The notification hits my phone while I’m still standing in the doorway, salt air clinging to my hair from the cliffs.
Theo sprawls on the couch, socks half-off, thumbs flying over his controller. The muffled churn of washers downstairs blends with the explosions on his video game, turning the apartment into a single vibrating hum. My hand shakes from leftover adrenaline as I juggle keys, recorder bag, and grocery-store sushi I picked up on the way home.
“Pause it,” I say. “We have to celebrate.”
“You were gone forever,” he grumbles, but he hits pause. The screen freezes on some doomed soldier mid-sprint. “Did the dead prom girl talk back this time?”
“Don’t say that,” I say, dropping the sushi on the table and nudging aside math worksheets. “And her name is Juliet.”
My phone buzzes again in my hand. I glance down.
TrueCrimeNow tagged you in a post.
My pulse jumps. TrueCrimeNow is the podcast equivalent of being invited onstage at the regatta gala—polished, national, the kind of show that sells mattress ads in between gruesome autopsies.
I swipe the notification open with a fingertip that still feels gritty from cliff dust.
The post stares back at me: *“New obsession: #GlassRoses pod. Small-town prom queen, cold case, a single mom host who actually cares about ethics. Start with Ep 3. Thank me later.”* There’s a screenshot of my cover art—the glass rose centerpieces from 1997, reframed and glowing against a black background.
“Theo,” I say, and my voice pitches higher than usual. “Theo, look.”
He drags himself off the couch and pads over, the floorboards creaking under his weight. He squints at the screen. “That blue checkmark means famous, right?”
“That blue checkmark means they have about half a million listeners,” I say. “And they just told all of them to listen to us.”
The word us makes something warm flare in my chest.
I drop into my wobbly thrift-store chair and yank my laptop open. The keyboard feels sticky from some old juice spill, but the boot-up chime might as well be an orchestra. I click through to my hosting dashboard, fingers flying.
The graph has sprouted a mountain.
“Whoa,” I breathe. “We hit the cliffs in real life and online in the same twenty-four hours.”
Theo leans over my shoulder, smelling like laundry detergent and kid sweat. “Is that good or bad?”
“That’s… rent,” I say. “And groceries that aren’t processed cheese. That’s maybe getting our own washer so I stop losing your socks to everyone else’s underwear.”
He grins, that gap-toothed flash that still looks five to me. “So rich-people rich?”
“Let’s not get regatta-rich,” I say. “But maybe ‘don’t panic at the power bill’ rich.”
My laptop pings: new email from a sponsor inquiry, one from “Media Booking,” three from strangers with subject lines like “I KNEW JULIET” and “tip about prom.” Discord pings on my phone, Sadie blowing up my DMs with shrieking all-caps.
Theo’s eyes widen at the stream of notifications. “Are you… going viral?” he asks.
I laugh, dizzy and exhausted. “I think we might be, baby.”
His shoulders release a little, the tight little knot between his eyebrows smoothing. “So… things might finally get easier?” he says, tentative, like he doesn’t quite trust the words.
I close the laptop halfway and look at him. His hair sticks up in ridiculous cowlicks, and one of his knees has a mystery bruise. He came back to this town because I dragged him, because I decided digging up a prom queen’s bones was worth the humiliation of living above a laundromat.
“Yeah,” I say, pulling him into a one-armed hug that he grudgingly accepts. “I think things might finally get easier.”
The smell of hot oil from the downstairs fryers sneaks under the door. The washers thud, the dryers whine. Upstairs, in our little floating box above Crescent Bay, I pop the lid on the sushi and decide to believe it.
I don’t know yet that someone else is celebrating too, watching the same numbers climb, taking notes on what color my son’s sweatshirt is.
By morning, the apartment sounds like a newsroom.
My old laptop fan roars. Email pings stack on top of Discord chimes and Twitter notifications. The kettle screams on the stove. Outside the kitchen window, the gulls throw their own commentary over the alley, shrill and hungry.
I stand barefoot on the cold linoleum, tea bag string wrapped tight around my finger while the inbox populates. The subject lines scroll in a blur.
“Regional public radio feature?”
“Love Glass Roses—possible ad partnership”
“I was there that night”
“Noah’s cousin wants to talk”
“You’re what this case needed”
“You are disgusting”
My shoulders go up at that last one, then drop again when another wave arrives to push it down the list.
My phone buzzes across the table like a trapped insect. Sadie, again.
SADIE: MARAAAA
SADIE: DO YOU SEE THIS
SADIE: WE’RE TOP 10 TRUE CRIME ON APPLE PODS
SADIE: SORRY FOR ALL CAPS BUT I’M LITERALLY SHAKING
SADIE: ok breathing
SADIE: reporters joining the discord, I’m making a Press Info channel plz don’t yell at me
I thumb a reply with one hand while pouring boiling water over the tea bag with the other.
ME: You’re doing great. Just no doxxing any reporters. Or anyone. For real.
ME: I’ll hop in later. Flooding here.
She replies with a string of rose emojis and a gif of confetti exploding behind a microphone.
The mug warms my fingers. Downstairs, a washer door slams. Someone laughs, the sound muffled through the floor, reminding me there’s a whole world not cut into squares on my screen.
I click open a message from “AdFusion Audio.”
