The Credits

I wrote twelve songs for Sophie Lin. She put them on an album, made millions, and her name is the only one in the credits.

I asked her for credit. She threw coffee in my face, called the police, and said I was crazy and trying to hit her. The counselor she'd lined up ahead of time wrote down delusions before I'd said a full sentence.

The ambulance took me to a psychiatric hospital. At the door, she cried for the reporters. "My best friend is sick. I'll take care of her for the rest of my life."

The next day she signed a copyright confirmation with the label. My studio was cleared out. Every demo file was batch-deleted.

But she didn't know my phone was under the bed, and the scheduled release had seventy-two hours left on it.

1

I chose the blue switches on purpose. The loudest ones.

I took the seat by the window at the café and turned the laptop toward her. She was posting to her feed, phone case printed with the concept art for the new album. Twelve songs. Every note of them mine.

"Sophie. We need to talk about the credits."

Her thumb stopped. She looked up with the smile still on. "What credits?"

I opened the folder. Every original demo file. Creation times stamped to the second. The first one was March 14, last year, 2:00 a.m. She'd been posting vacation selfies from the Florida Keys that night.

"These songs. The contract needs my name on them."

I didn't duck when the cup came.

Hot coffee hit the keyboard. She shoved her chair back and screamed. "Help! She's going to hit me!"

Everyone in the café stood up.

I looked down at the keyboard. Coffee ran down between the keycaps. On the screen, the creation-time column was still lit.

"Call the police!" She was gripping the arm of the man at the next table, her voice shaking.

I pressed a key. Click.

On my phone, the countdown on the scheduled release started moving. 71:59:58.

When the police came, a man in a white coat came with them. Sophie rushed to him. The tears arrived on schedule. "Dr. Meyers, please look at her. She's been so off today."

Meyers was a counselor she'd met at a physical last year. He walked up to me and spoke in a soft voice. "Hi. I'm Dr. Meyers. Can we talk?"

"No." I closed the laptop.

"She does this all the time!" Sophie's voice went up. "She says she wrote songs, she says I stole from her, but those are my work. Mine."

The police asked me for evidence.

I unlocked my phone and opened the cloud drive. Empty.

Every backup, batch-deleted three minutes ago. The deletion log listed the device as Sophie's iPad. The iPad her assistant, Kayla, carried.

Meyers made a note in his book. "Have you been under a lot of stress lately?"

I stared at the empty drive. The countdown was still moving. 71:58:02.

"I'd recommend an evaluation at the hospital," Meyers told the police. "Her mental state is genuinely unstable."

Sophie nodded through her sobbing. "I'm only trying to help her. She lives alone. I'm scared she'll do something to herself."

Two officers took my arms.

I didn't fight them. I slid the phone into the deepest pocket of the hospital gown. Sophie didn't notice. She was explaining to the police how long we'd known each other, how close we were, how lately I'd been saying strange things.

The siren started up outside the café.

Through the window, as the ambulance pulled out, I saw her standing at the door, waving off the crowd that had gathered. Someone held up a phone to film her. The tear tracks on her face caught the sun.

The hospital corridor was long.

The orderly dragged me along it, my slippers scraping the floor. At the nurses' station, someone was on the phone. "Yeah. New admission. Bed twenty-eight."

Sophie walked behind us, talking to the attending. "She's just exhausted. We've been working on an album, the pressure's been enormous."

"The album is yours?" The doctor was writing in the chart.

"Mine. My solo album." She paused. "She did some support work for me. I think somewhere in there she started to… imagine things."

The door was steel.

They put me on the bed and the orderly went for the restraints. I got the phone out of my pocket and wedged it into the gap between the bed and the wall.

"She took something!" Sophie came across the room.

The orderly went through my pockets. Empty. He pulled back the sheets, the blanket, the pillow. Nothing.

"I must have been wrong." She smiled. "I've been jumpy too."

The attending was named Dr. Alcott, past fifty, a slow speaker. "Rest assured. We'll take good care of her."

Sophie held his hand. Her eyes welled up again. "Please. She matters to me."

At the door, there was a reporter.

"Sophie Lin, can you tell us how serious your friend's condition is?"

"I'm very sad right now. But I believe she'll get better…"

Click.

The door locked.

I was alone in the room.

I lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain. It looked like a manuscript someone had left open.

The bed frame buzzed, low. A message coming in.

I hooked a toe on the edge of the frame and worked the phone out of the gap between the bed and the wall. The screen was lit. Kayla.

"Sophie, everything's taken care of."

An OK emoji under it.

I shut the screen off and closed my eyes.

The countdown read 71:52.

Enough.

2

While Sophie took a selfie in the recording booth, three words got added to my chart. Delusional disorder.

The phone buzzed against my ankle. I checked it from the gap. She'd posted a long note.

"I'm sorry to meet you all this way. Something happened recently. My best friend needs to rest for health reasons. She walked a lot of this road with me. Now I have to walk the rest alone. The album won't stop. That's my promise to the music, and the best wish I can give her."

