I picked the pier because the air here told the truth—salt, diesel, caramel steam from the early carts—and because fog from the cliff-back squeezed into downtown like a hand closing. Neon smudged its own edges. People kept their voices low unless there was a camera. Larkspur’s social compact: don’t make a scene unless it pays. Theo arrived with his hoodie up and a paper cup he didn’t drink from.
“Thanks for meeting,” he said, eyes scanning the pop-up row like trolls might slide out of a QR mural.
“You said you had receipts,” I said. “Receipts beat rumors.”
He thumbed his phone awake. “I do. But—hear this first.” He handed me one earbud. The rubber felt cold from the fog. He pressed play.
Scene Beat 1 — Theo plays a voice note: Lyla crying, apologizing to fans.
Lyla’s voice filled the bud in a whisper that broke hollow in the middle. “Hey hive, I—hi—um. I’m okay, I’m okay, I promise. I just—” Her breath hitched; fabric rasped like she’d wiped her face with her sleeve. “I need, like, a day? Or two? I’ll make it up to you. You give me so much. I don’t want to waste it. I’m sorry.”
She tried to laugh then, my sister’s party trick for turning pain into confetti. The sound failed, a torn streamer in wind.
I kept my jaw still. The pier boards creaked; a gull stepped sideways like it didn’t trust gravity. In the earbud, Lyla whispered, “I owe you,” and the note ended.
Theo watched my face like he expected me to break. I didn’t. I pulled the bud out and set it carefully on the lid of his cup. “When?” I asked.
“Two months before the countdown,” he said. “She deleted it before posting. She sent it to me instead. Said she needed to practice brakes.”
“And?”
“She never used them,” he said. “He took the pedals.”
The ring lights from a juice stall blinked warm ozone across the wet planks. I tasted metal, like the word owes had a copper core. “Show me the rest.”
He scrolled. “DMs,” he said. “From Cass’s studio account. Some are with her. Some with me, because I told him she needed a break.”
We leaned over the screen. The fog made a tent around us.
Cass (studio): Your care is currency. Don’t hoard it. Fans heal by participating.
Theo: She’s exhausted.
Cass (studio): Exhaustion is proof of devotion. We can convert it. Add a countdown; teach them to hold her up.
Theo: She needs off-camera time.
Cass (studio): No such thing during a rescue arc. Let them carry her. They want to. They owe it to her joy.
He kept scrolling—encouragements disguised as empathy, empathy weaponized into asks. Cass had a talent for replacing verbs: help for pay, care for convert, rescue for retain. My skin prickled, the way it does near a ring light that’s plugged in but off. Energy waiting for a finger.
“He’s grooming obligation,” I said. My voice carried no farther than the coffee steam.
“He called it ‘narrative sovereignty’ when he pitched me,” Theo said. He hunched his shoulders as if shrugging off a draft. “I thought he was a creep. Then I watched my feed fill with ‘are you with her or against her’ takes, and I wondered if I was the creep for wanting her to rest.”
“You dated her,” I said. I kept judgment on a leash. “You loved her.”
“I still do,” he said, like that was an embarrassing admission, like love was contraband in a retail zone.
A trolley rolled past, its wheels chattering like teeth. Neon honeycomb shelves winked from a homewares pop-up, the pattern so woven into the city I sometimes forgot it had started as a jar on our fridge. Not marketing. A pact.
“There’s more,” he said. He pulled a manila folder from his hoodie pocket—who still prints?—and handed it to me, his fingers shaking just enough to make the edges flutter. “He made me sign a thing. And he tried to add me to another.”
The paper smelled like toner and old citrus. I flipped it open.
Scene Beat 2 — A “persona transfer” draft includes Theo’s NDA.
The first page wore honeycomb faint as a watermark. Rainer Narrative Studio—Temporary Persona Transfer (Draft). The clause language stung my eyes—words I’d met in the subpoenaed agreement, now refitted for an ex-boyfriend. I scanned down:
The Participant agrees to hold and maintain the Persona defined herein as a steward, proxy, or devotional extension…
A stapled addendum: Non-Disclosure and Non-Disparagement—Theo [REDACTED], integrated into the transfer as Exhibit B. He wasn’t just gagged; he was a component. A screw inside the machine.
