I don’t mute him. I let him in.
The old audio opens on my phone like a drawer I kept locked and labeled later. The waveform blooms with the harsh top-ends of a tiled kitchen and a cheap ceiling fan that made a narrow click every third rotation. The first word is mine—too loud, too sure. I grip the mic, not to control the volume, but to keep from grabbing the wheel.
“Play it,” I tell the river. “No edits.”
Gray’s upload rides in on elevator screens and blimp tickers and the whispering ribbons that hang above food hall counters where etiquette forbids filming at communal tables yet everyone liveblogs from the edges. The halo icon spins in the corner, two rings that promise purity while hiding capture. He’s banking on the old machine: shock first, frame later, rinse with pity.
“I won’t look away,” I say, and I don’t.
Mom’s voice slides in soft and raw. “You can put the recorders down, Mira.”
“I’m trying to make something honest,” the younger me says. I wince at the s snapped hard between teeth. “If I don’t get it now, it’s gone.”
“I am here,” Mom answers, the sentence all sheet and cotton, tired and stubborn. “I’m not a scene.”
Jonas drives, knuckles pale on the wheel, eyes pinging mirrors for drones. Sera cradles Leo’s head against her shoulder and thumbs the bite-marks of his wristband, not pulling yet. Fog ribbons through the cracked window and gives us the marina’s salt like a benediction and a dare.
“This is a decade old,” I tell the chat, though thousands already typed the metadata we saw flash. “Kitchen mic. Tuesday night. Thunder somewhere outside like a drum under the sink.”
“Mira, stop,” younger me says in the clip. Footsteps. A chair leg squeals against linoleum. The ceiling fan clicks. “You need to take the meds on schedule or I can’t do this.”
Mom: “I am more than a schedule.”
There it is—the part I hate, the line I gave him for free by being a person. “Then be more,” I snap on the tape, a cruelty that slides off my tongue like a blade I sharpened for righteousness. I was all wrists and proofs then. I can hear it; you can hear it.
I flinch, but I keep my eyes on the little moving line and let it cut me clean.
The chat spits and steadies, a whitewater of strangers who want to love me or leave me. I see “monster frame earned” twins with “I’ve said worse” and “my mother and I had that fight too”. Elevator screens in high-rises whisper headlines between floors: VALe’s Vile Tape? Context Coming. The city smells of salt, disinfectant, and hot sugar; it always does when stories burn.
“Breathe with me,” I tell the river, and I hear my mother’s ceiling fan. “We’re listening to me at my worst.”
The clip lunges into the part Gray wants: my voice breaking into a hiss the way newscasters teach you never to let happen. “Stop editing yourself,” I shout. “Give me the truth.”
Mom: “The truth is I am hurting and I don’t want a microphone.”
I hear a refrigerator click and a car pass and my neighbor’s child drop a toy upstairs, a hollow thud that once interrupted my edit with fury and now saves me; because it proves the date and the walls and the life around the words. Pattern concordance could never hold all this.
“Pause,” I tell the river, and I freeze the waveform where my breath shoved the meter into orange. “Gray cut the next minute when he sold you this clip on your elevator screens. I won’t.”
I tap play.
The apology arrives like rain. It’s mine. My voice loses its spines and finds the floor. “I’m sorry,” I say on the tape, the words undramatic and plain. “I framed you to make my fear legible. I’m scared of losing you and thought proof could fix it.”
Chair legs move again. Fabric rustles: Mom stands. “You don’t have to be the archive,” she says, less saint and more person, breath catching on the syllable like her body knew the script was too tidy and corrected it. “You can be my kid.”
“I’m sorry,” younger me says again, and the tape holds two seconds of nothing—no mouth, no shuffle, just air. The kind of silence that makes a kitchen honest.
I return to the present and the fog hits sweet and wet on my tongue. A slow relief starts to ghost my elbows and I don’t let it relax me. I keep my hands working. I slide the apology to the center of the frame and enlarge the timecode so anyone ripping it later will have to carry the minute Gray clipped off. I add the tiniest lower-third: Recorded 10 years ago • Played unedited.
“I’m the woman who said those words,” I tell the river, “and the woman who apologized, and the woman who made soup after and sat on a linoleum floor and listened to a ceiling fan click until thunder softened the pain.”
The chat stutters, then pours: “we’ve been there” “I told my dad worse at the hospice” “I said be more to my sister & I hate it every day” “thank you for keeping the apology”.
“Who published it?” I ask out loud, so I don’t choke on gratitude. “Dr. Lucien Gray. He weaponized a private fight to sell a purity rating.”
I put his name on the screen in a neutral font. No horns. No devil. Just a line of text next to the halo icon that stamps receipts, contracts, hospital bracelets, all the places we say yes with a pen and then lose the right to choose later. Families in this city trade reputation scores like weather reports, with code words for scan outcomes: green for employable, red for volatile, amber for “needs work.” My mother lived and died under those colors.
Jonas clears his throat. “Mira,” he says so I know he’s with me, “you’re trending in the food halls. Etiquette took the night off. People are watching on mute while pretending to wait for noodles.”
Sera squeezes my forearm from the back seat. “Finish it,” she whispers, meaning the frame, the wound, the tendency to explain until explanation becomes erasure.
“Okay,” I tell them and myself and Mom like she can hear from wherever the linen smell ended up. “Here’s the rest.”
