The Credits

Chapter 2: The Margin

The interview was already running when I got to the activity room.

I took the chair in the corner, the one facing the television but not the nurses' station. Ray had the seat closest to the screen. He always did. He watched the news like it was weather.

On screen, Sophie sat in a studio with two microphones and a plant. The host asked her where "Silent Confession" came from.

She lowered her eyes first. She always did that before she lied, like she was checking the floor for her line.

"One night I couldn't sleep," she said. "The melody just arrived. It's strange — it felt like the song found me."

The audience made the sound audiences make.

A woman two chairs over clapped. "She's so good."

I had a ballpoint pen. They let you keep one if you sign for it, and the newspaper comes every morning whether you ask or not. I folded the paper open on my knee and wrote along the margin, small, where no one looks during a TV interview.

*Silent Confession. February 14, 2:00 a.m. Upstairs at the café. Rain on the window.*

On February 14 Sophie was in the Florida Keys. Her story had the sunset in it. I remember the color, because I saw it on my phone between takes.

The shot changed. Now it was the booth, the behind-the-scenes footage they run when they want the audience to feel close to the work. Sophie had the headphones on. She sang the chorus a cappella into the mic, stopped on the turn, and turned to the producer.

"Can we take that higher?"

The producer nodded. "Your instincts on this are really solid."

I pressed the pen into the paper until the tip broke through. Then I folded it back along the crease.

That turn took me eight drafts. She heard the demo on the eighth one and said, *That works.* Three words. I kept the file. I kept all of them.

The nurse came around for the papers at ten. I handed mine over. She glanced at the margin, frowned at the ink, and dropped it in the trash on her way out.

Fine. I had it. I'd had it the whole time.

Ray was watching me instead of the TV now.

"You write on the news," he said. "That's new."

"It's a crossword."

"It's not a crossword."

I didn't look at him. On screen Sophie was telling the host that every song on the album was like a child to her.

Ray snorted. "That's one busy woman."

I kept my face still. He was funny on purpose and never asked for credit for it, which was the only reason it worked.

At eight-thirty that night the phone buzzed under the bed.

I hooked it out with two fingers and held it low against the mattress so the screen light wouldn't reach the door.

Unknown number.

*Hi — I'm the admin of a music forum. Someone there was asking about June Carver, whether anyone knows how she's doing. Would you be able to reply?*

I read *June Carver* twice.

Nobody had called me that in a while. Since the partnership started, everything went out under Sophie's name and my part got described in softer words. *Collaborator.* *Production team.* Then those words stopped appearing too.

There was a link. I opened it.

The thread was six days old. The title asked what June was working on lately. A few replies guessed. One said she'd heard I was off the scene now. The last one, half an hour old, said she'd heard I quit, no reason given.

I started a reply. Typed four words. Deleted them. Typed one.

Then I closed the thread without sending it, put the phone back under the bed, and lay flat.

The countdown read 34:12:00.

The thing I had set would fire whether or not I did anything else.

---

The next morning Ray went to the activity room after breakfast and came back with his mouth set.

"Somebody's asking about you online," he said.

"I heard."

"Your people don't like it."

"I heard that too."

Around ten-thirty the door opened without a knock. No, that's not right — Dr. Alcott knocks. It was the nurse who came first, and then Alcott behind her, holding the chart like it weighed something extra.

He sat on the chair by the bed. He sat slowly.

"I want to talk about your contact with the outside," he said. "There's been some activity online. People asking questions about you."

"That's not me."

"I know you haven't been posting." He turned a page. "But the concern is real. To avoid misunderstanding, we're going to restrict your movement. You'll stay in the room. And your phone — we'll hold it."

"I don't have one."

He looked up.

"I don't have a phone," I said. "You wrote that down yourself. The first day, when they searched me."

Behind him, Ray laughed, short and mean. "Says so right in the chart. Whole hospital watched them find nothing."

Alcott's mouth tightened. He wrote something. "Regardless. The room, please. No wandering. This is for your own good. Things outside are complicated right now."

I nodded. "Okay."

