For three weeks, Leif kept his phone face-down.

On the kitchen counter. On the couch. On the nightstand, screen pressed to the wood. In four years, he had never done that.

I didn't ask. I just noticed.

My name is Ember Weaver. I'm the person behind *Leif's Table*, a food channel with 1.2 million subscribers. You've probably never seen my face. I write the recipes. I style the plates. I edit every frame. Leif smiles for the camera. That was our deal, and I thought it was a good one.

Then came the perfume. It clung to his denim jacket when I hung it up. Vanilla and expensive flowers. I don't wear perfume. It ruins your sense of taste.

Then came the turtleneck. Black wool, in August. It was ninety-four degrees in Los Angeles.

“Aren't you hot?” I asked.

“It's a look,” he said. He tugged the collar up. He wasn't fast enough. I saw the purple mark under his jaw.

I said nothing. I filed it away the way I file everything. Labeled. Dated. Backed up twice.

Thursday night, I was editing at the kitchen table. Our dumpling video. Two hundred clips, color-coded. My coffee had gone cold hours ago.

I took a break and opened a fan subreddit. Sometimes I read it to see which recipes people loved.

Someone had posted a photo. *Is this Leif?? Spotted outside a restaurant in WeHo last night.*

It was blurry, but it was him. His gray jacket. His perfect hair. Next to him stood a tall blonde in a cream dress. I knew her. Macie Pierce. His college classmate. She had liked every single post we made for six months.

They were holding hands.

I zoomed in. On his left hand, between the thumb and index finger, was a pale, shiny scar.

I knew that scar. Four years ago, in our tiny Koreatown studio, he grabbed a cast-iron pan without a towel. He yelled so loud the neighbor banged on the wall. I sat on the floor with him and rubbed ointment into the burn. I wrapped it in gauze. He kissed my forehead. “What would I do without you?” he said.

Now that hand was wrapped around her fingers.

The screen dimmed. I tapped it awake. It dimmed again. I tapped it again. I didn't move otherwise.

Leif came home at nine, buzzing. He didn't even take off his shoes.

“Em, huge news. A supplement brand wants us. Detox gummies. Six figures for three videos.”

“Detox gummies don't work,” I said.

“Who cares? People buy them.” He grabbed a beer. “And we're pivoting. No more slow braises. Spicy challenges. Reactions. That's where the money is.”

“Our audience comes for the cooking.”

“Our audience comes for *me*.” He grinned. “Honestly, babe? Your recipes are dead weight now.”

Dead weight.

I set my phone on the table, screen up. The photo glowed between us.

He looked down. His face didn't change. But his right thumb drifted to the scar on his left hand and rubbed it.

He always did that when he lied.

“That's not what it looks like,” he said.

“It looks like you holding Macie's hand.”

“She tripped. I caught her.”

“For a whole block?”

“Em, come on.” His voice went soft and warm. His camera voice. “You know how much you mean to me. Macie gets marketing. She can help us scale.”

“Is that what the hickey was? Scaling?”

The smile dropped. “You've been spying on me?”

“I've been living with you.”

His jaw went tight. “Fine. You want the truth? You're boring, Ember. You hide behind the camera and act like a saint. Macie actually wants to grow.”

“Then go grow with her.” I stood. I kept my hands flat on the table so they wouldn't shake. “My name is on this lease. Get out.”

“You can't run the channel without me.”

“Get out, Leif.”

The door slammed. Through the peephole, I watched him wait for the elevator. He was already texting. He was smiling.

That night I drove to my parents' house in Pasadena. I slept in my childhood bedroom, under my old debate trophies. For four days I barely ate. My dad, Hector, left tea outside my door. He never knocked. On the fourth morning, there was a note under the cup in his neat teacher's handwriting.

*You were never small, Ember.*

On the fifth day, I opened my laptop.

I wrote to our community. I thanked them for four years. I told them I was the one behind the recipes and the edits, and that I was stepping away. I didn't name Leif. I didn't name Macie. I didn't need to.

By morning, there were forty thousand comments.

*I KNEW it was her. The editing has a soul.*

*Your garlic noodles got me through chemo. Thank you, Ember.*

*First the editor guy vanishes last spring, now this? What is going on over there?*

I read that last one twice. Benson Tucker. The quiet editor who stopped answering my texts. Leif had said he “just quit.” I hadn't thought about him in months.

Six days later, Leif posted: *Cooking With My New Co-Host!*

Macie stood in my kitchen setup in a white blouse. She held the knife like it might bite her. She called the cilantro parsley. Her laugh sounded rehearsed. The lighting was flat. The cuts were sloppy. The audio hummed.

Within three hours, the dislikes outnumbered the likes four to one.

*Where's Ember?*

*This is painful.*

*Bring back the person who actually cooked.*

I watched the subscriber count tick down. 1,214,000. 1,209,000. 1,201,000.

I didn't feel happy. I felt something colder.

