The cliffs come first.
I catch them between the gaps in the waterfront mansions, that jagged strip of rock shelf where the land drops into the bay. The late afternoon light hits the water in sheets, and for a second I taste hairspray and cheap champagne on my tongue, hear distant bass throbbing from parties I was never invited to.
Theo kicks the back of my seat with both sneakers. “Mom, my leg’s asleep. How much longer?”
“Five minutes,” I lie. My phone wedged in the cup holder says twelve, not counting traffic and my courage.
We roll past a row of glass-and-shingle palaces on the cliff road, all white railings and manicured hydrangeas. I know who owns most of them without checking the mailbox plaques. The Harrows. The Calders. The Pierces. Same surnames that sit on school boards, police rosters, yacht club programs. Same names carved into cherry-wood plaques at Crescent Bay High.
Same names that decided what went into Juliet’s official story and what slipped quietly off the record into the dark.
“These houses look like hotels,” Theo says, pressing his face to the glass. His breath fogs a circle that he erases with his palm. “Do famous people live here?”
“Old people with money live here,” I say. “Same thing, sometimes.”
I turn off the cliff road before the overlook, my hands tightening on the wheel on instinct. I don’t look toward the crumbling path down to the rock shelf. I don’t look toward the spot where they said Juliet fell in her ivory dress—the version the town keeps framed like one of those glass rose centerpieces, pretty from a distance, cutting up close.
I focus on my new address: 17 Harbor, second floor. Over the laundromat. Under my own pride.
Crescent Bay shifts as I get closer to downtown, wealth thinning into narrow streets and clapboard houses. The air thickens with salt and detergent from the laundromat vents, and beneath that I catch the faint, metallic-smelling breath of low tide. A regatta flyer flaps limply on a light pole, the edges curled and gray. The Prom Throwback fundraiser banner from last month still hangs across the main intersection, adults grinning in 90s dresses and tuxes, frozen in mid-laugh.
Juliet would have killed at that party. The thought slides in before I can block it.
I find the building by the glow: rows of industrial washers behind steamed-up glass, the rhythmic slosh and rumble spilling into the street. Above, a crooked set of wooden stairs climbs to a narrow landing and a dented metal door. Two liquor stores bookend the corner, their neon beer signs flickering against the dusk.
“Home sweet laundromat,” I say.
Theo makes a face but tries to turn it into a smile for me. “At least we’ll always have clean socks?”
“That’s the spirit.” My laugh comes out thin. “Come on. Help me with the lighter boxes. Anything with a skull and crossbones on the side, I’ll handle.”
“You drew those,” he says, already unbuckling. “To be dramatic.”
“Correct.”
The stairs creak under our combined weight and the weight of our life in cardboard. My fingers sting where the tape bites into them. I smell old frying oil from downstairs, mixed with lavender dryer sheets, the kind my mother used for the rich girls’ prom curls in ‘97. For a second I’m fourteen again, sweeping hair off the salon floor while the bay air sneaks in through the cracked window and the radio plays “Lovefool” on repeat.
Juliet had walked in late that afternoon, hair in a careless knot, sunglasses perched in her dark curls. She had kicked off her sandals, dropped into the salon chair, and said, “Make me look like I don’t give a damn, Celeste.” My mother had laughed and reached for the hairspray like it was a magic wand.
I blink the memory away and focus on the door in front of me.
The key sticks in the lock twice before it turns. The apartment smells like old paint and lemon cleaner, like someone scrubbed hard but couldn’t erase the years. Scuffed hardwoods, low ceiling, a cramped rectangle of kitchen with a laminate counter that curls up at the edges. One small window facing the street lets in neon from the liquor store sign across the way, painting a green stripe on the opposite wall.
“It’s… bigger than it looked in the pictures,” I say.
Theo walks to the center of the room and spins slowly, taking it in. The ceiling fan wobbles above him like it’s considering a dramatic exit. “My room’s which one?”
“Left door.” I point with the box in my arms. “I’ll be right behind you.”
He disappears into the tiny bedroom without complaint, because he’s eleven and his standards are almost merciful. I set the box marked KITCHEN down on the counter that will be my studio. The laminate is sticky in spots, my fingertips catching. The hum of the laundromat rises through the floor, a constant mechanical heartbeat.
It’s not a soundproof booth. It’s not even quiet. It’s what I can afford.
I dig my phone out of my back pocket and thumb open the email app, because denial doesn’t pay bills. The top message is from my internet provider, subject line screaming in red: FINAL NOTICE – SERVICE INTERRUPTION IMMINENT.