He hesitated. He'd expected an argument. He got one last week about the pills and I don't think he'd forgotten it.

"Good," he said. "Rest. We'll reassess in a few days."

The door locked behind him. Ray waited until the shoes stopped in the hall.

"So you're just gonna lie there."

"What else."

"You've got something."

I looked at the window. Wire mesh, half of it, the sky on the other side the color of a wet nickel.

"It doesn't need me to hold it up."

Ray shook his head. He thought I was sick the way they said. He was patient about it, which was more than most.

At three o'clock someone down the hall started yelling. Not words at first, then words: *I'm not sick, you can't keep me here.* A cart knocked over. The yelling went on for maybe fifteen minutes and stopped the way a fight stops, without a verdict.

Ray sighed. "There's another one."

I didn't answer. I was running the days.

Adrian had his questions in writing now, wherever he was. The forum had a thread with my name in it. Both of those were visible from the outside, and people whose money depends on silence see everything. Sophie's people would have seen by now. So what does she do.

The phone buzzed under the mattress. I leaned over the edge and teased it out with my toe until I could pinch it.

A push notification. Entertainment desk.

*Sophie Lin's studio issued a statement: former collaborator June Carver has withdrawn from the music industry due to health reasons and is currently receiving treatment. Please respect her privacy and refrain from speculation.*

Under the text was an image. I enlarged it with two fingers.

A hospital diagnostic form. My name on the top line. The diagnosis, boxed: *moderate anxiety with delusional features.* Recommendation: inpatient observation. Date: April 8. Signature: the doctor two rooms up the hall.

The comments under the post ran the way they always ran.

*Sophie's so decent, still protecting her friend.*

*Hope June gets better.*

*Some people just can't stand to see someone else do well. Now they know what lying costs.*

I turned the screen off and slid the phone back under the bed until my fingers found the wall.

Ray was right about this place. Everyone who says they're not sick stays. The form had a signature on it. A sane person wouldn't keep arguing with a signature. A sane person would sign the tray sheet and eat the eggs.

I wasn't going to argue with the form.

I had one of my own.

---

Four in the morning, the light at the nurses' station was still on, and Ray was asleep.

I lay on my side with my cheek to the mattress ticking, the phone braced between my palm and my hip and covered by the sheet. One small square of blue light fell on the floor tiles from the gap under the edge of the bed.

Self-check, same as every night.

Network: connected. The guest network reached these rooms, weak, one bar, but it reached.

Camera: working. I pointed it up and watched the ceiling appear on the little screen — water stain top left of frame, the way I wanted it. A viewer would see the stain and understand nothing, which was fine. A viewer would hear everything.

Scheduled task: armed.

The phone had said 05:48:23 when I armed it. That was the number I needed.

Ray turned over and said something in his sleep and went quiet. Outside, a cat went along the fence and complained about it.

I put the phone back in the gap and lay on my back and ran the plan the way I'd run it every night for four nights.

Six-thirty: first med check. Pills, water, breakfast tray.

Seven to eight: doctors' rounds. Alcott, sometimes the resident, a clipboard each.

Eight onward: activity time. Ray goes to the dayroom. Normally I would go too. Now the room is mine for three hours, and a room with one patient in it and a door that doesn't open is a room where no one sees what the patient is doing, because they already decided nothing happens in it.

Ten o'clock: shift change. The day nurse comes on and the night nurse hands over in the office at the end of the corridor. It takes them about twenty minutes to walk the meds, the codes, the two patients who need extra notes. For twenty minutes nobody comes down this hall.

The scheduled task fires at the top of the hour. I had made sure of that by keeping the phone on the same clock as the internet. I don't need the phone after it fires. I only need the internet once. One handshake and the queue is out of me and into the rest of the world, and then the phone is just a phone again, a piece of glass that can be confiscated and apologized for.

She never thought to ask what I did with my time in here.

I lay still and let the light from the corridor move across the ceiling and put the stain in and out of shadow.

At six the nurse came in with the tray. Took my temperature off the wrist band. Asked how I slept. I said fine. She left.

