like a secret kept on the lip.
“Numbers,” he says. “Degrees.”
“Read it to me.”
He zooms. “Forty point seven four six one north,” he murmurs. “Seventy-three point nine four eight two west.” He shifts the coin a hair. “Then: C-12. And… ‘KEY: 2-3-5-4.’”
“Coordinates,” I say, and the word opens something reckless and familiar in my chest. “Storage unit?”
“Rehearsal space,” he counters. “C wing, unit twelve. The key’s a rhythm, not a key.” He taps his ring finger on the console: two, three, five, four—staggered like a hand counting off a song it can’t afford to forget.
I pull up the map and type the coordinates. The dot lands in Long Island City, a block of rectangle roofs I know. “There’s a complex there,” I say. “They rent band rooms and black boxes by the hour. I recorded a season-one pickup in a closet with a mattress on the wall.”
“You swore we’d never talk about the mattress,” he says, because he’s kind, even now.
“We can talk about it once we’re in C-twelve.”
—micro-hook— I text Elena: Following a coordinate clue. Storage facility, LIC. Will send unit number once inside. She pings back a single instruction: No sirens. Keep your head. I swallow the reflex to invite the Night Choir. No posts, no threads, no confessors crowding our car. Just the creek’s gurgle, the factory’s breath, the van’s old peppermint ghost.
We roll out. The van slaps through a shallow sheet of creek water and the undercarriage complains. The city is a wet stage that refuses to go dark. As we turn under the elevated, I catch my reflection in the window—eyes too bright, jaw tighter than the lock I’m about to spin—and I hate that I look like every host who thinks the next beat will forgive the last one.
“You ready for a do-not-stream rehearsal?” Jonah asks.
“I was born on mute,” I lie, and he snorts because he knows my mother worked nights and the radio raised me.
The storage complex wears cinderblock like a cheap suit. Fluorescent lights gutter along a caged corridor; the air tastes like dust and mop water. A bulletin board by the office advertises Weekend Scene Study in torn tabs and a dubious Paying Improv Gig ripped clean. A cherub sticker peeks from under a layer of tape and grime—a curly-headed face smiling with a crack through one cheek, the Orpheum’s motif translated into a cartoon.
“Of course,” I whisper. “He can’t resist his own brand guidelines.”
We find the C wing. C-12 waits with a combination lock scabbed in red paint. The code wheel looks like a prop: I can hear the Director’s breath in it, that teacherly patience that pretends to be mercy.
“Two-three-five-four,” Jonah says, and he means the rhythm. He taps the lock’s metal body with his ring finger in the pattern. The corridor answers in a faint, sympathetic buzz. It’s ridiculous. It’s theater. I hate that I smile.
“Try 23-54,” I say. “Two digits by two.”
He spins, pulls, shakes his head. “Nope.”
“Then he wants 2-3-5-4 on the dial. Staggered quarters.” I take the lock, set the wheel to 02, breathe, to 03, breathe, to 05, last to 04. The metal gives like a throat clearing.
“He rehearsed how our hands would move,” I say, more to the corridor than to Jonah. “He counted on our muscle memory.”
Jonah pockets the lock and knocks his shoulder into the roll-up. It shudders, screams, and lifts. Cold air moves across my face with that warehouse-vanilla of concrete, sawdust, and old sweat. Someone has tried to scent it with a plug-in pine tree that died of loneliness.
The room inside is the size of a childhood bedroom with ambition. Black curtains hang along two walls, stiff with dust. Worklights clamp to a pipe. The floor has chalk marks: blocking arrows in white and blue, Xs where feet should stop, arcs like parentheses around a taped square— a tiny stage inside a box pretending to be a room. My chest goes tight the way it does when I step onto a real stage and hear the audience settling like weather.
“Don’t touch the tape,” I say. “Document before we disturb.”
Jonah shoots a slow pan with his phone, lens steady. I breathe through my mouth. The air tastes like someone rehearsed secrets here and didn’t clean up.
On the far wall: a corkboard peppered with pushpins and paper like a conspiracy Santa. I step close. The index cards carry case names I know from my own seasons—and cases I refused because I didn’t trust the edges. A Post-it labels one column MASKED CALLERS. Another reads PREDICTABLE GUILTS. There are printouts of my episode art, each ringed with notes in Alina’s slanted hand: Cadence similar to #23; Pause inserted after “I’m sorry”; Breath doesn’t spike on “blood”.
My hands go cold.
“Mara,” Jonah says softly.
“I’m reading,” I answer, but my voice hits the black curtains and comes back smaller.
On the desk—a flat panel on sawhorses—sits a manila folder with my name printed in neat block letters. I know that handwriting. I know how it curls the M, how it presses the R too hard. I also know I shouldn’t touch a thing until Elena can put this in a bag. I also know I’m going to open it.
“Photos first,” Jonah says, and his voice is the one I borrowed when I built a show out of other people’s breath. He shoots the folder closed, the folder open, the letter inside. He nods—go.
I slide the letter free. The paper smells faintly like copier heat, like every office that ever killed a story and called it timing. The top line is in Alina’s hand.
Mara—
I lean on the desk because my knees forget. “If you’re reading this, I picked exposure over friendship.” The sentence lands like a coin on a wooden table—quiet, resonant, a dare.
“Read it to me,” Jonah says. He doesn’t step closer. He holds the edge of the room like a stage manager keeping the wings from chewing the actors.
I read.
“I auditioned three callers. Not for a play—for your show. I asked them to tell me about a crime that never happened. They did it convincingly in one take. Two are aspiring actors; one teaches movement at a studio tied to an LLC that rents black boxes with cash. I matched their voices to past episodes by rhythm, not pitch.”
The chalk arrows on the floor become tongues.