Somewhere in this city, Leif was refreshing the same number. I knew him better than anyone.

He wouldn't take this quietly.

For two weeks, I stayed in Pasadena and tried not to look.

I failed. Every night, I checked the channel.

Video two: *Macie's Easy Avocado Toast.* Thirty-eight percent likes.

Video three: *Insane Spicy Ramen Challenge!* Leif coughed, laughed, and chugged milk. The comments were turned off after six hours.

The subscriber count kept falling. 1,180,000. 1,152,000. 1,131,000. It was like watching a house lose its roof one shingle at a time.

I didn't see what happened next. I learned it later, piece by piece. But I knew Leif. I could have drawn every second of it with my eyes closed.

They were working out of Macie's condo in West Hollywood. Leif had hauled over my old ring lights. They never sat right without me. Nobody had ever asked how I set them up.

Macie sat at the laptop, scrolling through comments. She twirled a strand of blonde hair around her finger. Tighter. Tighter.

“It's the algorithm,” she said. Her voice climbed half a note. “They changed it last month. Everyone's numbers are down.”

Leif didn't answer. He was on the couch, phone in hand. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. A cloud of mango vape drifted over his head.

“Or the software,” she went on. “This editing program is garbage. And the windows face north. The light is flat. That's not on me.”

“It's not the light.”

“Then what is it?”

He didn't say it. He didn't have to. The answer was sitting in my childhood bedroom thirty minutes away.

On the coffee table, next to his keys, was an orange pill bottle. Adderall. He'd been taking it for a year. He called it his “focus.” I'd found the bottle once and said nothing. I'd been good at saying nothing.

His phone buzzed. A brand rep. *We're pausing the gummy campaign while we reassess.*

Leif stared at it. Then he threw the phone at the wall. It bounced off the drywall and landed face-down on the rug.

Macie flinched. Then she smoothed her blouse and turned the laptop toward him.

“Okay. Listen to me. They love her because they think she's a saint.” She tapped the screen. “So we show them she isn't.”

“She's not going to slip up. She never says anything bad. I lived with her for four years.”

“She doesn't have to say it.” Macie smiled. “She just has to *sound* like she did.”

She pulled up a website. Gray background. A soundwave logo. *Clone any voice in minutes.*

Leif sat up slowly.

He still had access to the old shared drive. I'd never changed the password. Why would I? It was *ours*.

Four years of my scratch voiceovers lived on that drive. Me at 3 AM, saying, “Okay, take two.” Me reading recipe notes. Me laughing when a dumpling fell apart. Hundreds of hours of my voice, labeled and dated by my own careful hands.

I had built the weapon. I had even organized it for them.

“How much do you need?” Leif asked.

“Thirty minutes is enough. More is better.”

He gave her everything.

While the program learned me, Macie typed a script. She read it out loud.

“Our fans are so pathetic. Obsessed losers with no lives.”

Leif shook his head. “No. She'd never say it like that.”

“Then how?”

He closed his eyes. I picture him doing it. The same way he used to close his eyes when he tasted my sauces.

“She starts with ‘okay, so’ when she's thinking. She says ‘honestly’ right before she means something. And she's precise. She wouldn't say ‘no lives.’ She'd say ‘no actual lives.’”

Macie typed. Deleted. Typed again.

*Okay, so. Honestly? They're pathetic. Obsessed losers. People with no actual lives, crying in my comments about garlic noodles. Like, go outside.*

“Add a laugh,” Leif said. “Through her nose. Short.”

He knew me so well. That was the part that would hurt the most, later. Every detail he had ever noticed about me, he handed over to a machine.

The program finished at 1:40 AM. Macie pressed play.

My voice filled the room. Soft. Tired. A little hoarse, the way I get after a long edit. Then that short laugh.

Macie rubbed her arms. “God. That's creepy.”

Leif didn't look creeped out. He looked relieved. His right thumb found the scar on his left hand and pressed down on it. Hard.

“Add some background noise,” he said. “Like it was recorded on a phone. In a kitchen.”

She did. She added the hum of a fridge. A clink of a glass.

Then she opened her spreadsheet. Two hundred and twelve influencer contacts, sorted by follower count. Plus a folder of burner accounts she'd been building for months. *For brand campaigns,* she'd told him once.

She wrote the caption.

*LEAKED: What Ember from Leif's Table REALLY thinks of you. Private convo. Sent to me by someone close to the channel.*

“Should we wait?” she asked. “Sleep on it?”

Leif picked his phone up off the rug. The screen was cracked across the subscriber count.

1,127,000.

“Post it.”

At 2:14 AM, it went up on Twitter. Then TikTok. Then Reddit. Then three YouTube community pages run by people who owed Macie favors.

In Pasadena, I was asleep under my debate trophies.

That night, for the first time in my life, I'd turned my phone face-down on the nightstand. I just wanted one quiet night.

At 2:17 AM, it began to vibrate against the wood.

I didn't wake up.

