Sera opens the door before I knock. The hallway tastes like lemon soap and old carpet, and the bay’s damp rides my coat inside. “Shoes,” she says, already walking. I toe them off onto the mat and follow the sound of cabinet doors ticking open and shut.
She stops in the kitchen and brings a binder down like a gavel. Plastic rings clack, paper breathes. The slam vibrates the mug beside it; tea lifts and settles, a tiny storm in porcelain.
“There,” she says. “Timeline, invoices, shifts, miles. Do I need to alphabetize the grief for your show?”
“It’s not a show,” I say, even though I know I’m lying to both of us. “Not this.”
She flips a tab. Highlighter screams in lemon and coral. “Admissions: four. Transport: two. Therapy that insurance called enrichment: seven. Do you remember any of this, or do you only remember microphones?”
I pull out a chair. It squeals. I sit with my hands flat on the laminate, a schoolkid about to be assigned detention. The kitchen smells like hot sugar—the neighbor must be baking—braided with Sera’s disinfectant and the ghost of dinner onions. Through the window, the fog has leaned its forehead on the glass.
“I brought a pen recorder,” I say. “Not for you. For me. I’ll keep it off unless—”
“No,” she says. She taps the binder. “Use your eyes.”
The elevator screen in my building had whispered headlines all the way down: forgiveness tour extended, tribunal schedules review, deepfake taskforce briefing. Here, Sera’s screen is set to a family dashboard—muted, but the numbers glow. I catch a dip where a number should hold steady, a little wound in red. I pretend I didn’t.
“You’re angry,” I say.
She huffs. “Angry is when a stranger cuts line. This is architecture.”
I reach for the ledger. She lets me have it like a loaned organ.
“You called me while Mom was—” I start.
“Dying,” she says for me, cleanly. “You said you were five minutes away.”
“I was five minutes away.”
“Five minutes and eleven months,” she says, flipping to a log where the handwriting slants like a body pulling an all-nighter. “Pick a memory. Then match it to a bill.”
Paper softens under my fingers. Each page has the halo icon printed faint as a watermark in the corner—two concentric rings hiding in the margins like a quiet trap. I hear the Strand food hall in my head—no filming at the communal tables—and picture everyone filming from the edges, anyway.
“Sera,” I say, “I need to show you something.” I pull my phone halfway out, then tuck it back. “No. First, can I copy this? Not share. Not yet. I need to map the timeline to the leak.”
“Leak,” she says, tasting the word like it’s gone sour. “That video feels truer than your halo. Isn’t that funny? The red looks like what my chest knew.”
My throat tightens with a sound I refuse to call anything. “The room tone in that clip matches Studio B’s hum. It’s not a cheap fake.”
“Then the green one is,” she snaps, hands gripping the chair back. “Because I don’t remember forgiveness. I remember logistics.”
The kettle clicks behind us. She hasn’t turned it on. Her body is always listening for tasks. I ease a breath out and count five ridges in the laminate. My pulse wants to climb out of my wrist.
“Why the sudden ledger tour?” I ask gently. “Your voicemail was short. ‘Come if you’re serious.’ I’m here.”
She shifts, the anger not leaving but standing aside to let another shape through. She touches the lip of the mug, then pulls her hand back like the clay bit her.
“They called,” she says.
“Who?”
“Gray’s people.” She won’t sit. She keeps moving the same two inches left and right, like the floor might tip. “They offered closure services. A family package.”
The term lands with packaging foam around broken things. “What’s inside a package like that?”
“A nurse—sorry, a ‘care liaison’—explained,” she says. Her voice flattens into quoting mode. “‘Guided reconciliation. Narrative seam work. On-site adjustments to reduce reputational volatility.’” She force-smiles. “They really said volatility. Help me, Mira, they said I qualify for a discount because I’m a public educator.”
The fog outside presses harder. A drone blinks past the window, then veers, blind in the wind tunnel. Somewhere, a news blimp has to choose between rerouting and embarrassment.
“They’re cultivating you,” I say. “They cultivate families post-broadcast. I heard it in that suite last night.”
She folds her arms. “I heard you were there.”
“I listened,” I say. “I heard storyboarded outcomes and sponsors with teeth. I heard my wristband beep hello across their systems.”
“You kept that thing?” She looks at my wrist like I’ve brought a snake into her kitchen.
“It’s a key. I’m not wearing a collar.”
“Keys can lock from both sides,” she says, and her voice is not wrong.
Micro-hook: The binder’s spine has a crack I’ve never seen; inside that crack, a folded receipt winks like a clue that wants to be pulled.
“What did you tell them?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “Yet. They said closure could stabilize our household’s score during this… publicity.”
The screen on the wall shifts to a weather map and then back to the dashboard, coy. The red dip flares again at the edge of my sightline. I stand and walk past her to the sink so I can turn around and face both her and the screen without making it a confrontation. Lemon soap, stainless steel, a ceramic sponge holder painted like a fish. Domestic, almost gentle.
“Is that why you called?” I ask. “Because the household score—”
“Don’t,” she warns.
“—dipped,” I finish, because truth doesn’t fix itself by being polite. “Is that his?”
Her jaw works, a muscle auditioning for a sharper face. “He lost a client last week. They said optics.”
“Because of me.”
She doesn’t answer, which is the same as answering. The silence scratches like starched sheets.
“Scores aren’t weather,” I say. “They’re policy.”
“They’re groceries,” she snaps. “They’re the mortgage. They are whether the kids’ teacher looks me in the eye or pretends to check her watch. I carry these numbers like pails of milk.”
I sit again. The binder is between us like a neutral witness. I slide my palm over a page where her handwriting is neat until it isn’t. “You’ve kept everything,” I say. “You shouldn’t have had to, but you did.”