At seven-thirty Alcott came through. Tired, but the same tempo as always, like the day pulled him along at one speed and he'd given up fighting it.

"How'd you sleep?"

"Fine."

"Any dreams?"

"Not that I remember."

"How's your mood?"

"Steady."

He wrote. "Good. That's good. If this holds a week, we can talk about moving you to a regular room." He said *regular* the way you'd offer a child a snack.

I said thank you. I said it plainly and I meant the sound of it, not the meaning.

He left.

At eight-twenty Ray got up, put on his slippers, stood at the door and looked back at me.

"Coming?"

"Not today. They want me to stay in."

He said something under his breath that wasn't quite words. The door closed behind him and I heard the nurse lock it.

Then the room was mine.

I sat up. I took the phone out from the gap. After four days of sleeping on my side against the wall it had a warm spot on the casing, and I held it in both hands for a second, because turning it on was the last thing left to do. Then I turned it on, checked the number once, and put it under the pillow, face down.

The screen read 01:48:23.

Off the ceiling the stain was gray, then less gray, as the sky outside went the color of oatmeal. Rain coming.

I lay back and closed my eyes and let it come, the whole year, the way it always came when I stopped moving.

The booth too late at night, and the light off my screen on the wall, and Sophie on the couch with her phone up to her face.

The café table up the stairs, and the rain on the window, and the second cup going cold because I was still fixing the bridge.

The green room ten minutes before a show, and the video, and the sound check bleeding through the wall.

I was behind the frame in every one of those rooms. I told myself it was the work that mattered, that the work would be there when the lights went off. I'd told myself that for eight years. Then she sat on a chair with a paper cup in her hand and told a room full of people the songs were hers, and I understood that the work had never been the point.

I had been a tool. There'd never been a version of this where she gave it back.

At nine-fifty the corridor went quiet the way a room goes quiet when someone turns off a fan. Two voices at the station, then one, then the shuffle of the cabinet. The med cart rolled. The day nurse said something and the night nurse laughed. The footsteps went down the hall and away.

I lay still.

Three minutes. I counted them off with my breathing, in through the nose, out slow. A bird started up outside the window and I let it go at nine, the way I had counted birdsong on the first night, when the room was new and the ceiling was the only thing I could stand to look at. It wasn't the first night anymore.

One minute.

Thirty seconds.

I reached under the pillow. The phone screen lit against the sheet, and the app came up the way it did every morning I tested it, green bar, tiny camera, hold signal.

The bar filled.

On the screen the app said: *Stream live.*

Zero.

The number in the corner went from 0 to 1 to 7 to 15 to 42, and then past a hundred fast enough that the digits smeared, and the comment field under the square began to fill from the bottom.

*Whose stream is this*

*no picture??*

*is this a test*

Somebody typed *hello?* Somebody typed a row of question marks.

The picture on the screen was the ceiling. Just the ceiling, gray-edged, and the stain in the top left corner like a page out of a notebook. Nothing else. No face. No room.

I picked up the phone and held it close under my chin, screen still down against the pillow, and I spoke. My mouth was dry and I let it be.

"My name is June Carver. The twelve songs on Sophie Lin's new album are mine."

The number in the corner flipped past five hundred.

The comments stopped being questions and turned into a wall. *What. Who. Is she serious. Wait. WAIT.*

I kept my voice even. My blood was loud in my ears and I kept my voice even, because whoever was listening on the other end of this needed to be able to believe it.

"What you're going to see is all of it. The timestamp on every file, every draft, every change." I paused. "And what she did to get me out of the way."

I pressed the button at the bottom of the screen. The first file began to play.

The screen went white, then a folder appeared, then the top of a list.

Name, date modified. Two columns.

*The Four-Line Poem* — 2023-03-14 02:17:33

*Silent Confession* — 2024-02-14 03:42:56

*Old Days* — 2023-11-07 23:08:14

And nine more under them, and the numbers at the ends of those rows, each of them rounded to the second.

