Part 3: The story below begins with the section summarized in the comment.
The name in the Composer field was my mother’s legal name.
I stared at it long enough for my phone to dim, then opened the distributor dashboard I had used to deliver the album weeks earlier.
That screen told a different story.
The original delivery record still listed me as the composer, showed the date I submitted the finished audio, and preserved the metadata attached before my sister ever received editor access to the public page.
Mother could change what people saw.
She had not changed the delivery history.
I kept reading.
The mastered files were already stored with the distributor, which meant the case sitting beside me was ruined, but the release itself had not disappeared with it.
For the first time that evening, my hands stopped shaking.
Then I saw the problem.
The album was scheduled around my brother’s memorial date, and challenging the credit could put the release on hold while the conflicting information was reviewed.
Mother had forced me into a choice she probably assumed I would avoid: protect the date everyone associated with him, or challenge the version of the album that erased the person who wrote it.
A notification from my sister’s stream slid across the top of my phone.
I ignored it.
I opened the credit-dispute form, attached the screenshot from 7:26, added the original delivery record, and entered the public page showing my mother’s name.
Before submitting, I looked once at the blue TAPE on the damaged case beside me.
Then I pressed Submit.
The confirmation page said the release had been flagged for review.
I sat there another few minutes with the engine off, even after the car had gone cold enough that my fingertips hurt against the phone.
A dead moth was wedged beside the passenger-side vent.
I pulled the ruined master case onto my lap, opened it, and found grease along the outer sleeve but not inside the plastic pocket where I had tucked a handwritten track list months earlier.
It didn’t matter to the distributor.
I still wiped it clean.
At home, sometime later that night, I copied every delivery receipt, audio checksum, metadata export, and email confirmation into two folders on two separate drives.
Then I drove to a twenty-four-hour print shop and printed the delivery record even though the dispute form had already accepted the digital copy.
The printer spit out eleven pages.
I carried them home.
They achieved nothing.
By the time I got back, the apartment smelled faintly like the coffee grounds I had forgotten in the machine that morning, and my stomach cramped hard enough to remind me I still had not eaten.
I made toast.
I burned one side.
My sister called while I was standing over the sink eating it anyway.
I let the call end.
She called again.
Then a message appeared.
Mom says you reported the album.
I read it twice before answering.
I reported the credit.
Three dots appeared, vanished, and came back.
You know what I mean.
I put the phone face down beside the butter dish.
A minute later she sent another message.
She says this could stop the memorial release.
That sentence worked better than anything Mother could have said to me directly because my sister knew exactly which part would hurt.
The date mattered.
My brother had died on that date, and for most of a year I had built the release around the idea that people who loved him could hear the unfinished melodies he had left behind become something complete.
I opened the dashboard again.
The status still said Review Pending.
Nothing else moved.
Near midnight, Mother called.
I answered because I wanted to know whether she would mention putting her own name in the Composer field without being asked.
She didn’t.
“I don’t want tonight to become the thing you remember about your brother,” she said.
I leaned against the counter and picked a crumb off the edge of the plate.
“Did you put your name on the album?”
There was a pause.
“This isn’t a good time for an accusation.”
“It’s a question.”
“I think you’ve had enough conflict for one day.”
I waited.
She changed subjects.
According to her, relatives had already planned to listen together on the memorial date, my stepfather had arranged food, and people had rearranged work because the album was supposed to go live that morning.
“Nobody wants to lose that because you’re upset about a line on a page,” she said.
I stopped picking at the plate.
A line on a page.
That was how she described the only place where the public could see who had composed the music.
My stepfather, Paul, took the phone from her before I could answer.
“The distributor won’t care about some public credit field,” he said. “You’re making this bigger than it is.”
I heard Mother say something behind him.
Paul covered the microphone badly.
“What?”
Another muffled sentence.
Then he came back.
“Take down the dispute tonight and we’ll sort it out as a family.”
I ended the call.
By morning, the public page had changed again.
My mother’s name was gone.
So was mine.
The Composer field now showed nothing, and the release date had disappeared from the page while the distributor compared the conflicting information.
I had protected my credit and lost the one thing I had been trying not to disturb.
For several seconds I just stood barefoot in my kitchen, holding my phone while the floor felt colder than the rest of the apartment.
The cereal box on top of the refrigerator was open.
I folded the cardboard flap shut.
My sister, Mia, texted before nine.
I hadn’t used her name in my head much the night before; she had been my sister, the camera, the person holding the phone.
Now her name sat on the screen.
Can I come over?
I wrote back, Did you change the credit?
She did not answer for almost an hour.
When she finally arrived, she was wearing the same sweatshirt from the livestream, except one cuff had a loose white thread she kept winding around her finger.
I left the chain on the door while I looked at her.
“Yes,” she said.
I removed the chain.
Inside, she stood near the entry instead of taking her usual chair.
“Mom told me you wanted your name taken off until after the memorial,” she said.
I said nothing.
“She said the album was becoming too much for you.”
Mia looked toward the kitchen.
“She said putting her name there was temporary.”
“Did that sound normal to you?”
She rubbed the loose thread between two fingers.
“No.”
That was all she gave me.
Before I had arrived at Mother’s house, Mia had used the editor access I gave her to remove my credit and type Mother’s legal name into the public field.
Then she had started the livestream because Mother told her I might become emotional and the family needed people to see that they were trying to help me.
Mia had believed enough of it to press the button.
She also said the review would probably freeze the page for weeks.