I pull up the day’s receipts from stores that sell comfort in sachets. The halo icon glows on the corner like a tiny brand. “Purity,” I say softly, “while hiding capture.”
Gray’s counter-strike keeps flashing. His voice edges into feeds with that velvety concern that hired him long before science did. “We must understand difficult families,” he says from some studio with hands folded like a prayer he outsourced. “Sometimes kindness demands guidance.”
“People need to be guided,” he told us earlier when the chair rolled on stage. I replay that sentence next to the kitchen apology so viewers can watch the belief system and the profit motive shake hands over my mother’s linoleum.
“Say the storm words,” Leo murmurs from the back seat, not the three we share with sponsors listening for them but the family ones Mom used before thunder. I don’t say them back because some things remain ours, but I take his hand over the seat and he uses that grip to climb another inch out of the fog in his head.
Micro-hook rides my throat; I choose it. “Here’s what I know,” I say to the river. “To be believed, I submitted to the machine that erases me, and it gave me green. Then it sold the red leak to keep me in frame. Healing demands remembering, but the market sells forgetting as cure. Tonight, someone tried to sell you my forgetting.”
I play the apology again. Not to loop shame. To normalize the second half of the fight.
The chat answers like surf hitting a jetty. “We’ve been there.” “I told my mother to take her meds too.” “I filmed my brother and he said stop. I stopped. I’m sorry.” A user tag I recognize from months ago writes, “I withdrew consent at Curalis and they wouldn’t let me. I’m crying on a bus.”
“Breathe with me,” I say again, and I count them in—four in, four out—and the car keeps moving through the wind tunnel that funnels fog toward the marina, scrubbing drone eyes to a smear. News blimps reroute; gossip stalls where the gusts make it hard to hear. Elevator screens in glass towers cycle from Gray’s clip to the “technical difficulties” slate they never cleared because the blackout was supposed to end the story.
My phone vibrates: a DM from a nurse. I know the chair. Not therapy. The words are in the software. Another from an AV tech. Lab 7 used “authorized benevolence” in internal docs. Got files.
“The public momentum shifted,” Jonas says, reading comments as he threads the car into fog so thick the road becomes sound. “They’re telling us where to dig.”
I nod into the night and make a new box on the stream: What You Can Do. “If you’ve said things you regret in care,” I say, “say the apology out loud tonight. Text someone you trust. If you signed a reframing clause, request a copy. If your elevator screen just pushed Gray’s clip, ask the building to show the apology too.”
Sera laughs once, surprised, the sound like an anchor cutting a rope. “The food hall will put it between dumpling specials.”
“Let it,” I say. “Let truth smell like frying batter and salt and bad lemon. We live here.”
I pivot the stream to the kitchen photo Gray used for the thumbnail. Mom’s thrift-store curtain in the background. The chipped mug. The corner of a paper grocery receipt with the halo rings tucked in the logo like they belonged to flour and eggs. I zoom until the rings pixelate and break.
“Lucien,” I address him like he’s on the other end of the microphone, because part of me believes he always is. “You taught a city to associate pain with purity and then asked us to buy absolution by subscription. You think my worst moment will lock the monster frame back into place. Watch.”
I stop. I put the mic down for one beat and let the wind whistle over the car hood and the distant drones power-shift their little rotors. Then I pick the mic up again, clean, and land where I choose.
“I am not a monster,” I say. “I am a daughter who said a cruel thing and then washed the bowls and rubbed her mother’s temples while the storm rolled in. I am a sister who forged a letter to get a brother out. I am a person who will not let you edit apology out of grief.”
The chat answers with a wall of “we’ve been there.” Old men. Teenagers. A midwife on a night shift. A grocery clerk whose store prints halo rings on receipts. A girl in a tower whose elevator whispers headlines at 2 a.m. They braid my shame into something that doesn’t dissolve, and it doesn’t absolve me either; it contextualizes.
“What now?” Jonas asks, eyes flicking to me and back to fog. His voice carries salt.
“Now we show what bought that clip,” I say, and I cue up a PDF my lawyer obtained through a leak shaped like a conscience. The filename carries the words settlement and authorized benevolence and a company name Gray used before he found a better font.
“This is next,” I tell the river, my thumb hovering over publish the way I once hovered over the kitchen stop button and chose not to press it. “If you’re here because of that tape, stay. If you’re here because you’ve said ugly words to someone you love, stay. If you’re Gray, stay and watch me name you without deleting the parts of me that make it complicated.”
The bay coughs another lungful of fog down the wind tunnel, and a drone loses bravery and swings wide. From somewhere behind us, the city’s hot sugar finds my mouth again, and the disinfectant ghost of bad lemon rides up after it. I decide to keep both. I can live with a layered taste.
“We’ve been there,” the chat keeps saying, and the words stop being mine and become liturgy.
I take one long breath that smells like salt and electricity and paper, and I tap the screen so the settlement language fills the frame. “On my mark,” I say, voice steady not from steel but from being held by thousands of strangers choosing to witness, “we go from feeling to naming.”
That’s when my phone lights with an unknown number and a voicemail notification rolls in from a blocked ID. The preview reads two words: “ask Rowan.”
I let the waveform hover, one pixel shy of publish, and I look into the fog as if it could look back.