Elena controls the alley like she’s fitting a lid on a pot. She plants an officer at the mouth, nods once to me, twice to Jonah, and lets the street noise fall a register. The rain softens into a hiss against brick. Wet paper clings to the heel of my boot; I scrape it on the curb and think about all the words that live under doors.
“No one crosses the threshold,” she says. “Not even fingers.”
“I brought the tongs,” Jonah answers, and produces the thrift-store salad tongs we keep in the van because so much of this work asks for reach without touch. He offers them like a flower under rain.
Elena eyes the plastic corner peeking from under the stage door—the glint that hooked me. “Okay,” she says. “Slide it out. Slowly. I’ll bag it.”
I hold the van’s umbrella at a slant to keep the drop zone dry. The alley smells like wet rope, sour dust, and something sweet from the factory that won’t leave the back of my throat. The creek’s damp breath slips up the block and cools my shins. I taste copper when I swallow.
Jonah crouches. His jeans wick water, then surrender to it. He slides the tongs under the door and lifts, gentle, like he’s coaxing a turtle from a storm drain. The envelope skates out on a thin layer of grit—clear plastic with a pressure seal, the kind sailors trust and theater kids steal for props.
“Stop there,” Elena says. She kneels, gloves on, and pinches the edge with tweezers. “Photo first.”
I angle my phone. She gives me the look—the one that says you’re here as witness, not director. I lower it, then lift the van’s little GoPro instead and send the feed to her phone. She sighs at me, but she lets it ride.
She pops the seal, and the smell hits first: old paper, dry and faintly mildewed, like a library that forgot a window open. She slides a single page into a clear evidence sleeve. The paper is thick, creamy, its edges deckled on purpose. Theatre-kid money.
“What am I looking at?” Elena asks, though she already knows it’s a page and that pages carry words and words carry weight.
“Words,” Jonah says, then catches himself. “Sorry. Linemarked?”
Elena tips the sleeve so the alley light catches black ink. A centered title reads: DRESS REHEARSAL. Beneath, a character list—CAST: DIRECTOR (unseen), HOST (MARA KEENE), CHOIR (YOU). Then dialogue in courier, each block spaced like actors waiting for cues. Stage directions sit in brackets. Each bracket feels like a hand.
“He’s writing a play,” I say. My voice comes out level, but heat gathers under my thumb where the copper coin burns a circle into my pocket. “He’s writing my play.”
Elena holds the page at arm’s length and reads a line out loud; her tone is all metal. “[HOST enters without makeup. HOST speaks through glass to the CHOIR, who respond with hands and glare.]”
Jonah winces. “That’s our window. He watched from outside.”
“He watched since the beginning,” I say, because the next line stabs that point home. It’s my line. It’s the line I used on the first night of the show. HOST: ‘We’re live, we’re listening, and we’re not here to be gentle.’ I hear my early bravado now and it makes my stomach contract.
Elena looks up. “He quotes you often?”
“He quotes me better than I quote me,” I say. “And he knows which quotes make fire.”
Micro-hook: I wanted a clue; I got a script with my name on it.
“Hold still,” Jonah says. He pulls a UV penlight from his backpack—the little forensic toy we used once to check hotel sheets and decided never to use again. “You’ll want a watermark check.”
Elena tilts the sleeve. Jonah sweeps the beam. The page glows clean, then a ghost rises—a faint oval that resolves into a cherub mask, smiling too hard, cheeks plump, eyeholes blank. The watermark floats dead center like a drowned face under ice.
“That logo wasn’t on the theater,” Elena says, voice low.
“It was on pins,” I answer. “Bootlegs. Someone passed them out at Night Choir pop-ups after the Orpheum arc last year. I thought it was fan art.”
“He turned your fandom into a costume department,” Jonah says, mouth twisting.
Elena angles the light again. The cherub mask swims in and out. “Watermark says currency,” she says. “He’s paying in attention. He wants to mint it.”
I read the next bracket. [HOST resists. HOST accepts. HOST resists again.] He bullet-points my arc like he’s outlining a three-act apology. Under it, DIRECTOR: ‘Repeat after me: We solve when we perform restraint.’
“He knows the pledge,” I say.
“He wrote his own pledge,” Elena counters. “He wants to weaponize your restraint too.”
My palms sweat inside invisible gloves. “Let me read the rest. Fast.”
“You can read while I bag,” she says, and tilts the sleeve toward me while her other hand reaches for a larger evidence envelope.
The dialogue shifts into precise cues, all current: [HOST steps on the van’s metal rung. HOST says ‘evidence breathes.’ CHOIR disperses in pairs.] He was in the balcony feed or across the street; he framed me like a DP.
“He’s producing me,” I say, because naming it is the only way to keep from being used by it. “He’s turning my caution into choreography.”
Jonah’s jaw tightens. “Keep going.”
The next block is a memory. DIRECTOR: ‘Episode One: you said names are power and silence is a tool. You used both. Trade them back to me.’ Then [HOST plays the clip with the lake, cuts laughter, holds breath until download spikes.]
My skin chills under my hoodie. “Episode one was the quarry girl,” I say. “But I started that episode with the lake house tape. I wanted a human anchor.”
“So did he,” Jonah says, eyes on me, not the page. “He anchored you.”
Elena slides the page fully into the larger bag and seals it with a long, sad sigh from the adhesive. “Enough,” she says. “You’ve read. Now you remember.”
“I want thirty more seconds,” I say, and she lets me have ten. I scan the bottom third.
