After My Boyfriend Framed Me With an AI Recording

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.