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.