Story code: ST-001000
Part 3: The Leash Was Still on My Battery
I unlocked my phone right there in my van doorway while Dylan was still talking at me.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “You know exactly what I did for you.”
I ignored that and opened the app tied to the charge controller. The screen came up with the battery status first: charging, steady, normal. Then I tapped into settings.
The account email was not mine.
It was Dylan’s.
For a second I just looked at it, because the whole scene outside my van kept moving like normal. Rosa shifted the stack of plates again. Somebody farther down the lane laughed at something near a fire ring. A sewer hose cap clinked against concrete. And in the middle of that ordinary campground noise, my battery setup was sitting under my brother’s login like I was borrowing my own equipment.
“Megan,” Dylan said, sharper now, “don’t start messing with settings if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
That landed too cleanly.
I turned and looked at him. “Why is the admin account under your email?”
He did not answer right away. He stepped closer to the van door and lowered his voice, which told me more than the words would have. Public volume had helped him when he was selling the story. Lower volume meant he knew we were down to details.
“Because I set it up,” he said. “Somebody had to.”
“And you never switched it over.”
“You never asked.” He shrugged one shoulder. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
Except it was. He had spent all evening acting like he had handed me independence, and here I was looking at proof that he kept control of the one thing he kept pointing at as his generosity.
I kept my voice level. “So when you say you saved my trip, what you mean is you installed a used battery you needed out of your own system, left the controls under your account, and now you’re trying to bill me for it.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what happened.”
Rosa had gone still again. Nate was at his own site but not moving much now, one hand on the hose he had already coiled.
Dylan put his hand up toward the door frame, not touching me, just taking up space. “I monitored it because you didn’t know the system. That’s normal.”
I looked back at the phone. There was a device list under the main setup. My battery controller was there. So was another device name I recognized from his rig, the inverter model he had bragged about buying in spring.
That was when the whole chain finally lined up.
“You used my install to test your new setup,” I said.
His face changed, not into some confession, just into that quick hard look people get when the sentence lands where they didn’t want it to.
I read straight from the screen so I would not drift into anything I could not prove. “Your account still has both systems on it. Mine and yours. You wanted this thing running out here where you could watch it.”
“That doesn’t mean what you’re implying.”
“It means this favor helped you.” I held up the phone, not for the neighbors, just for him. “You got the battery out of your compartment, you made room for your inverter, and you kept admin control on my setup after calling it mine.”
He started overexplaining immediately, too fast to sound steady. “I was consolidating apps. It was easier that way. I didn’t think you’d want to fool with firmware and charge profiles and all the little details. I was trying to keep it working.”
There it was again. He had to keep himself in the middle of the thing for the story to hold.
“So it wasn’t a gift,” I said. “It wasn’t rescue. It was your project, on my van, with my trip attached to it.”
His mouth tightened. “You still benefited.”
“Not in the way you keep saying.”
I tapped through the account menu. There was an option to transfer device ownership. Another to remove shared access. I did not hit anything yet. I wanted to be sure.
“Do you have remote access to the battery settings right now?” I asked.
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Because yes or no matters.”
He looked past me into the van instead of at me. “I could log in if I needed to.”
Needed to.
I felt the trap get smaller and clearer at the same time. He had not just turned an unwanted favor into a debt. He had left himself a hand on the controls and then used the story of helping me to demand money and labor back.
I stepped fully inside my van. Not slamming the door, not making a scene. Just changing the line between us.
“I’m not paying you,” I said. “I’m not helping with your inverter. And before this night is over, you’re coming off this account.”
He gave a short laugh, but it had no room in it. “You can’t even do that without me.”
I looked at the transfer screen again. It was asking for the current admin password.
I did not know it.
Then I remembered the one practical detail Dylan had repeated when he first set the app up, because he had thought it was funny. He had used the same password base as his campground Wi-Fi hotspot so he would not forget it.
And ten feet away, his hotspot name was still broadcasting from his rig like a label.
I stared at the network name on my phone and knew I had one clean shot to find out if he had been as lazy with control as he had been loud with the story.