The photo was the booth. She had the monitor headphones on, and in front of her, a stack of score pages. I recognized the handwritten draft of "The Four-Line Poem," and the coffee ring in the lower right corner where I'd knocked a cup over.

The comments were already past nine hundred.

"Sophie, you're so strong!"

"Take care of yourself, we love you."

"Your friend will understand."

I pushed the phone back into the gap and looked at the water stain on the ceiling.

When the nurse brought meds, I asked if I could make a call.

"No." She set the cup on the nightstand. "Dr. Alcott says you're in isolation treatment."

"I want to contact a lawyer."

"After you're better." She turned to go.

"I'm not sick."

She stopped and looked back. There was something like pity in it. "That's what they all say."

The door locked again.

I swallowed the two white pills. Vitamins. Alcott hadn't put me on sedatives, which was something.

At three that afternoon, they wheeled an old man into the next bed.

His name was Ray. He'd been here eight years. His hair was all white, and when he talked he looked at the window.

"What'd they get you for?" he asked.

"They say I'm sick."

"Are you?"

I looked at him. "What do you think?"

Ray grinned. Two teeth missing. "The ones who say they're fine never get out."

Birds outside.

I counted them. On the seventeenth call, the phone buzzed again.

A label announcement.

"Given that the original creative partner cannot continue performing her obligations, and following amicable discussion with Ms. Sophie Lin, the remaining work on the album will be completed independently by Ms. Lin. The company understands and supports this change and will ensure the album's quality. Announced herewith."

A scan of a document under it. Copyright Ownership Confirmation. First party, the label. Second party, one name. Sophie Lin.

Signature time was the previous afternoon, four o'clock.

I'd been loaded into the ambulance at 3:20.

Ray leaned over. "What are you looking at?"

"Somebody who can clear her calendar in forty minutes and call it a year."

He didn't follow, and didn't ask. He went back to the window.

At seven, Dr. Alcott did rounds.

He asked whether I was sleeping, whether I heard odd sounds, whether I felt people were out to hurt me. He asked it in complete, careful sentences, like he was filling something in.

"I just want what's mine back."

"What's that?"

"Credit on my songs."

He wrote something down. "You mean the album."

"Yes."

"Your friend says she wrote those songs."

"She's lying."

Another note. "Why are you so sure?"

"Because I have proof."

"Where?"

I shut my mouth.

Alcott closed the chart and sighed. "Get some rest. We'll work on this slowly."

The door shut. Ray spoke from the other bed. "You really have proof?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

I looked at the ceiling. "On its way."

The countdown read 68 hours.

3

Ray was right. In here, the ones who say they're fine never get out.

So on the third day, at rounds, I started cooperating.

Alcott asked whether I still believed someone had stolen from me. I said maybe I'd misremembered. He asked what I thought now. I said maybe the stress had gotten to me.

He was satisfied. He wrote recovered on the chart.

"See. Relax, and a lot of things come clear." He patted my shoulder. "We can talk about moving you to a regular ward in a day or two."

I nodded. I was very good.

When the nurse brought meds, I asked if I could go outside for a while.

"Two to four, in the activity room."

The activity room was on the third floor. A television, board games, a few magazines with the pages worn soft.

I sat in the corner and wrote on the paper they let me have. The nurse assumed it was a treatment journal. I was working the timeline. What Sophie had now, what she still needed, what she'd do next.

Ray sat in front of the television.

The host was reading an entertainment segment. "The musician Sophie Lin is set to release her first solo album. The record took a year, and it compiles twelve original songs."

The frame cut to the booth. Sophie with her headphones on, singing into the mic.

"Silent Confession." The song I wrote in February. The chorus took me eight drafts.

She sang it well. Right emotion, clean runs.

She'd never lived a second of it.

On screen, the host asked what the album meant to her.

Sophie smiled. "It's everything I've been through, distilled. Each song is like a child to me."

Ray made a noise. "That's one busy woman. Twelve of them at once."

I kept writing.

The timeline on the page got clearer. Café, ambulance, admission, label announcement, copyright confirmation. Every step landed on the mark. Not a second wasted.

She'd set this up for a long time.

She'd missed one thing.

At eight, the nurse came to collect the paper and pen.

I crumpled the pages and pushed them under the pillow. She saw me do it. She didn't say anything, just reminded me to take my meds on time tomorrow.

I waited until her footsteps faded. Then I took the pages back out.

Three times written on them.

Admitted: April 7, 3:20 p.m.

Copyright confirmation signed: April 7, 4:00 p.m.

Sophie's post: April 7, 9:00 p.m.

From the café to the ambulance, forty minutes.

From the ambulance to the copyright confirmation, forty minutes.

Two forty-minute windows. Not a coincidence.

I folded the paper and tucked it inside the pillowcase.

Under the bed, the phone lit up.

Kayla's social post. "Moving is exhausting. Finally done."

The photo was an empty studio. The acoustic foam was half torn off the wall, and cables were scattered on the floor.

My studio.

The drives on the desk, the drafts in the cabinet, the recording gear in the corner. Gone.