“I don’t think you knew. I think you got good at not asking. I think the Director learned your beats and cast them as confession.”
I grip the edge of the desk until my fingers ache. “She thought they were actors,” I say, and my mouth is full of chalk.
“Present tense,” Jonah says. “She thinks.”
I shake my head. “She knew enough to write it.”
—micro-hook— Shame walks up my spine like it owns the stairs. I see the faces I turned into thumbnails. I hear the pauses I praised as courage that might have been cue lines. I smell the burnt sugar the factory throws into the neighborhood and want to scrape the sweetness out of the air with my nails. Exposure heals and harms—I say it on air like a creed—so what does it do when I’m the one exposed?
I keep reading.
“I’m going to bring you proof. A comparison cut. I will need you to sit in silence for thirty seconds and not rescue the moment with a clever question.”
The letter lists three episode timestamps and calls them repeatable cadences. My stomach lurches because I can hum those beats. Another paragraph: “Juniper isn’t a plant. She found me after the grief group and told me the Director approaches attendees with ‘morality scenes.’ She didn’t want to hurt you. She wanted you to stop.”
“She used Juniper’s name,” I say, and the floor tilts. “He named her. He made her the whistle and the trap.”
Jonah has his fist against his mouth. “Alina was going to blow up the format,” he says, not accusing, just naming the weather.
The last page is the part that hurts worse because it is small and domestic and true.
“PS—Your draft folders were exposed for nine minutes last week. The cached version showed your apology notes. Whoever grabbed them can mimic your tone now. Fix your box permissions and update the security patch Jonah keeps postponing for latency.”
I feel the words like glass under my bare feet. “She knew about the leak,” I say, and I don’t look at him when I say the next part. “And she knew you hadn’t updated.”
He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t bluster. He leans the back of his head against the black curtain and shuts his eyes, and his breath shudders. “I wanted to keep the lag under a second,” he says. “I chose speed over—” He stops because the word is obvious and ugly.
“Safety,” I finish, and I’m not righteous; I’m complicit. I turned silence into a sell. I turned immediacy into a virtue that ate its own young.
I set the letter back exactly where it lived, then realize I’m wrong and pick it up again and slide it into the folder and tuck the folder under my jacket because I will not let this room eat it or stage it for a later audience. “We’re bagging it for Elena,” I say. “We’re not streaming a syllable.”
“Agreed,” he says, and relief in me fights disappointment at how quickly he agrees.
We search without touching more than our eyes need. A metronome sits on a shelf, old wood, wound tight, frozen at a speed that would make speech breathless and desperate. A whiteboard leans against the wall with faint ghosts of numbers wiped away. On the corkboard’s edge, I find a clipped article about a former network consultant getting hired and fired in the span of a budget cycle. Someone drew a tiny cherub in the margin, then X’d the eyes.
“He rehearsed here,” Jonah says. “With or without Alina. He rehearsed the way crowds feel.”
“And she rehearsed telling me the truth,” I say. “She wrote me a letter like a cue sheet.”
We back our way out, step careful over chalk Xs. The corridor feels louder, like the building has been swallowing our breath and wants to burp it back into the fluorescent light. I relock the door with the ring-tap code because I don’t know who I’m protecting from who.
In the van, the creek has risen another-inch-that-isn’t-an-inch, and the street reflects advertisement colors that don’t belong to the block. I’m aware of every camera I’m not turning on. The studio in my head wants a cold open: We found a room. The person in my ribs says: Shut up and call Elena.
“We should wait to send her the letter until we can hand it over,” Jonah says, reading my chest with the ease of someone who has mixed my voice enough times to predict my vowels.
“Agreed,” I say. I hold the folder like it might warm me. It doesn’t.
He puts the coin on the console, gentle. “We should also acknowledge the part where Alina figured out the draft leak before I fixed it.”
“We should,” I say, and my hands won’t stop. I drum the ring finger rhythm without a ring to blame. Two-three-five-four. It sounds like the wrong heart beating over the right chest.
He meets my eyes. He doesn’t look away. “I chose latency. I thought the live feeling would keep people with us while the Director tried to pull them away. I didn’t see how it opened the door to mimicry. That’s on me.”
The honest thing tightens my throat. The next honest thing chooses me. “And I chose spectacle,” I say. “I taught the crowd to listen for crescendos instead of contradictions. That’s on me.”
We sit in it. The van hums. The creek whispers. The factory breathes sugar into the dark like a persuasion.
—micro-hook— I open the folder again and scan the last paragraph to be sure I didn’t invent it. “If you can’t say it on air, say it to each other,” Alina wrote. “Start there.” Below it, a line in pen I don’t recognize, maybe written in the moment, maybe by a hand shaking: Locker? 318? The question mark looks like a fishhook through the paper. I press my fingertip to it and look up at Jonah.
“There’s one more place,” I say.
He nods, already pulling up a map of facilities with lockers like train stations and gyms. “You think she hid the comparison cut there?”
“Or he did,” I say, because hope and dread share a spine.
My phone buzzes with a Night Choir group DM I shouldn’t be reading. A new thread calls me a grifter with a ring-light. Another voice defends the early episodes where I let mothers cry without music. Both are telling a version of the truth. Both are useless right now.
I tuck the letter into my jacket and turn to Jonah. The question thuds between us like an unwelcome drumbeat I have to hit anyway. “When we get this into Elena’s hands,” I say, “are you ready to explain the patch delay on paper? Not to me. To her.”
He swallows. “Yes.”
“Good,” I say, and the word doesn’t feel good. It feels like a door I owe opening.
I fold the coordinates into memory, taste chalk still, count the ring-tap in my bones, and angle the van toward a promise written in a question mark. The creek kisses the tire and withdraws, daring me to decide what I flood next.