Tengu sent the list at 6 AM.
Four nas.
He had started with over a hundred Rhonda Steins across V-Gram and worked downward thodically. Removed anyone without profile pictures. Removed anyone outside Arica. Removed anyone old enough that the tiline stopped making sense. Then narrowed it again using Harrington and the surrounding areas.
Four remained.
Rhonda Mary Stein.
And three plain Rhonda Steins separated only by profile details.
The first owned a bakery. Her page was filled with pastries, custor photos and daily specials written in aggressively cheerful fonts. The second worked at a pharmacy. The third was married with children and posted enough family pictures to docunt an entire suburban existence.
The fourth had not posted in months.
No profile picture. No tagged locations. No recent activity.
The account barely looked real.
I stared at all four profiles in silence.
Which one of these are you?
I called Frank.
"I’m sending you a docunt," I said the mont he answered. "Four nas. I need you to follow each one personally. Not your people. You."
"Understood, boss."
"Report directly to ."
"Got it."
I sent the file over and ended the call.
I’m sorry, Rhonda, I thought.
Whoever you are.
But Malcolm leaves no choice.
Monday stream.
My managent team had been trying to push the dostic violence segnt onto my schedule for almost two weeks.
I resisted at first.
Not because the topic didn’t matter. It did. More than most things. But Lumi♡Live had always been built around warmth. Comfort. A place people escaped to after difficult days. The audience ca here for lightness. For familiarity. For the feeling that sobody was sitting beside them for a few hours at night telling them things would probably be okay.
Dostic violence was not light.
My content manager had pushed anyway.
"The book is trending everywhere right now," she had told during the last eting. "The author personally reached out asking if you’d promote it. Your audience skews young and emotionally invested. A lot of them co from unstable hos whether they admit it or not. This conversation matters."
She wasn’t wrong.
She was rarely wrong about things involving audience engagent.
So I agreed.
Mostly because they kept putting it back onto my schedule until eventually saying no started taking more effort than simply doing it.
I adjusted the microphone slightly and watched chat begin to flood the screen as the stream opened.
"Okay, first of all," I said, smiling toward the cara, "I want to officially thank everyone for helping this channel reach two million subscribers."
The chat exploded instantly.
2 MILLION LETS GOOOO
WE MADE IT
lumiLOVE ! lumiLOVE ! lumiLOVE !
I WAS HERE BEFORE 100K
SHE’S GONNA CRY
I laughed softly.
"I started this channel in a tiny apartnt with equipnt I genuinely could not afford at the ti," I said. "I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I just knew I wanted to create a place people could co back to after bad days."
More ssages flooded upward.
"You guys turned it into sothing way bigger than I ever expected. So seriously... thank you. Every single one of you."
The donations started pouring in almost imdiately after that.
ssages attached to nearly every one.
People talking about how long they had been watching. Where they had discovered the channel. What streams they rembered most clearly. Soone said they started watching during exams three years ago and never left afterward. Another said they used Lumi♡Live streams to fall asleep every night because silence made them anxious.
I read as many as I could.
Then I reached for the book beside .
"Okay," I said. "This next part is a little different from our usual content."
The chat slowed imdiately.
I held the book up toward the cara.
"The Effects of Dostic Violence by PenPalRia."
The comnts started moving faster again.
OHI KNOW THIS BOOK
I SAW THIS EVERYWHERE ONLINE
WAIT SHE’S TALKING ABOUT SOTHING SERIOUSLYTODAY
"The author actually reached out to my managent team a while ago and asked if I’d be willing to talk about it on stream," I said smoothly. "My team kept pushing it onto my schedule until I finally sat down with the material they prepared for and..." I paused slightly. "Honestly, I’m glad they did."
Technically true.
Mostly true.
I had not exactly sat down and read the book front to back the way the audience probably imagined. My team had highlighted key sections, talking points and emotional beats most likely to resonate with viewers. They always did that with sponsorships and promotional material.
