For six months, my boyfriend turned the same crude bodily-function joke into a running performance at restaurants, family dinners, movies, and even events connected to my job. I kept asking him to stop because other people were uncomfortable and I was embarrassed. He kept telling me the real problem was that I needed a better sense of humor.

The next morning, Derek behaved as if the housewarming had been a minor experiment that had produced an amusing result. He made coffee, whistled tunelessly, and asked whether I wanted eggs. When I said no, he slid a plate toward me anyway. The eggs were folded with the care he usually reserved for apologies. I watched steam lift from the toast and thought about how easily he could make a kitchen feel like a stage after the performance was over.

“You’re still upset,” he said.

“I’m thinking.”

“That’s what people say when they’re building a case.”

“Against you?”

He leaned against the counter. “Against the fun parts of me.”

I wanted to tell him that the fun parts were not on trial. The part of him that noticed when I was tired, that remembered to bring home ginger tea, that could turn a long train delay into an invented travel documentary—those parts were still real. I kept mistaking their existence for evidence that the rest could not be dangerous.

At work, the first clip arrived in my inbox from an address I did not recognize. The subject line read: this is incredible. There was no message, only a link. I did not open it at my desk. I copied the address onto a piece of paper, folded it twice, and put it beneath the seating chart for the gala.

Nia found me in the supply room counting champagne flutes that had already been counted twice.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.

“I got a strange link.”

“From Derek?”

“I don’t know.”

She held out her hand. I gave her the paper. Her eyes moved across the address, then returned to me.

“Have you asked him?”

“Not yet.”

“Mara.”

“I know.”

She lowered her voice. “You keep waiting until you have proof that would satisfy a jury.”

“I’m not waiting.”

“You are. You’re collecting clues because asking him directly makes you feel unreasonable.”

The sentence landed with the precision of something she had been rehearsing. I turned toward the shelves so she would not see my face.

That evening, I opened the link on my phone while sitting in the locked bathroom stall at work. It led to a short video on a social platform. Derek stood outside a grocery store, wearing the orange scarf Calvin had mocked himself for buying. The picture shook slightly, as if the person filming was trying not to laugh. Derek made the noise. A caption appeared beneath him: When your girlfriend says you need to act normal.

The clip had been viewed more than nine thousand times.

I watched it twice, then turned the sound off. The comments moved too quickly to read. People called him fearless, disgusting, brilliant, and relatable. One person wrote, Who is the woman? She looks like she’s about to report him. Another answered, That’s the bit. She hates joy.

The account was called Rook’s Nest. Its profile picture showed a black chess piece on a yellow background. There were dozens of videos, most featuring Derek in public places: a laundromat, a train platform, a hardware store, the lobby of a hotel. In every clip, someone nearby flinched or stared. In several, I could recognize my own shoulder, my coat, the side of my face. I had not known I was being filmed. I had not agreed to be part of anything.

I closed the app and sat on the edge of the bathtub until my knees stopped shaking.

When I got home, Derek was on the couch with two of our mutual friends, Jonah and Priya. They were laughing at something on his phone. The laughter stopped when I walked in, not completely, but enough to make the room feel guilty.

“Mara,” Priya said. “We were just watching Derek’s new thing.”

“His new thing?”

Jonah looked at Derek. “She doesn’t know?”

“She knows I make videos,” Derek said.

“I know you have an account,” I said. “I didn’t know you were filming me.”

He put the phone face down. “You’re in the background.”

“I’m the caption.”

Priya’s expression changed. “It’s satire.”

“Satire requires consent?”

“It’s not a documentary,” Derek said. “No one thinks you’re actually being attacked.”

Jonah gave a nervous laugh. “You do have a very serious face, Mara.”

There it was: the story already traveling without me. I was the serious girlfriend, the person who could not take a joke, the woman who stood beside laughter and asked it to lower its voice. Derek had not needed to lie exactly. He had only needed to choose the most flattering interpretation of himself and the least generous interpretation of me.

After they left, I asked him who Rook was.

“My producer.”

“Producer of what?”

“Short-form comedy.”

“With footage of me?”

“With footage of life.”

“You made me part of your life without telling me.”

He stood by the sink, rinsing a glass that was already clean. “You’re acting like I sold your medical records.”

“How many videos are there?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many include me?”

“Why are you interrogating me?”

The question was so familiar that I could feel my mind reaching for the old response: I’m not interrogating you, I’m just asking. I stopped myself.

“Because I am asking,” I said. “And you are refusing to answer.”

He set down the glass. “You want to know the truth? People like the character. They think she’s hilarious.”

“The character is me.”

“It’s an exaggerated version.”

“Who is paying you?”

His eyes flickered. Not toward the phone this time, but toward the hallway, where his backpack rested beneath the coat hooks.

“Nobody.”

“Then why did Rook text about people loving the market clip?”

“Because he likes the numbers.”

“What numbers?”

He smiled without showing his teeth. “You’re making this very unsexy.”

I slept in the guest room that night. At three in the morning, I heard the apartment door open and close. Derek’s footsteps crossed the floor. A drawer slid shut. When I looked out, he was standing at the kitchen counter with his phone connected to a small laptop. A progress bar crawled across the screen. Beside it was a folder labeled GALA ARC.

He saw me and closed the laptop.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

“What’s the gala arc?”

“A joke.”

“Is it going to include me?”

“Everything includes you lately.”

I returned to the guest room before he could see that I was crying.

The next day, Nia and I ate lunch on the steps behind Brightwell. Wind pushed dry leaves against our shoes. I told her about the account, the clips, and the folder. I told her I still did not know whether Derek was earning money, and I heard how ridiculous that sounded. As if payment were the line between violation and inconvenience.

“You don’t need to prove a financial motive,” she said.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I picked a thread from my sleeve. “I can’t just blow up my relationship every time he does something cruel.”

“You can call something cruel before it ruins your life.”

“What if it’s not as bad as it looks?”

“Then he can show you the account, delete the clips, and stop.”

The simplicity of her answer frightened me. I had been treating the situation as a maze because a maze implied that I needed to find the correct exit. Nia was reminding me that Derek had built the walls.

That evening, I made one practical plan. I told Derek that he was not to film me, post me, or include me in any project without my explicit agreement. I asked him to remove every clip that showed me and to bring me a complete list of where the footage had been shared. I wrote the request in an email so there would be no argument about what I had said.

He read it at the table while I stood by the window.

“You’re sending me a workplace memo,” he said.

“I’m making the boundary clear.”

“You really think a document can make me respect you?”