Turn 2 of 11

Open the full history log before she asks another question

You don't close the panel. You reach past the greyed line and pull, the way you'd peel back a tab on a folder, and the full history log unfolds beneath Tamsin's tags in a vertical cascade of timestamped entries. Your stomach drops before you've read a single line, because there are more entries than there should be. A lot more.

The first few are yours. You recognise them — the night you changed anxious to tired because watching her spin at the kitchen table over Christmas had been unbearable, the afternoon you swapped self-conscious about her gap year for sharp because she'd earned the upgrade. Each one is logged in the same clean typeface: your tag, your timestamp, your edit. Clean. Familiar. Below them, the entries shift.

There are edits you did not make. They begin roughly three weeks ago — a day after you changed self-conscious to sharp — and they are sparse, careful, almost surgical. Someone added forgives-too-easily on a Tuesday at 14:03. Someone removed it the following Friday at 09:17. Someone appended testing-waters on the same day you flew to Edinburgh, and then, two days later, someone replaced it with thinks-you-resent-her. The timestamps are precise. The style is not yours — your edits are impulsive, emotional, badly spelled the one time you fumbled a tag. These are deliberate. Measured. Each one reads like a sentence in an argument no one invited you to.

None of the entries carry a name. But there is a column on the far right you've never seen before — a thin strip of grey alphanumeric strings, partial identifiers that look truncated, as though the log was designed to record who made each edit but only half-willing to say so. Your own edits show fragments you half-recognise: the beginning of your laptop MAC address, maybe, or the tail end of your phone's device ID. The unknown edits show fragments too, but they're longer — six characters where yours show four — and they don't match anything of yours.

The bread timer goes off.

The sharp triple beep cuts through the kitchen like a small alarm, and Tamsin slides off the counter in one fluid motion, pulling the oven door down with a folded tea towel. The smell of bread rushes out, warm and yeasty and absurdly domestic, and for three seconds she is occupied, turning the loaf on the tray, testing the crust with a knuckle. You have three seconds. The history log hangs open in your vision like a wound, and the unknown editor's identifier fragments sit there, unreadable but present, evidence of someone who has been adjusting your sister the way you'd tune a radio — small turns, careful, listening for a signal you can't hear.