The Follower Count

The spreadsheet on Mara Voss’s monitor said her personal Instagram had gained two hundred fourteen followers overnight. She had not posted to that account in eleven months. The last grid tile showed a photo of her sister’s empty sneakers by the front door, dated March of the previous year, and she had stopped scrolling after that.

She clicked the cell twice. The number held.

Monday analytics for the brand account sat in another tab, engagement rates and reach and saves, all of it flat and legible. Her personal account was not part of the pull. She kept it on her phone, logged in, muted, a digital drawer she did not open. Two hundred fourteen new followers in one night on a dead account meant a bot farm had latched on. That happened. It was boring.

Mara copied the number into her anomaly log, a spreadsheet with columns for date, platform, metric, hypothesis, and resolution. She had started the log two years ago, after Lila disappeared, when Mara needed a place to put the things that would not stay put. The log had forty-one rows. Most of them ended with “resolved: bot purge” or “resolved: platform glitch.” She typed the date, the number, and in the hypothesis column wrote “bot farm, likely Indonesian click farm or engagement pod.” In the resolution column she left it blank.

The office around her was quiet. Monday, eight-forty in the morning, the building still half-dark. Her desk lamp threw a cone of yellow across the keyboard. The brand account for which she was responsible sold linen napkins and ceramic butter dishes to women who wanted their homes to look like the homes in the brand’s photographs. Mara had built that audience from sixty thousand to four hundred thousand over four years. She knew exactly which posts would move the needle, which captions would get saved, which color grading would make a stranger tap the follow button and then forget why.

Two hundred fourteen strangers had tapped that button on her dead account while she slept.

She filed a report with the platform’s automated tool. The confirmation email arrived in her work inbox. She moved it to a folder called “housekeeping” and went back to the napkin brand.

At lunch she checked her phone. The follower count was two hundred fifteen.

Mara ate her sandwich over the sink in the office kitchen. The rye bread had gone slightly stiff at the edges. She watched the number on the screen, then locked the phone and put it face-down on the counter. A bot farm could add followers in waves. A wave was not a pattern. She would check again tomorrow, and if the count had moved by another few hundred, she would file a second report and wait for the platform to sweep the accounts.

That night she slept badly. Her apartment on Halstead Street held heat in the walls, and October had not yet turned the radiators on. She woke at 3:14 AM to a sound like a wet fingertip drawn across glass.

It came from the nightstand. Her phone lay there, screen dark. The sound came again, two seconds later, the same slow squeak of skin on a windowpane. Mara reached for the phone. The screen stayed black. No banner. No app icon. She opened the notification history. Empty.

She held the phone in her palm until the screen timed out. The apartment was silent except for the refrigerator cycling on in the kitchen. She put the phone back on the nightstand, face-down, and lay still until her alarm went off at six.

By morning the follower count was two hundred sixteen.

The next night she put the phone in the kitchen, inside a drawer, under a stack of dish towels. At 3:14 AM the sound came from the living room. Her laptop sat closed on the coffee table. The sound came from the laptop. She knew it before she walked out there, before she stood in the dark living room in bare feet and listened to the wet fingertip drag across the closed lid of the machine, once, twice, and then stop.

She did not open the laptop. She went back to bed and lay with her eyes on the ceiling until the streetlights went out.

In the morning, the follower count was two hundred nineteen.

Mara began to document in earnest. She created a new tab in the anomaly log and called it “personal_audience_oct.” She recorded each follower by number, date, and time of first appearance. She recorded the 3:14 AM sound each time it woke her, noting which device had produced it and how many repetitions she heard before it stopped. She did not tell anyone at work. She did not tell her mother, who called every Sunday and asked if Mara