I asked for her phone.
She hesitated, then unlocked it and handed it over.
The livestream archive was still there.
I did not watch the part where the grease hit the case.
Instead, I dragged the timeline backward to several minutes before I entered the kitchen.
For a while there was only Mia adjusting the phone against a cereal canister and my stepfather walking through the frame with a dish towel over one shoulder.
Then Mother’s voice came from somewhere off camera.
“Keep it on her if she starts arguing.”
Mia answered, “Why?”
“Because afterward she’ll say we ambushed her.”
The stream continued for another few seconds before Mia lifted the phone and the picture swung toward the ceiling.
That was the first time I understood the camera had not been an impulsive cruelty after the argument started.
It had been part of the afternoon before I walked through the door.
Mia sat on the edge of my couch while I replayed those few seconds.
She did not defend herself.
Outside, somebody dragged a recycling bin along the sidewalk, the wheels knocking over each crack in the concrete.
I sent the archived stream to myself.
Then I changed the password on the release page and removed Mia’s editor access.
She watched me do it.
“I get it,” she said.
I expected her to leave.
Instead, she opened the public page from her own phone, saw that her editor controls were gone, and nodded once.
Mother’s counterattack arrived that afternoon.
She posted a short clip from Mia’s livestream to the family group, beginning after the credit had already been changed and ending with me asking what would happen to the album.
Under it she wrote that I had turned a memorial project into a dispute and that the family was trying to keep the release focused on my brother.
Nobody mentioned the grease.
Nobody mentioned her name in the Composer field.
The argument had moved sideways.
It was no longer about who had written the music; it was about whether correcting the credit proved I cared more about recognition than about the person the album remembered.
A few relatives replied with careful messages about keeping peace for the memorial date.
One aunt sent a heart and nothing else.
I didn’t answer any of them.
Mia did.
She wrote, I changed the page. She didn’t ask me to.
Then she added the full livestream archive beneath Mother’s clipped version.
Mother removed her own post about ten minutes later.
The full archive stayed.
For that afternoon, control shifted back toward me.
Mia restored my name on the public page from the edit screen while I watched, then sent me a screenshot showing the correction before I permanently removed every remaining shared login.
My name appeared again.
It lasted less than an hour.
The distributor’s review system locked the metadata, cleared the public Composer field, and hid the date again while the dispute remained open.
I had gotten the page back and lost it a second time.
That night I left the phone in another room and ate a bowl of soup before checking anything else.
The blue TAPE on the damaged master case had dried darker where the grease touched it, and a corner had lifted away from the plastic.
I pressed the corner down.
The next morning the dashboard had a new status.
Verified From Original Delivery.
My composer credit returned first.
A little later, the release date returned too.
The album had not been cancelled.
The original mastered files were still scheduled for the memorial date, and the distributor had restored the metadata from the delivery record I submitted before Mia ever had editor access.
I read the page three times.
Then I closed it.
For maybe twenty minutes, I thought that was the ending.
The album was intact.
My name was back.
The date was back.
Mother no longer had a path into the release page, Mia no longer had editor access, and the damaged master case was only a damaged case because the actual files were already stored where my family could not reach them.
I washed the soup bowl from the night before.
I put it in the rack.
Then Mother sent one final message to the family group.
She said the memorial listening would still happen at her house, but anyone who supported what she called my decision to “claim” the album should understand that the gathering was for people who wanted the day to remain about my brother.
She did not name me.
She didn’t have to.
A private message followed.
If the album releases with your name restored, don’t come here that day.
I sat at the kitchen table with the ruined case beside me and read the sentence until my screen went dark.
This was the cost she had been trying to make me avoid from the beginning.
Not a delayed upload.
Not a blank field.
The price was being told I could keep my work or keep my place inside the family’s version of my brother’s memorial, but not both.
The distributor dashboard still showed one final confirmation button for the restored release.
I opened it.
Before pressing anything, I listened to one of my brother’s old voice notes, the one where he tapped a rhythm against a cereal box and stopped halfway through because somebody nearby asked him a question.
It lasted nine seconds.
Then I confirmed the release.
The album went live on the memorial date with my composer credit attached to every track I had written.
Mia did not go to Mother’s listening gathering.
She came to my apartment sometime that afternoon carrying grocery-store sandwiches and a phone charger she had accidentally taken from me months earlier.
We did not have a long conversation about forgiveness.
She put the sandwiches on the counter and asked whether the third track was the one built from our brother’s parking-lot humming.
“Part of it,” I said.
She listened.
Halfway through, she started to say something and stopped.
I let the track finish.
Paul never apologized for breaking the award, and Mother never admitted that replacing my credit with her legal name had been wrong.
I stopped asking either of them to explain it.
What changed was access.
The release account remained under one login that only I controlled, the backup audio went onto two drives, and the full livestream archive stayed with the records from the dispute instead of on a public feed.
Mia did not get editor access again.
Weeks later, she asked once.
I said no.
She nodded and asked whether I wanted coffee.
The broken award half remained at Mother’s house because I had left it on the counter that afternoon, and I never went back for it.
The grease-covered master case stayed with me.
One evening, after I had made a clean backup of the released album and my brother’s original voice notes, I peeled the strip of blue TAPE from the ruined case as carefully as I could.
His cramped FINAL? was still visible.
I pressed the strip across the new backup case and wrote the release date underneath it.
The old case went into a drawer.
The blue TAPE is on the backup case now.
