The alert hits like a door slammed inside my mouth. Brand Safety Notice: Campaigns Paused Pending Review. My ad dashboard washes red. The locket taps my sternum once like it wants out.
I don’t breathe right away. I listen. Far off, the lake mutters against the breakwater, low and lateral, that seiche-drag whine that makes sound bend around corners. Closer, my laptop fan scrapes like a bad edit. The house carries yesterday’s coffee and wet rope from the jacket I forgot to hang. My tongue tastes penny metal.
“Ruth,” I say to the empty room, then louder, “Ruth!” I don’t call her; I shout into the hall the way a kid calls a parent who can’t possibly be there.
My phone buzzes again—Sponsor A: temporary suspension—and then again—Sponsor B: request for comment on ‘exploitation’ clip. My hands shake enough to turn the scroll bar into a small river on my screen. The smear account’s thumbnail stares up at me: a freeze-frame with my mouth open mid word and eyes caught mid blink—ugly vowel weaponized again.
I hit play because I must hurt myself to understand. My voice fills the speakers—my voice but not my meaning—cut, crossfaded, plucked like a rotten tooth.
“—I decide what pain is worth airing—” me, spliced to “—grief is content—” me, spliced to laughter that isn’t mine. The clip ends with a splash of bell noise I recognize from my own room tone, cut to sound like applause.
I gag. I run to the sink and spit bile and coffee. The kitchen smells like percolated church coffee that’s sat too long on a hot plate; I never know whether that scent means community or warning. I rinse my mouth until the metal thins.
My phone vibrates on the counter. Ruth’s name. I swipe with a wet thumb.
“I’m here,” she says, air already on my side. “Talk to me from the top.”
“They cut the Q&A from the Harbor Barn live,” I say. I grip the edge of the counter and look at the refrigerator magnets so I won’t look at myself in the black window. “They lifted a draft I recorded later for the transcript—my worst phrasing, the one I flagged not for air—they fused it to laughter from that night by the bait shop. Sponsors are pausing. They wrote ‘grief is content’ in my mouth.”
“You did say the words ‘grief is content’ in a private editorial meeting,” she says, not to betray me but to immunize me. “You said, ‘If we treat grief as content we will fail Celia.’ Your cut saved your own ethics. They un-saved it.”
“This isn’t just the livestream,” I say. “They had the rough.” I dry my hand on my shirt and catch the locket chain; it clicks against my necklace clasp like a tiny bell clapper hitting home. “My rough lives on two drives and one passworded folder. Yours and Lydia’s copies are evidence-only. No one else has the cut where I workshop that sentence. Unless…”
“We’re not accusing the walls,” she says. “Not yet. What’s the ad network’s exact language?”
I pull the email and read. “Quote: ‘Temporary pause due to public controversy; please provide clarification statement addressing concerns of exploitation and editorial manipulation. We will review in seventy-two hours.’”
“Seventy-two hours of rumor is a calendar year,” she says. “Sit down. Open a doc. I’m driving over.”
“Don’t,” I say. “The roads are slush and men with good coats are counting the minutes I shake. I can do the first draft before your keys hit my sidewalk.”
“Then put your hands on home row,” she says, and I can hear her getting her coat anyway, zipper teeth promising backup. “We say what we measured, why we measured, what we won’t air, and why. You include chain-of-custody and the words ‘repeatable’ and ‘third-party lab.’ You do not use the word ‘sorry’ unless it’s, ‘Sorry, I won’t release private grief for your appetite.’”
“Copy,” I say, and the word steadies me. I carry the phone back to my studio and sit. The room smells like dust warmed by equipment and the ghost of lemon oil from the Harbor Barn. I put on nitrile gloves without thinking, ritual now—handling drafts like evidence.
I start typing.
Statement Draft v1
We will not air screams. We will air measurements.
“Too poetic,” Ruth says through the phone. “Lead with a fact.”
I backspace until the cursor is bare. “Okay. ‘I do not monetize grief. I test audio. On [date], a private rehearsal file was edited without permission and posted to misrepresent my editorial process.’”
“Good,” she says. “Then explain process. You always say process saves you.”
