Story code: ST-000194
Part 2: The More I Tried to Solve It Without Him, the Stranger He Got
By two o’clock I had three repost screenshots, one mangled audio track, and my brother outside the edit bay acting like he was part of station security. The clip still looked damaging at a glance, but once Marisol and I slowed it frame by frame, little things started breaking apart. Derek saw me working without him, and that was when he stopped performing concern and started blocking doors. Marisol pulled the bay door almost shut behind us, leaving a narrow gap for newsroom noise to leak in. On the monitor, the fake clip jumped every few frames around the jawline. The parking lot lighting changed between cuts even though the camera angle stayed fixed. When the woman in the video turned, the shadow under her chin slid the wrong direction for half a second. “There,” Marisol said, tapping the screen with a capped pen. “And listen to the room tone. It drops out before the envelope exchange. Whoever did this patched audio over it.” I leaned closer. The fake still made my stomach go hard, because faces do not need to be real to do damage. But now the damage had seams. “Can we prove it cleanly right now?” I asked. She shook her head once. “Not cleanly enough for the internet. Cleanly enough to start protecting yourself in here.” That mattered more than a perfect victory at that moment. Inside the station, people were already choosing whether to look me in the eye, whether to lower their voices when I passed, whether to decide the clip matched some private version of me they had invented because online video makes people feel like witnesses. Tom stopped by the bay and stayed in the doorway. “Status.” I told him what we had: visual irregularities, audio splice points, repost times, and the fact that the account looked newly built. No profile history I could see. No face attached. Just an ugly post and a trail of shares. Tom nodded at the monitor. “Enough for internal caution. Not enough for a public fight. Keep documenting. Also, change your station passwords before end of shift. If this gets tied to access claims, I want every system locked down.” From the hallway, Derek said, “Or she could stop making herself look guilty and let me handle it.” Tom looked past me at him. “Why are you still here?” “Because she’s my sister.” Derek pushed off the wall and came to the doorway. “Because nobody in this building knows what I’ve done for her.” I turned in the chair. “Then go home. If you’ve done so much, you should be thrilled I don’t need you to stand here and narrate it.” He gave a short laugh with no humor in it. “That’s not how this works.” There it was again. Not a request. A rule. Tom’s voice flattened. “Avery, do you want him on this floor?” “No.” Derek lifted both hands and took one step back, but he did it slowly, like he was making a show of my answer being unreasonable. “Fine. Fine. I just hope when this blows up harder, you remember who tried to shield you.” He walked away down the hallway, then stopped near the control room glass instead of leaving. He stayed where people could see him. Marisol waited until Tom moved off before speaking again. “He wants an audience.” “He always does when he’s keeping score,” I said. I finally checked the text thread Derek had been hammering all day. It was one long line of pressure disguised as rescue. I told you not to talk. You owe me that much. After everything I gave up for you, don’t make me look like the bad guy. Send me whatever the station has. Let me answer if anyone asks about the family. The last message had landed thirty seconds earlier. If you shut me out, I can’t protect you. I stared at the screen, then typed back the one thing I had not said to him in plain language before. I am not asking you to protect me. The typing bubble appeared almost instantly. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then my phone rang. I let it ring out. A minute later the edit bay handle rattled hard enough to pull both our eyes to the door. Derek did not come in. He just tested the latch once, twice, then knocked with the flat of his hand. “Avery. Open this. We need to get on the same page before your manager makes this worse.” I stayed where I was. Marisol looked at me, waiting. “We are on a page,” I said through the door. “Mine.” Silence. Then his voice changed shape, lower and sharper. “You don’t get to do that after what I carried for you.” I stood up and opened the door only as far as the stopper chain allowed. He was closer than I expected, one hand braced against the frame, the other holding his phone with my text lit on the screen. “Go home,” I said. “You’re making this public in your own workplace,” he said. “You think these people will stand by you when this spreads?” “These people are my coworkers. This is my job.” “And I’m the reason you got steady enough to keep one.” Behind me, the clip was paused on the monitor with my false face turned toward us. In the reflection of the black screen border, I could see Derek looking not at me but at the workstation login in the corner where my name sat above the station software. That made me think of two things at once: Tom telling me to change my passwords before end of shift, and the old spare key Derek had once insisted was only for emergencies. I shut the door and locked it. He knocked again, harder this time. “Avery. Don’t do this.” I sat back down, opened the repost folder, and zoomed in on the upload timestamps. One of the earliest shares had hit only minutes before Derek.