I woke up at 6:40 AM because the nightstand was buzzing.

Not ringing. Buzzing. Nonstop, like a trapped insect. I flipped my phone over. The screen was warm in my palm.

4,812 notifications.

My first thought was stupid. *Someone died.* My second thought was worse. I opened Twitter.

My own voice came out of the speaker.

*Okay, so. Honestly? They're pathetic.*

I sat up so fast my head spun. I played it again. The fridge hum. The clink of a glass. That short laugh through the nose. My laugh.

I had never said those words. But I couldn't prove it. Not even to myself, for one horrible second.

The clip had 2.3 million views. It was 6:41 AM.

I opened my DMs. I shouldn't have.

*You fake bitch.*

*I cooked your noodles for my dying mom. I hope you choke.*

*Kill yourself before someone does it for you.*

I scrolled. They kept coming. Faster than I could read them. New ones pushed the old ones down. It was like trying to bail out a boat with a teaspoon.

Then I saw a tweet with fourteen thousand likes.

*Her parents live at 1147 Linda Vista Ave, Pasadena. Go say hi.*

Under it, a photo of our house. The blue door. Mom's lemon tree. Dad's old Volvo in the driveway.

Someone had replied: *Hector Weaver, retired teacher. Wonder how his students feel about his garbage daughter.*

They knew his name.

My hands went cold. I typed a reply. *This is fake. I never said this.* I deleted it. Nobody would believe one sentence. I typed it again anyway. Posted it. Within a minute, it had nine hundred replies.

*Lol. That's what they all say.*

*AI? Sure, Jan.*

The same people. Some of them were the exact same usernames from my farewell post. *Your garlic noodles got me through chemo.* Now that account was calling me trash.

I got in the shower to stop shaking. I don't know how long I stood there. When I came out, my mom was screaming.

---

I pieced it together later. From my mom. From the paramedics. From the iPad on the floor.

Dad never used social media. He thought Twitter was a bird thing. But he heard the phone calls. He saw the cars slowing down outside. He saw Mom crying into the kitchen sink.

So he took her iPad into his study. He sat in his leather chair, with his reading glasses and his cold coffee. He wanted to understand what was happening to his girl.

He read for forty minutes.

The iPad was still open when I found him. On the rug, beside his hand. Somebody's comment glowed on the screen. *Her father should have drowned her at birth.*

He was gray. His lips were blue at the edges. His chest moved in small, wrong jerks.

“Dad. Dad, look at me.”

His eyes found mine. He tried to say something. Only air came out.

The ambulance took eleven minutes. I counted every one.

---

Pasadena General smelled like bleach and burnt coffee.

They said it was a cardiac event. Stress-induced. They said the next twenty-four hours mattered. They said a lot of things in calm voices that didn't match the beeping.

Mom went to sign papers. I sat by the bed alone.

Dad had tubes in his nose. Wires on his chest. A clip on his finger glowing red. The monitor drew his heartbeat in green, jagged lines. Each one looked like it might be the last.

I took his hand.

It was dry and light. When did it get so light? This was the hand that turned the pages of *Charlotte's Web* every night when I was six. The hand that wrote *You were never small* on a note under a teacup.

His eyes opened halfway.

“Don't,” he whispered.

“Don't what?”

“Don't read them. I saw your face. In the study.” He breathed. It cost him. “Those people don't know you.”

“They know my voice.”

“No.” His fingers pressed mine. Barely. “They know a recording. That's not the same thing. You taught me that. Editing.”

I almost laughed. It came out wet.

“Rest, Dad. Please.”

“I should have told you. About him.” His eyes drifted shut. “I saw it the first dinner. All performance. No substance. I said nothing.”

“I wouldn't have listened.”

“That's not the point, sweetheart.” A long breath. “The point is I didn't try.”

Then he slept.

I didn't let go. With my other hand, I picked up my phone.

I know. I know I shouldn't have.

6.8 million views now. #CancelEmber was trending in the U.S. A food blogger I'd admired for years had posted, *Disgusting. Unfollowing. Do better.* Leif's channel had gone quiet. No statement. No defense of me. Just silence. He was letting it burn.

I could see him. On Macie's couch. Refreshing. Thumb pressed to that scar.

The monitor beeped. Steady. Then it skipped. My heart skipped with it. Then the line evened out again.

Outside, the sky over the San Gabriels went from pink to gray. Someone rolled a cart down the hall. Somewhere, a stranger was typing my father's name.

I waited for the crying to come. It didn't.

Something else came instead. It was quiet. It felt like ice forming on a lake. Slowly. Then all at once.

Four years. I had saved everything. Every clip. Every take. Every outtake where the camera kept rolling after Leif thought it stopped. Labeled. Dated. Backed up twice, on drives in a shoebox in my closet.

He'd used my voice to bury me.

I still had his.

I looked at Dad's hand in mine. I looked at the trending tag on my screen.

Then I turned the phone face-down on my knee. Not to hide this time.

To think.