I shut the screen off and closed my eyes.

The countdown read 61 hours.

Ray snored in the next bed. Outside, an ambulance passed. The siren rose and fell.

I opened my eyes in the dark.

4

While Sophie raised a glass at her signing dinner, I was eating hospital dinner.

Another notification. Entertainment headline.

"Sophie Lin signs with three platforms. Single licensing breaks six figures."

The photo was the signing. She wore a white suit and signed a stack of documents. Three platform reps stood next to her, all smiling.

I zoomed in on the contract on top.

The heading read Exclusive Music Licensing Agreement. Under it, a line of small print. The licensed work is original to Party A.

The line was behind her hand.

The comments section was boiling.

"Sophie is unstoppable!"

"This is a real musician."

"Eighty thousand a single. Times twelve."

I closed it and opened my notes.

Sophie's schedule was written there. April 5, the Florida Keys. April 6, lands in Portland. April 7, the café. April 8, the booth. April 9, the signing.

Five days. From vacation to seven figures.

Efficient. Like a script.

Ray leaned over. "On the phone again. Watch it."

"The nurses don't check at night."

"I mean your friend." He nodded at the photo on the screen. "She got you in here. She can find out what you're doing."

I shut the screen off. "She's busy counting. She doesn't have time for me."

The door opened.

Dr. Alcott stood in the doorway. Behind him, a man in a suit.

"This is Ms. Lin's manager. He's here to see you."

The manager's name was Dana Whitfield. Forties, hair combed flat. He crossed to the bed and looked me over like cargo waiting for a decision.

"You look well." He said it evenly. "The hospital's been taking good care of you."

I didn't answer.

He went on anyway. "Sophie's worried about you. She sent me to check in, and she's paid six months of your stay up front."

"I don't need it."

"You do." He smiled. "In your condition, being out there wouldn't do anyone any good."

Alcott cleared his throat. "Mr. Whitfield, the patient needs rest—"

"I know. Two minutes." Dana turned back to me. "Rest and recover. Don't worry about anything outside. Sophie will handle all of it. Including your… creative work."

He paused on the last two words.

I watched him. "She can't handle it."

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't hers."

The smile dimmed a little. "You see? This is exactly why you need treatment."

He took a document out of his briefcase and set it on the nightstand.

"Copyright ownership confirmation. It states clearly that the copyright holder for those songs is Sophie Lin. If you have thoughts about that, you can read it."

I didn't touch it.

Dana waited a second, saw I wasn't moving, and put it back in the briefcase. "Fine. You're in here anyway. Nothing you can do."

He turned for the door, then stopped. "One more thing. Sophie asked me to tell you she remembers your kindness. After the album comes out, she'll send you something for your trouble."

The door shut.

Ray looked at me. "You're not angry?"

"Anger doesn't do anything."

"So what are you going to do?"

I glanced under the bed. The phone screen was dark.

"Wait."

"For what?"

"For them to keep patching, one hole at a time, until the ground opens."

Ray didn't get it. He didn't ask. He rolled over and went to sleep.

I lay on the bed and ran the conversation back.

Dana hadn't come to visit. He'd come to confirm I was still here, and still locked in tight.

The confirmation he'd mentioned was signed the day I was admitted.

Six months of fees. A gag, and insurance.

Sophie's plan was clean. Every step accounted for.

She'd missed one thing.

I worked the phone out of the gap between the bed and the wall and opened settings.

Scheduled release: 52:37.

Before the screen went dark, a notification came in.

A brand announcement. "National beauty brand names Sophie Lin as brand ambassador, four hundred fifty thousand, with the lead single 'The Four-Line Poem' as the campaign track."

"The Four-Line Poem." I wrote it over three months. Eleven drafts. The day I finalized it, Sophie was on a red carpet in New York.

It was worth four hundred fifty thousand now.

I shut off the screen and closed my eyes.

The countdown moved.

One second. Another. Another.

5

Adrian Ross's message came at two in the morning.

The phone buzzed three times under the bed. I worked it out far enough to read the screen.

"The arrangement logic on 'Silent Confession' doesn't work. The chord movement looks like your hand."

I looked at it for a while without answering.

Adrian was the pickiest producer in the scene. Demos passed him less than five percent of the time. I'd worked with him last year on one song. He killed it seven times, then said it had spirit and wasn't ready, and I never heard from him again.

He could hear it because he remembered how I worked.

A second message came before I decided.

"Haven't seen you around lately."

Then a third. "How much of Sophie's album is you?"

I pushed the phone back into the gap between the bed and the wall.

Ray shifted in his sleep and said something. Then he went quiet.

The streetlight came through the barred window and laid a shape on the ceiling. The water stain looked like a staff of music, notes and all.

The countdown read 49 hours.

The next afternoon, the television in the activity room was running Sophie's interview.

Author's Note

Most people would flinch. She doesn't — she keeps her eyes on the creation timestamps still glowing behind the spilled coffee. That's a person who has already decided something. What's the smallest physical detail that ever told you everything about someone?

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