I open it. The words blur for a second from dry eyes, not emotion, I tell myself. Past-due amount, date, “to avoid disconnection, remit payment immediately.” No euphemisms, just corporate teeth.
“Great,” I mutter. “Perfect timing.”
I drop the phone next to my battered laptop on the counter and flip the lid. The screen wakes slowly, like it resents being uprooted as much as I do. A salt ring stains the corner where I once set down coffee on a night I worked until sunrise. The trackpad is slick with use. My fingerprint unlocks the machine, and the familiar home screen blooms: folders labeled EPISODES, RAW AUDIO, B-ROLL, and one folder tucked in the corner named GR_SEASON02 that I haven’t opened in months.
One click and the Glass Roses logo fills the screen: a pale blue bay under a night sky, a single glass rose half-submerged in the water, its stem cracked. I hugged myself when I first made it, satisfied with the symbolism. Now it just looks like foreshadowing.
I open the podcast dashboard. Stats load across the page in unforgiving graphs: a long, slow climb from the first episode—disappeared girls in Ohio—peaking at a modest but promising summit around episode eleven, then a steady downhill slide. The last episode I released, a rushed piece on a hit-and-run three towns over, limps along with a fraction of the listens.
Total subscribers: down 38% since last quarter.
Revenue: negligible. Less than negligible, after hosting fees.
“Wow,” I whisper. My voice sounds hollow in the empty kitchen. “You really did it, Mara. You chased your dream right back into your childhood bedroom. Except the bedroom’s above a row of industrial dryers.”
“What?” Theo calls from the bedroom. “You talking to me?”
“Talking to the internet,” I say. “It’s not listening.”
“You always say the internet’s always listening.”
“Not to the right things,” I answer.
I scroll back through the episode list and read the tagline I once typed in a burst of certainty: Stories of girls whose names should have stayed in our mouths instead of old case files.
Juliet’s name never made it into the files the way it should have. The official version turned her into a cautionary tale: drunk prom queen, bad decisions, tragic fall off the cliffs. Noah Pike, the working-class boyfriend with the leather jacket, turned into the monster. Convenient. Clean. Telegenic for the local news.
The part where she drove me home once, hand light on my shoulder as I shook in the passenger seat, never made the cut.
Theo appears in the doorway, hair flattened on one side from the car ride. “My room has a window,” he says. “You can see the bay if you lean way left.”
“See?” I paste on a smile. “Water view. People pay millions for that up on the cliffs.”
He peers at the laptop. “You gonna start recording again?”
“We just got here.”
“So?” He shrugs. “You said once you moved back you’d have more, like, material. ‘Cause this town is full of stories.”
He parrots my words back with my own cadence, and heat crawls up my neck. “I did say that.”
“And you said moving here was temporary,” he adds, softer. “Till the podcast makes money.”
“You really listen when I talk, huh?”
“You talk loud,” he says, cheeks lifting. “And in the car, there’s nowhere to go.”
I reach out and tug him into a hug, breathing in the mix of sweat and grape candy clinging to his T-shirt. His ribs press against my arms. He feels lighter than he should. I tuck that worry away with the rest, in the mental drawer marked LATER THAT YOU NEVER OPEN.
“We’ll make it work,” I say into his hair. “Go pick which side of the room you want the bed on. You get first dibs.”
When he disappears again, I turn back to the screen and click open the GR_SEASON02 folder. Half-finished script documents blink back at me: SECTION_1_INTRO, INTERVIEW_MOTHER_ARKANSAS, EP13_OUTRO_DRAFT. None of them sings. None of them matters enough to keep my internet from going dark or my kid from sharing a futon with me in six months.
I close them all.
My hand moves before my brain catches up, digging into the nearest box labeled MISC. I push aside dish towels, a chipped mug with a true-crime slogan, a bundle of tangled charging cords. At the bottom, wrapped in an old Crescent Bay High hoodie, I feel the stiff edge of a photo sleeve.
My chest tightens.
I pull it out. The plastic crackles in the warm air. Inside, the prom photo from my mother’s salon wall has warped slightly at the corners but survived the years: Juliet Reeves in ivory satin, a glass rose pinned at her wrist, standing under an arch of metallic balloons. Her dark curls cascade over bare shoulders, sprayed into impossible obedience. The light catches the tiny rhinestones scattered through her hair like stars.
She is smiling at someone just out of frame. Even now, the focus of the whole image follows her gaze, not the camera’s.
Behind her I recognize the old gym—wooden bleachers blurred in the background, a banner half-visible with the year: 1997. The night the town still stages at fundraisers and throwback balls, but only to the point where the music stops. The part after that never gets reenacted.