Bulleted beats: [HOST to call DETECTIVE for dumplings—no email.] He knows our détente. [HOST to hold PA until the CHOIR thins.] He knows our tactics like he learned them in rehearsal.
Then the final line, centered, bolded, sick with certainty: DIRECTOR: ‘Take a bow where it began.’
I look up and the alley narrows, the walls pressing in like a bad overture. The creek drafts cooler air into my lungs. I imagine my mother’s kitchen radio hissing late-night talk, my sister and me recording on a toy mic at the lake house dock, the water slapping pilings in small applause. That tape turned me on—the idea that stories could live in mouths and machines. He knows that because I told everyone. That’s on me.
“You okay?” Jonah asks, voice stripped of bravado.
“Define okay,” I say, and force my shoulders down. “He’s not just taunting. He’s scheduling me.”
Elena nods at the sealed bag. “He’s also giving me paper I can use,” she says. “Watermark, fibers, ink. We pull prints off the envelope if he slipped. We canvas print shops for custom watermarks. We look for bulk orders of these sleeves.”
“He’ll have bought them in cash,” I say, because hope lives next to experience and sometimes they share cigarettes.
“Sometimes people who pretend to be careful love leaving their signature,” Elena says. She slides the bag into a hard case. “Either way, this is mine now.”
“Let me lock it in my head,” I say. “Please.”
She gives me the page through plastic, the way a zookeeper might let you touch a lion’s mane through a fence. I read each line again and say them in my head with full stops that punch the words into memory: Dress Rehearsal. Cast. Host enters without makeup. We’re live. Not here to be gentle. Resist. Accept. Resist again. Evidence breathes. Dumplings. PA. Take a bow where it began.
I close my eyes. I say the last line again. I tuck it where old jingles go so it can’t escape.
“Done,” I say.
Elena slides the bag away. “Good,” she says. “Because you won’t see it again until discovery.”
Jonah shakes rain from his curls and tracks a fingertip along the stage door’s bottom seam. “He must have used a feeler to push it under,” he murmurs. “Tape on the edge so it wouldn’t snag.”
“Do not touch that door,” Elena says, and Jonah pops his hands up like a magician finishing a trick.
The alley mouth stirs; a few stragglers from the Night Choir drift past, pins hidden now, phones down, voices low with gossip that pretends to be prayer. The city smells like sugar again, and under it, wet plaster—the scent of saints when you break them.
“What’s your move,” Elena asks me, not unkind. “Not the one for the mic. The one for the case.”
“I share everything off-mic,” I say. “I cut the public feed. I follow your lead.”
“And the line about the bow,” she presses.
I rub the coin in my pocket until the edge bites. “That line points to my lake house.”
Jonah’s head snaps. “No.”
“Yes,” I say, because truth doesn’t care about comfort. “Where it began is the dock where I recorded my first story—the one I played over the quarry girl. He listened to that cadence and built a script around my first breath.”
Elena watches my face and not my hands. “If it’s upstate, I will coordinate with the county,” she says. “You will not go first.”
“I won’t livestream,” I say.
“That’s not the boundary,” she says, and I flinch because she’s right. “You will not go first.”
“You going to handcuff me to the board?” I ask.
“If I have to,” she says. “But let’s start with cooperation.”
Jonah exhales hard through his nose. “We can pre-record a safety statement,” he offers. “We can keep the Choir busy with a quiet episode—no locations, just the pledge again and a resource list.”
I nod. “We’ll do that tonight.”
Micro-hook: I know where he wants me next; the question is whether walking there saves Alina or feeds him.
Elena tucks the case under her arm and steps back into the light at the alley mouth. “I’ll put a patrol car by the theater overnight,” she says. “I’ll text the county about the lake. Don’t start your engines until I say.”
“Dumplings?” I ask, because I need something human between now and whatever “where it began” asks of me.
“You can door-dash your conscience,” she says. “I’ll see you at the precinct at ten.”
She leaves me with the drip and the mask’s faint grin burned under my eyelids. Jonah and I climb into the van. The cabin smells like peppermint gum and rain, fan blowing a humming line that makes me think of metronomes.
“You’re thinking about the dock,” he says.
“I’m thinking about the dock,” I say. “And about my sister.”
He looks at my hands on the wheel. “We can loop Tessa in before anything.”
“I have to,” I say. “He used our childhood as a cue. That’s not strategy; that’s trespass.”
I open my phone. Messages crowd the lock screen—mods asking for guidance, sponsors asking for brand safety, the Night Choir asking for a story they can carry to bed. I ignore them and open my family thread. You up? I type to Tessa. Need to talk about the lake.
I don’t hit send. I stare at the word lake until the letters rotate into nonsense. I slide the phone into the cup holder and rest my forehead on the wheel for a beat.
“We keep him from writing the next scene,” Jonah says, soft.
“No,” I answer, lifting my head. “We write it with Elena.”
The van’s roof drums in a new burst of rain. The creek’s mirror on the street fractures and remakes itself. I put the van in drive and pull away from the theater, from the cherub watermark that still glows in my mind’s UV.
My phone buzzes, single haptic thud—unknown number. I answer on speaker. No voice, just a metronome click, steady, patient.
Then a whisper, shaped like a stage direction and my name: “Curtain up at the dock, Mara. Let the water applaud.”
The line dies. The click lives in my ear anyway.
I do not turn the van around. I grip the wheel until the coin in my pocket digs a crescent into my palm and say to the empty cabin, to Elena’s absence, to Alina’s silence: “Not your stage. Not this time.”
The dock waits whether I walk toward it or not, and the applause in the dark water doesn’t care who bows.