*3/14/23 2am??*

*hold on she was in the Maldives on 3/14*

*anybody recording this*

*who is June Carver*

Somebody typed *there's no picture, is this real*, and somebody else answered *the timestamps don't lie*.

The counter under the stream kept climbing. 1872. 2406. 3591. I watched it until it filled the corner of the screen and then I stopped watching it, because the lock at the end of the hall had clicked.

Someone was walking.

I turned the phone screen-down and slid it back under the pillow and lay down and adjusted my breathing, in through the nose, out slow, because I had learned this too, and the trick is the chest, not the mouth.

The door opened a hand's width. A nurse's face, in and out.

I kept my eyes closed.

She looked at me for a count of three, and the lock clicked, and the steps went away.

I opened my eyes.

Under my pillow the phone was warm, and it kept buzzing. The number was past fifty thousand.

The first file had finished. The second was starting.

---

The phone got hot in my hand.

I took it out and held it flat on the mattress with the screen facing me and the volume down to two bars under the sheet, and I read what was happening up there.

The number in the corner read 121,000 and had tripled in the time it took me to look.

The queue had moved to the second layer — the notebooks. Pages came up one at a time, the way I had scanned them before all of this, on a borrowed flatbed at the studio that I'd told nobody about. Dates. Coffee receipts, photographed the same night and in the same place. Weather, written in the corner in the shorthand I use for myself.

On the "Four-Line Poem" page, bottom right, a brown ring where the cup had tipped. Two inches from the ring, the receipt: *March 14, 2023. Rain. Drip. $4.50.*

The comments were falling so fast the frame couldn't keep up.

*that coffee stain — that's the one on her studio photo*

*scroll up scroll up*

*the sheet music in her post, look at the corner*

*can somebody pull her location history*

Somebody linked to an archived post of Sophie's from that date. Sunset over water and a beach. Location tagged. Two thousand and some miles from the café.

I closed out of the stream and opened my feed.

The trending list on my home screen, top to bottom:

*1 — The Four-Line Poem copyright*

*3 — Sophie Lin plagiarism*

*5 — June Carver*

*7 — Sophie Lin album*

*8 — receipts*

Every one of them had a red tag next to the arrow, the kind the app puts on a topic when there are no humans left in the room.

I clicked the top one. The first post there was Adrian's.

*I got a version of "Silent Confession" in October. The file was created at 2 a.m. on February 14. The sender was June Carver. I sent back eight notes and she sent back eight fixes inside a week. The song is now credited to Sophie Lin alone. I'd like someone to explain that to me.*

Email screenshots below, three of them. Inbox times. Attachment sizes. The last one from me, sent back at some hour I remembered, because I had already been awake and there was nothing else to do.

Twenty minutes old. 54,000 shares.

The top comment under it was the archive post, with the geotag visible in the corner. Sophie Lin, the Florida Keys, February 14, sunset.

I scrolled. A sound engineer I hadn't spoken to in a year.

*A while back June booked a session with me, one track. Sophie wasn't at the session. She was posting from out of town.*

An arranger I knew.

*The chord movement on "Old Days" is June's, I've worked with her and it's recognizable.*

A music account I didn't follow.

*3/14 — June writes "The Four-Line Poem" at a café in Portland. Sophie is in the Maldives. 2/14 — June is rewriting "Silent Confession". Sophie is in the Keys. 11/7 — June writes "Old Days". Sophie is at Fashion Week in New York. Can somebody please tell me how the songs were written in Portland while she was on the other side of the world?*

That one broke ten thousand shares while I watched it.

I put the phone back under the pillow. I lay on my back.

The stain on the ceiling, from where I was lying, wasn't a page anymore. It had thrown lines out to the corners, thin veins crossing the gray.

Down the hall, steps. Not slippers. Not soft.

The door opened without a knock.

Alcott was first, and his face was a different face. Behind him, Dana, tie crooked, hair off its part, face the color of something gone wrong inside him.

"Where is it," Alcott said.

"Where is what."

"Don't. The stream. The entire building can see the traffic. It's on my phone, it's on everyone's phone — where is the phone."