My thumb traces the glass rose on her wrist through the plastic. I smell the hairspray again, feel the stickiness in my own lungs from that day. I had stood in the salon doorway in my freshman year hoodie, clutching my Latin homework, when Juliet walked past me and paused.
“Mara, right?” she had said, voice warm. “You going to the after-party?”
“I don’t get invited to parties,” I’d mumbled, eyes on my sneakers.
She had given my shoulder a gentle bump. “Then people are idiots. I’ll give you a ride home if you need one.”
She kept that promise later, when I froze outside the gym at the edge of the cliffs and couldn’t make my feet obey. She parked at the curb, cranked the heat, and talked about nothing—song lyrics, hair disasters, how the bay looked like black glass at night—until my breathing slowed.
That girl, that version of her, never made it into the trial transcripts.
Noah Pike did. Noah with his record, his busted car, his lack of a legacy surname. Noah convicted on what the evening news called “overwhelming circumstantial evidence,” as if repetition could replace certainty. People still debate it on old message boards, long threads arguing about bloodstain patterns and timelines, comfortable in the distance of pixels and years.
I look from the photo to my laptop, where my Glass Roses logo glows faintly. Stories of girls whose names should have stayed in our mouths.
I left this town and Juliet’s story behind once, or at least I pretended I did, while I edited other people’s tragedies for other people’s shows. I turned strangers’ pain into clean narrative arcs and neatly packaged ads, and I told myself I was helping by shining a light.
The truth: shining a light sells better when you aim it at someone far away. The backlash feels smaller. The damage, too.
Now I’m back over the laundromat, broke, newly single, one overdue bill away from losing the only thing that lets me work from this crummy kitchen. My creative identity currently fits in a dropdown menu labeled “cancel subscription.”
I balance the photo against the base of my secondhand microphone like a talisman.
“This is a terrible idea,” I tell the empty apartment. The ceiling fan ticks in reply. The hum from downstairs deepens as someone starts a new load of towels.
I plug the mic into the laptop. The cable clicks into place with a small, satisfying sound. The recording software opens, meters jumping faintly with the room noise: the rumble of washers, the distant spin cycle, faint music from a liquor store radio drifting up through the floorboards.
“Mom?” Theo calls. “Can I put my posters up with tape or is that bad for the paint?”
“Tape is fine,” I say, eyes on Juliet’s frozen smile. “We’re not here long enough for them to care.”
I swallow, lean closer to the mic. The familiar weight settles over me—the awareness that once I start, I can’t control who hears this or what they do with it. I’ve watched listeners dissect women’s lives in comment sections, turning messy human pain into puzzles and merch designs. I know exactly how easily Juliet could become content instead of a person.
I also know silence hasn’t done her any favors.
My finger hovers over the red RECORD button. My pulse drums in my ears, matching the machines downstairs. If this flops, Glass Roses dies, and I go back to editing other people’s stories from some fluorescent-lit office while Theo stays with his dad every other week in a town that never asked him to choose between truth and belonging.
I press the button.
The red light blooms.
“My name is Mara Lane,” I say, my voice catching once and steadying. “This is Glass Roses. And today I’m back in Crescent Bay, the town that buried one of its own under a story it liked better than the truth.”
The meters jump higher. I breathe in salt air and detergent and history.
“Her name was Juliet Reeves,” I say, finally giving the name to the mic instead of the inside of my skull. “In 1997, on prom night, she went from queen of Crescent Bay High to a headline about a tragic fall. Her boyfriend, Noah Pike, went from boyfriend to convicted killer, even though the doubts never really went away.”
My hand tightens around the photo sleeve until the plastic groans.
“This season,” I say, “I’m reopening Juliet’s case. Right here. From a kitchen table over a laundromat, in the shadow of the cliffs where this town says she died.”
For a second, I hear my own words from months ago—stories of girls whose names should have stayed in our mouths—and I don’t know whether I’m honoring her or putting new teeth marks in an old wound.
I keep talking anyway.
“If you were there that night,” I say, “if you danced under those balloons or smoked on the cliffs or heard something you’ve never repeated, I want to hear from you.”
My voice drops, instinctively, into a register I use when I mean it.
“Because I was here, too.”
I let that confession hang in the air, raw and unedited, and I wonder who else is listening in this town full of glass houses and thin walls—the bayside mansions, the PTA power lunches, the rock shelf that remembers more than the official record ever will.
Then I ask the question I’ve never dared out loud. “What did we bury with Juliet that night, and what’s going to break when we dig it up?”