But sowhere between reviewing the notes and looking through the excerpts they prepared, the subject itself had stopped feeling like marketing.
That part surprised .
I talked about the cycle of abuse first.
The way it embedded itself quietly into households until people inside those households stopped recognizing it as abnormal. The way children carried it into adulthood without realizing how deeply it shaped their understanding of love, fear and attachnt.
The chat slowed again.
Then the stories started appearing.
my mum went through this
i grew up in a house like this
this stream feels different tonight
thank you for talking about this
my dad used to break plates when he got anything
The donations kept coming.
A woman said she left her husband two years ago and still woke up so mornings convinced she had overreacted.
A man admitted he spent most of his twenties terrified he would beco his father.
Then one ssage appeared and stayed in my head longer than the others.
this is my house right now
Nothing else attached to it.
Just that.
I stared at the ssage for a second before reading it out loud quietly.
The chat moved faster afterward. People responding to each other now instead of just to .
You aren’t alone
please stay safe
we’re here for you
I sat there looking at the screen.
I had promoted products before.
Gas. Beauty brands. Movies. Charity events.
But this was the first ti people were telling things that actually hurt.
Sothing about that shifted the atmosphere of the stream entirely.
"You are not alone," I said finally.
No performance layered over it.
Just the words.
Direct.
Honest.
The chat flooded instantly afterward.
By the ti the stream ended, I was sitting alone in the studio with the strange emotional weight left behind by broadcasts that actually reached people.
Not every stream did that.
Most streams were warm. Comfortable. Entertaining.
This one felt heavier.
Real in a way I had not planned for.
I sat there quietly for a few minutes before finally getting back to work.
The week moved quickly after that.
Frank checked in daily.
Progress was slow because following four separate people properly took ti and I had specifically told him not to cut corners.
At the sa ti Ethan and I kept seeing each other regularly.
I went to his apartnt for dinner once during the week. The evening stretched longer than either of us intended. We kept talking and sitting closer and finding reasons not to end conversations until suddenly it was after eleven and Malik had already been waiting outside for almost two hours without complaint.
The second visit I will keep to myself.
By Thursday morning Frank had enough information to start crossing nas off.
He called while I was reviewing emails.
"The married one is out," he said. "Her husband visits her bakery almost every afternoon with their kids. Two children. Very stable family. Very boring."
"Cross her off."
"Already done. Bakery owner is out too. I watched her for three days straight. Sa schedule every day. No connection to anyone nad Stein."
"That leaves two."
"The pharmacy woman and the inactive account."
I leaned back slightly.
"You found sothing?"
"The pharmacy woman has been eting soone regularly during lunch breaks," Frank said. "Different locations every ti. The guy she’s seeing wears a wedding ring."
"And she doesn’t."
"Exactly."
"Affair," I said.
"Looks like it."
I thought about it for a second.
"If Malcolm proposed and they actually married she’d have a ring too."
"Which ans she doesn’t fit."
"Not even remotely."
"I’ll cross her off."
One na left.
The inactive account.
No photographs. No activity. No visible life.
I opened the profile again and stared at the blankness of it.
"Frank," I said slowly. "What if we’ve been looking at this wrong?"
"What do you an?"
"Malcolm is ticulous. Burner phones. No digital footprint. He’s followed for months without slipping once." I paused. "Would sobody that careful really have a partner with an active online presence?"
Silence.
"Unless he taught her to disappear too," Frank said carefully.
"Or she chose to disappear herself."
I closed the page.
"Or maybe we were wrong from the beginning. Maybe she never took his last na. Maybe they never even married."
Frank exhaled quietly.
"That opens this up again."
"I know."
A pause settled between us.
Then his tone changed slightly.
Careful now.
asured.
"Raina."
"What."
"I have an idea."
I already disliked the sound of that sentence.
"What kind of idea?"
"The kind that works," he said. "But you’re not going to like it."
Silence stretched across the line.
Then slowly:
"Tell ."
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