“You kept everything too,” she says. “Except yourself.”
The kitchen fan stutters, a cheap drummer. I let the insult live in the room without chasing it.
“I’m trying to keep us,” I say.
“By making us content?”
“By making us a record,” I say, steady. “Records outlive edits. If you give me this ledger for twenty-four hours, I’ll log it like chain-of-custody. I’ll timestamp and cross-reference with the leak’s audio and the broadcast’s official track. If their narrative shifts don’t line up with your logs, that’s evidence.”
“Evidence for who?” she asks. “The audience that clapped? The tribunal that translates harm into therapeutic discretion?”
“For us,” I say. “For Leo.”
The name finds the softest place and presses. She looks away, then back. Her eyes have the sheen that comes right before a dam either holds or doesn’t.
“They offered a spot for Leo,” she says, and my stomach drops so cleanly I feel weightless. “Part of the package. ‘Early intervention for sibling alignment.’”
“You didn’t—”
“I didn’t,” she says. “Not yet.”
My breath comes tight, rasping on one edge, the way certain hospital rooms taught me air could hurt. I push the binder toward her again so she knows I’m not a thief.
“I’m not here to win,” I say. “I’m here to document. If you say no, I walk without a copy.”
She doesn’t touch the binder. She looks at my hands instead, the way I keep them still on the table like I’m afraid they’ll confess something.
“I watched your segment,” she says, voice smaller. “I watched the green. I was ready to believe we were done. Then I watched the red leak, and I didn’t have to work to believe that one. That’s the part that shames me. The truth that hurts is easier.”
“It’s also designed to be,” I say, thinking of Gray’s suite, the human furniture, the citrus air. “They mix it to feel inevitable.”
She laughs without amusement. “You and your mixes.”
“Me and my mixes,” I agree. “Me and my mother’s voicemail and the sound of summer thunder and the scratch of linens that no sponsor can own. You said to use my eyes. Now I’m asking to use my ears, too.”
Micro-hook: From the street, a siren bites the fog in half, and for a second I can hear nothing else but the memory of machines trying to be angels.
Sera pulls the folded receipt from the binder’s cracked spine and flicks it toward me. It lands face-up between us: a co-pay from the clinic with the halo icon smiling in the corner. On the back, she has written times and a name. Rowan—Lab 7—after-hours? My pulse pricks.
“Where did you get that name?” I ask, too fast.
“From a voicemail the care liaison failed to delete,” she says. “They think I’m only a spreadsheet.”
I tuck the receipt under my palm. The paper is warm from her fingers, cool from the table. “May I copy this?”
“One night,” she says. “You bring it back tomorrow undamaged and unexcerpted. If I see one line of it on your feed without my say-so, we are done. Not just sisters done. Evidence done. Leo done.”
“I hear you,” I say. “I accept those terms.”
She watches me pack the binder into my bag like I’m putting a live thing into a small cage. “You promise,” she says, and it’s not ceremony.
“I promise,” I say, and it is.
She moves toward the kettle. This time, she actually turns it on. Steam ghosts the window. Outside, the fog swallows a drone mid-blink and keeps it. The city hum is a blanket you only notice when someone yanks it off.
“He’s embarrassed,” she says to the counter, meaning her husband. “He thinks he’s a bad provider because your name is a headline he didn’t ask to carry.”
“Tell him,” I say, “that I’m a bad provider too, if the measure is compliance.”
“He doesn’t speak that language,” she says. “He speaks quiet.”
I nod. “I can make quiet.”
“No,” she says, not unkindly. “You can make a different noise. I’m lending you my noise now. Don’t make me regret it.”
The kettle clicks off. She pours, sliding a mug toward me I don’t deserve. Lemon tea razors my tongue. We stand too close to the steam on purpose, like we can convince our faces to forget their angles.
“What did the liaison say when you didn’t sign?” I ask.
“She said there’s a window for optimal reframing,” Sera answers. “She said certain patterns harden if not guided. She said, ‘We can help you remember properly.’”
“That’s not help,” I say. “That’s product.”
“That’s groceries,” she says again, but the line has lost some teeth.
I set the mug down and take one last pass through the binder, photographing nothing with my hands. The pages rustle the way hospital blankets do when the night staff flips them like cards—efficient, intimate, unforgiving.
“I’ll bring this back tomorrow,” I say. “You’ll get to veto anything that leaves this house.”
“You’ll try,” she says. “The machine you hate eats vetoes for breakfast.”
“Then we feed it evidence,” I say. “And watch what it chokes on.”
She opens the door before I reach for it. The hallway’s lemon soap meets the building’s tired breath. Down the block, gossip stalls at the corner where a blimp would be if the fog lifted. On the stoop, a neighbor checks a wristband and declares, “Clouded,” to no one in particular, like he’s reporting rain.
“Mira,” Sera says.
I turn.
“If Gray calls me again,” she says, “and I take the meeting, you’ll be the last to know. Don’t punish me for that.”
“I won’t,” I say. “I’ll be busy.”
“Doing what?” she asks, not mocking.
“Listening,” I say. “And drawing the map.”
I step into the hall with the binder strapped to my back like borrowed armor. My phone buzzes against my hip: Jonas—1 voice note. I press play as I hit the stairwell.
His voice is low, tinny: “I found a frame you need to hear. The red wasn’t just a swing—it’s an insert.”
The message ends. The stairwell holds its breath. I stand there with lemon air in my lungs and Sera’s ledger biting my shoulder, and I understand that choosing between sisters and proof is a false choice the machine keeps offering, a trick with rings and light.
I text back: Tomorrow. Chain-of-custody starts now.