I write the words I wish I didn’t have to write, the ones that make my stomach slam the brakes. “I record myself saying every wrong line first. I say, ‘Don’t use this sentence.’ I cut the unsafe choices and keep the math. That practice file was stolen. The laughter was not mine. It was layered in.” I stop and listen to the room. The lake’s hum sneaks under the sill, wider than the window.
I add: “I welcome independent verification. My methods and measurements are posted here [link]. My lab report is posted here [link]. My raw field audio lives offline for witness safety.”
“Put the bell schedule in, too,” Ruth says. “People trust clocks even when they mistrust women.”
“On it.” I type: “We corroborated times using the parish bell log and NOAA lake-level data (seiche). Those documents are public.” My fingers pause above the keys. “I hate that I’m performing innocence.”
“You’re not,” she says. “You’re teaching. Let the liars climb a ruler.”
Micro-hook: A notification blooms across my screen mid-sentence—New upload from @SecondLieWatch—and my spine picks up a small, electric tremor. I don’t click. Ruth hears my breath hitch anyway.
“Don’t feed it,” she says. “Finish the draft. Then we call the ad rep so the pause doesn’t turn into a cancel. After that, we ice your inbox.”
“What about the leak?” I ask.
“We seed two unique harmless sentences into separate folders and see which one appears,” she says softly. “I learned that trick when I still wore a badge. One sentence says ‘bell rope fibers like splinters.’ The other says ‘bell rope hairs like hemp.’ If the smear account uses one, we know which copy they touched.”
“You scare me in the right direction,” I say. My throat loosens enough to swallow air that isn’t all metal.
I return to the draft. I add a block: Financial Disclosure—sponsors, sources of support, the percent of ad revenue pledged to a victims’ fund. I paste the clause where I promise sources veto power over their own names and voices. I hear my mother’s admonition somewhere in the bones of the house: no one likes a woman who itemizes her soul, but everyone trusts a receipt.
The phone buzzes again, different tone—the ad rep. I put Ruth on speaker and answer.
“Mara,” the rep says, bright plastic pity. “We’re seeing elevated chatter. We need to pause to protect brands while you ‘work through this.’ Can you give me one sentence to put in the dashboard?”
“Yes,” I say, and I can hear Ruth’s approval without seeing her. “Put: ‘Publisher disputes manipulative editing; comprehensive clarifying statement with third-party corroboration forthcoming within twenty-four hours.’”
A beat. Key clicks. “Thank you,” the rep says. “And, uh—off the record—I listened to your locket epilogue. My grandmother wore a St. Brigid medal. Not the same, I know, but—” She clears her throat back into business. “I’ll keep you posted.”
I hang up and breathe through the sudden ache behind my eyes. I don’t cry. I pick up the mic.
“Voice draft,” I say, red light on. “This is the sentence they cut: ‘If we treat grief as content, we will fail Celia.’ That sentence is my line. I stand on it. We will not air screams. We will air measurements. Here is today’s ruler.” I lay down a clean, slow version of the dock segment, stripped of poetry down to numbers and wood.
Ruth knocks once and lets herself in, snow shaking off her coat like dog water. She smells like cold and faint dog shampoo from her morning route, a detail I could live in if I let myself. She sits, leans her elbows on her knees, and listens to my read with her head tilted, one finger tapping the cadence into her cheek.
“Good,” she says when I stop. “Now write the post no lawyer can poke holes in and no swap-group admin can misinterpret without looking like they’re trying.”
I craft the thread, point by point. Claim: I ‘decide what pain is worth airing.’ Fact: I consult with families first; I have declined multiple high-traffic saleable details at their request. Claim: I ‘called grief content.’ Fact: Full rehearsal line and context attached; I speak wrong aloud to cut the wrong from the final. Claim: Laughter is mine. Fact: Spectrogram attached; waveform mismatch; laughter sourced to a bait-shop clip unrelated to the Q&A. I attach a screenshot of the spectrogram where the copy-pasted laughter shows its telltale square edges like a badly glued picture in a yearbook.
Ruth points to the last bullet. “Say ‘I do not name the editor, but I ask them to stop before a court asks for them.’”
“That’s a threat,” I say.
“That’s a courtesy,” she replies. “Threats are what they do in parking lots with folded church bulletins.”
I add: Open Request: “To whoever posted my rehearsal: Please stop. You are risking witnesses. If you believe I erred, my door is open. Come argue with me on mic with the ruler between us.”