I sat up. "I don't have a phone."

"June—"

"You wrote it down." I kept my voice flat, but not hard. "April seventh. The intake form. Items in possession: none. The search was in the room. Two nurses and an orderly. Ask them. It's on the form."

Dana stepped past him. He was breathing through his mouth. He pushed at the mattress with the flat of his hand, once, twice, then bent to the floor and swept his arm under the bed, along the rail, feeling for the gap.

I waited. His hand went along the rail on the wrong side, the side the frame drops toward the head. The gap is on the wall side. From where he was crouched, his arm was too short to reach.

He straightened up. The smile from last week was gone entirely. All he had left was the voice.

"Miss Carver. You need to give that phone to me now."

"I don't have one."

"There are fifty thousand people watching—"

"I'm a patient." I said it lightly. "I don't understand what you're saying."

Ray, at the door with a nurse holding his arm, laughed out loud. "Told you. Can't find it, blame the sick lady."

Alcott's head turned to the door, then back. He made a sound, not a word, and did the thing he did when the room stopped doing what he wanted, which was nothing.

Dana's phone went off in his jacket.

He checked it the way a man checks a wound and flattened his mouth. His voice went up when he answered.

"What do you mean — all three? *Today?*"

He turned away. The phone rang again before he'd finished the first call. He listened six seconds and his free hand went to the doorframe.

"A million two? Say that again. *A million two—*"

The third call came while he was still talking on the second. He stopped talking altogether, let both phones buzz at once, put one to each ear, and started, not shouting, moving — a walk that had gotten fast enough to be a run without admitting it, out the door, past the nurse, down the hall, his voice curving back through the doorway.

"Tour? Cancel the *tour?* The tickets are — who authorized — I'm on my way—"

Then the corridor was only the nurse, and Ray, and Alcott, who looked at me for a while and did not speak, and turned and went out.

The door closed. The lock turned itself.

Ray came in from the doorway and sat on the edge of his bed, keeping his eyes on the wall like he wanted the wall to be the interesting one.

"You."

"Me."

"Where."

"I told you already."

"You haven't told me anything."

I reached under the pillow. I didn't bring the phone out, I only let my fingers rest on the casing where the heat had not gone yet.

The screen on the other side said 507,000 and climbing. Of the top ten topics in the country, seven were her.

The queue had come around to the third file, and now the screen held a room. Not the café. The studio.

Watermark bottom right, white, dim: 3/17/23 14:23.

In the frame a person sat at a monitor with her back to the camera for six hours without getting up for anything except one trip out for water, and it wasn't Sophie; the person in the chair had hair cut to the skull and a hoodie with the sleeves pushed, and if you squinted hard enough at the back of the chair you could see it was me. The monitor was the only light in the room, and on the monitor, large enough to read, was an open project named *Four-Line*.

*who is that*

*the timeline says the studio camera auto-saves — dates and everything*

*where was Sophie that day*

Under my hand I felt the phone refresh and the queue bring up the fourth file, the last, and it took everything I had to feel my face stay the way it had been.

The audio wave scrolled under the play bar. The date field next to it read *4/7, 15:19.*

I let it play out. I didn't have to listen to it. I had been in the room.

But the room I was in now was not that room, and there were five hundred thousand people in this one, and this one was going to hear my voice first, from the day of the coffee, saying the sentence I had practiced in the shower and put in the calendar for two in the afternoon, because I had chosen to say it out loud, in public, on the day it would happen.

*Sophie. We need to talk about the credit.*

Her. *Credit for what.*

The cup. The chair going back. Her voice to the room.

The comments underneath held each other up while they read, one line a fraction of a second behind the next, and I lay on my back and let my own voice out of the phone and onto the ceiling, which had stopped looking like anything I'd ever drawn on it.

Outside, the rain started, small at first, then steady, ticking against the mesh.

I watched the phone until it stopped buzzing, and then I put it under the pillow, screen down, and left it there, and lay with my eyes open in the gray, and waited for the next thing to come through the door.