I swallowed. My tongue tasted bitter, like over-pulled espresso. “He tried to fold you into her contract.”
“He said it would ‘stabilize the narrative’ if I committed not to contradict the arc,” Theo said. “He offered money I didn’t take. Then he offered access. He said I could be near her again. The word near did a number on me.”
“But you signed the NDA,” I said, tapping the addendum.
“I signed the first one months ago,” he said. “When we broke up, his studio sent it as a ‘courtesy’ so I wouldn’t ‘accidentally harm her opportunities.’ I didn’t know about the transfer until later.”
He watched my hands. I forced them to stay flat on the paper. The clause under my left palm read: The Participant acknowledges that audiences’ needs may supersede personal preferences during designated narrative windows. My body went hot and then cold, like stepping through fog into neon.
“This is coercive control in a cardigan,” I said.
He snorted, then pressed a fist to his mouth so the sound didn’t escape. The pier amplified drama; we fed it nothing.
He pointed at an email header paperclipped to the packet. The subject line reused the deck’s vocabulary: Participatory Rescue: Devotional Extensions. My chest tightened at the copy-paste from Cass’s slides to an email meant to corral an ex. The sender block wore the sponsor’s domain too, CC’d in like confirmation. The brand that wanted rescue adjacency had fingerprints here, faint but oily.
“He preyed on her obligation,” I said, hearing my voice level out into the boring that saves lives. “He framed it as stewardship. He built clauses to keep everyone in orbit.”
Theo nodded so hard his hood slipped. His hair stuck up in damp clumps, and he didn’t fix it, which told me he was past vanity and into fear. “She told me she wanted out,” he said. “But she said she ‘owed the hive.’ Those were her words. She said, ‘They paid for my light. I can’t turn it off and leave them in the dark.’”
The metal railing under my hand sweated brine. My reflection in the kiosk glass behind him wore hex shadows. I tried not to memorize the voice note’s breath-catches and failed.
“I need you to understand something,” he said. He held the folder the way people hold a child when cars are loud—close, even if it doesn’t help. “She’s brilliant. She’s stubborn. She believes accountability matters. If you try to ‘save’ her like she’s glass, she’ll cut you for it. And she’ll be right.”
“I know,” I said. I did. But knowing didn’t protect me from the tug-of-war between my chest and my head.
The pop-up two stalls down sprayed a mist of eco-clean scent over a display. A sponsor’s banner curled at the edges where fog had chewed the adhesive. I breathed it in and tasted marketing on my molars.
“What else do you need?” he asked.
Micro-hook: The folder was heavy; the heavier thing was choosing how to carry it without turning my sister into cargo.
“Where did he pitch you?” I asked. “And how did he talk about me?”
Theo flushed. “At the farmhouse,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “In the annex—the white room with the blackout curtains. He called you a ‘stabilizer with hero fantasies.’ He said you’d be useful if you could ‘accept a managed truth.’”
My laugh tasted like tin. “Managed truth is a lie with a haircut,” I said.
“He also said,” Theo added, lower, “that if you tried to blow up the finale, he’d make you the story. He already has a titled sequence: ‘Sister’s Rage.’”
The fog thickened at the edges, like the cliffs were sending fresh battalions. I pictured captions swallowing that title whole. We had a plan for boring; we would need a plan for bait.
“One more file,” he said. He pulled up a screen recording. The handler’s account voice messaged him: Brother energy sells. If you can model release, we can get her back to gratitude faster. The phrase model release in a human context made my vision go white for a blink. Consent as paperwork, not personhood.
I lowered the phone. “I need chain-of-custody clean,” I said. “Email originals, not screenshots. Forward from your provider with headers intact. I’ll log the handoff to Sloane.”
Theo nodded and began forwarding, thumbs steady now that there was a task that looked like salvation. I texted Sloane Meeting ex. Receipts include NDA + persona transfer draft w/ sponsor cc. Voice note: Lyla apologizing to fans for needing rest. Hand-off incoming. She pinged back Bring originals; no commentary. Also: breathe.