My phone pings so rapidly it vibrates across the desk, a caught fish. DMs, emails, comment pings. Then a name I love reading, a listener from the first season who transcribed episodes when I couldn’t afford to: @TapeHeadsJess.
I open her message.
I pulled the original Q&A from the library stream. Here’s the full transcript with timecodes. Posting now with a thread about editorial practice. Don’t engage; we got it. A second message follows with a Google Doc and a zipped folder. The Doc is color-coded—green for my questions, blue for audience, gray for stage manager interjections I’d forgotten.
Ruth reads over my shoulder. “Angels don’t need wings,” she says. “They need highlighters.”
I laugh, an ugly bark that surprises both of us, and it knocks a pebble of shame loose. I reply to Jess with a heart and a thank you and then throw my phone into Do Not Disturb because my bones twitch with the urge to scroll, and I refuse to feed that ache.
More messages arrive anyway—an old choir girl’s username I recognize, a dockhand’s cousin, the sexton’s niece. People I’ve only ever known as waveforms send me PDFs of minutes, screenshots of swap-group deletions, and a short video where someone points at the smear clip’s waveform and lays my phrase “we will fail Celia” under it in perfect sync. The mismatched room tone is unmistakable; the smear used the rehearsal file with my cough at 01:12, a cough I cut and never published. The proof tastes like relief and rust.
“That cough is in two places,” I say slowly. “My passworded folder and the backup I left at the Annex for the day the studio window turned into a bell clapper. I trust you.” I look at Ruth. “I trust Lydia’s caseworker. I trust the lab.”
Ruth doesn’t blink, which is how she gives you the truth you asked for. “And you share your roughs with your volunteer editor when you’re up against a hospital night,” she says. “We ask kindly first. Then we audit access logs.”
“I hate that I built a door and forgot to count the keys,” I say.
“Count them now,” she says. “And while you count, let your listeners do the fight you’re not allowed to do right now.”
Micro-hook: The house shivers, a pressure change that has nothing to do with the furnace. A seiche roll slaps the breakwater and the sound arrives sideways, making my mic arm hum. Sound in this town never stays where you put it.
I post the statement. I link the docs. I pin Jess’s transcript thread above mine and thank her, publicly, first. I send the ad rep the materials and a list of sponsors who stayed when others paused, including the small local shop that fixes tape decks for people who think better with whirring wheels. I turn to Ruth.
“Do I record an emergency episode?” I ask. “Or do I starve the fire?”
“You record a five-minute bulletin,” she says. “Clean, numbered, boring. You let the community do the human. You be the ruler.”
I hit record again. “Five-Minute Bulletin,” I announce to the red light. “Item one: An edited rehearsal file was posted out of context. Item two: Sponsors paused; we provided evidence. Item three: Methods and logs are public. Item four: If you’re new here, welcome; here’s why we measure and what we don’t air. Item five: To those rallying with transcripts—thank you. You bought me time to measure again.”
I stop, save, and export. I feel the shame flare—old, trained, female—then fade under the weight of work queued like boats at a lock waiting for green.
The inbox slows to something human. A dozen listeners attach their own spectrograms. A high school metals teacher I haven’t met sends a note: “Your ruler matters. Keep it out.” The bell tower’s silhouette darkens in the window as a cloud eats what’s left of the day. My house smells like coffee again; I pour a fresh cup with hands that only shake a little.
Ruth takes hers black, grimacing, then says lightly, “So. Which harmless sentence lives in which folder?”
“Hemp versus splinters,” I say. “I’ll seed both. We watch.”
We sit in the fading blue, listening to a town argue about me on screens and porches. Brass and breath and electricity share the room. Wealth’s varnish is everywhere—plaques, bells, a ribbon that used to mean good family—but it can’t polish math.
My laptop pings once more. An email slides into view from a name that shouldn’t have my address, a Marina Club functionary with a subject line that tastes like someone else’s breath: “Partnership Opportunity: Festival Stage Appearance.” The first line previews in the pane: “We can help reframe your story.”
I don’t open it. I look at Ruth instead and ask the question I already know we will have to measure with more than a ruler: if the cut came from my rough, who put their hands on my bell rope?