Theo slid the manila back to me. “I kept one copy,” he said. “You get the rest.”
“You understand you might be violating your NDA,” I said.
“I understand I signed something that asked me to love her by abandoning her,” he said. “I’d like to try the opposite.”
I tucked the folder under my arm. The cardboard was damp on the bottom edge where it had kissed the pier. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
He shrugged like it hurt. “There’s a cost to leaving someone who’s learned to speak in public apologies,” he said. “You either become the villain or the audience. I didn’t want either.”
“You chose witness,” I said.
“I chose accomplice to her exit,” he said, and his mouth quirked like he knew how that sounded and didn’t care.
I looked out at the water where the fog made a gray room with no corners. “Witness is harder,” I said. “It asks you to watch without writing the ending.”
Theo shifted from foot to foot. “Can I ask you something?”
“Ask.”
Scene Beat 3 — Theo begs Mara to protect Lyla from herself.
He exhaled like ripping tape. “Protect her from herself,” he said. “She’s going to try to give herself away to end this clean. She’ll offer to make a speech that absolves the hive. She’ll ask the audience not to blame anyone. She’ll apologize for making them feel worried. Don’t let her do that. That apology is a faucet he can turn forever.”
The sentence landed like a weight on my sternum. I rolled my shoulders against it. The honeycomb kiosk behind him reflected both of us in fractured hexes: me with sharp corners, him with blurred ones. “If I stop her, I risk treating her like a child,” I said. “If I don’t, I help him harvest her guilt.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m asking you and not the internet. You know her. You know the jar wasn’t branding. It was a rule.”
The jar. The clink. The fine we paid for interrupting, for cruelty, for breaking the hive. I pictured it on our childhood counter, coins dull with flour.
“I will protect her boundaries,” I said. “Not her brand.”
He closed his eyes, just for a second, and I realized he’d been holding them open on purpose to prevent tears from pooling. When he opened them, a ring of red mapped the effort. “Thank you,” he said. “Also—there’s a junior mod in your server who—never mind.”
“Say it,” I said. My voice didn’t lift. It grounded.
“They’re forwarding pins,” he said. “Not for money. For status. To a reactor who thinks you’re the devil. I can’t prove who, but the pattern matches a handle I know from a writing discord.”
A gull screamed like news. The pop-up row lit its sign cycles; the QR mural across from us shifted to a new weekly grid. The neon buzz tasted electrical on the tongue.
“We’ll check logs,” I said. “We’ll do it quiet.”
Theo nodded. “Quiet’s rare,” he said.
“We’re building a culture of boring,” I said. “You’re invited.”
He huffed a laugh and pulled up his hood. “Protect her from herself,” he repeated, softer. “And from anyone who wants to volunteer her guilt.”
“I hear you,” I said.
He tapped the phone, and the voice note marker jumped back to zero like tears hadn’t lived in it. We stood without speaking while a vendor wheeled a chrome mixer from a container shop; its polished bowl threw a smear of our reflection across the planks. I thought about how mirrors keep secrets until you point a camera at them and call it care.
“I have to go,” he said. “He watches who I meet.”
I didn’t ask how he knew that. In this city, paranoia was just situational awareness with better posture.
He walked away into the fog. I watched his shape dissolve until all that remained was the sound of his sneakers and the smell of eco-clean soap from the sponsor booth. My phone ghost-clicked even though the screen was dark. I held it anyway.
I sent Sloane a final text: Forwarded originals. Physical docs en route. New risk: potential junior mod leak. I didn’t send Nessa that last part yet. I didn’t want to accuse a hive member without the jar open.
The harbor breathed. Down the row, the honeycomb shelves glowed like cells in a living thing—haven or hive, sweetness or trap. I pressed my fingers to the manila’s damp edge until the paper buckled and asked the only question that made sense to bring to the next hour: when I stand between Lyla and the apology he wants, can I keep her whole without taking her voice, or will my protection become one more script he uses to sell our care back to us?