“We love your show’s tone and growth trajectory. Are you open to host-read ads for an initial run of three sponsors—meal kit, mattress, and a women-led financial literacy app? CPM is negotiable, but we’re thinking…”
The number they propose makes my vision fog for a second. With that, I could buy Theo new sneakers before he wears these ones to threads. I could maybe stop counting how many days until the next child support payment that never arrives.
I forward the email to myself with a subject line of THINK BEFORE SAYING YES and force my cursor back to the main inbox.
A local TV station wants me on their “In-Depth” segment to talk about “the power of podcasts to bring justice.” An advocacy group invites me to be a panelist at a Prom Throwback-themed fundraiser, the irony thick enough to spread with a knife. Three different self-described psychics claim Juliet “talks through them” when they listen.
I skim a message from a woman in another state who says she recognized Juliet’s eyeliner technique in an old photo and believes they could be related. Another from a man who insists Noah confessed to him once at a regatta after-party, language sloppy and grandiose.
Each subject line tugs at me like a hook. Each one says, you owe us attention now.
The tea goes cold beside my elbow. My cursor hovers over a folder I labeled “Prom Claims” because calling it “Possible Lies” felt too cynical for 7:00 a.m.
“Mom?” Theo calls from the doorway to the tiny hall. He smells like toothpaste and the cheap body spray he’s suddenly obsessed with, spicy and too sweet. His navy hoodie sits crooked over his T-shirt, backpack hanging from one shoulder. “Bus in ten.”
I jolt, slam the laptop halfway shut, and grab the paper bag lunch I threw together.
“Right,” I say. “You good? Homework? Charger? No secret grenades?”
“Only my charm,” he says, deadpan.
I ruffle his hair. He ducks away but lets me kiss the top of his head. “Text me when you get there,” I say. “And stay away from the rocks behind the school, okay? No shortcuts.”
“I know,” he groans. “You’ve told me like eight hundred times about the rock shelf of death.”
“That’s not what I called it,” I say, but he’s already backing toward the door. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” he mumbles, and then he’s gone, footsteps clattering down the narrow stairs.
I stand in the doorway a second longer than necessary, listening. The front door downstairs slams. A moment later, the distant rumble of the school bus drifts up from the street, mixing with the whine of a spin cycle.
My phone buzzes a minute later. THEO: on bus 👍
I exhale and reopen the laptop.
The inbox has added fifteen new messages.
Near the top, a subject line waits that I don’t remember seeing before.
“History doesn’t have to repeat.”
I frown. It’s from a generic email address, a throwaway string of letters and numbers at a big provider. No name. No profile picture.
My cursor hovers over it while I sip lukewarm tea. Another email dings in above it, pushing it down one slot: a journalist at a national outlet asking for a quote about “the ethics of crowdsourcing evidence.”
“You getting what you wanted, Juliet?” I whisper to the empty kitchen. “Because this is what attention looks like.”
I click on the reporter to star it, then, against whatever remaining instinct counts as self-preservation, I click the unknown subject line.
The email opens with a photo.
For a second, my brain refuses to parse it. My eyes register navy, gray, muted yellow. Then the shapes snap into place.
Theo stands at the bus stop a block away, captured from across the street. His hoodie is zipped half up. His backpack strap has slid down one shoulder, the way it did when he left. His head is turned three-quarters away from the camera, profile visible enough that anyone who knows him would recognize that jawline, that cowlick.
The sidewalk around him is wet, early-morning light reflected in thin puddles. In the background, our building peeks over the parked cars, the laundromat’s windows fogged from the first cycle of the day.
My heart slams so hard my vision pulses. My free hand grips the edge of the table until my knuckles hurt.
Under the photo, the text reads:
She wore ivory. He wears navy. Don’t let history repeat.
No greeting. No signature. Just that.
I hear my own pulse in my ears, loud and tinny. My stomach lurches, bile burning the back of my throat.
Ivory.
My mind flips through old images: Juliet in that dress, the one the salon women raved about. Not white, they all said. Ivory. Like candle wax. Like bone. The beaded bodice that caught the gym lights, the tiny snag at the hem only people behind her could see.
No one has used that word on my show. I’ve called it “cream,” “pale,” “off-white,” nervous about repeating the local paper’s dreamy adjectives. Katie said ivory in the teachers’ lounge, twisting her coffee cup with white-knuckled fingers, but I didn’t record her. I didn’t mention it on air.
Whoever wrote this knows the exact word.
Whoever wrote this stood close enough to photograph my kid in his navy hoodie without him noticing.
My chair screeches back. I’m on my feet before I register moving, the laptop screen throwing that cursed sentence across the room in hard blue letters.
I lunge for the door, heart pounding, and throw the deadbolt even though it was already locked. My hand flies to the kitchen window next, yanking the cheap blind down so fast it slaps the sill.
The apartment closes in around me. Without the view of the street, the place feels smaller, the air denser, thick with detergent and grease and panic.
My phone buzzes on the table. For a wild second I picture that email sender on the other end, watching me from a car, laughing.
It’s Sadie again.
SADIE: someone just posted a thread about the missing chaperone
SADIE: this thing is catching FIRE
SADIE: you ok? you’ve been quiet this morning
I stare at her words. My fingers hover over the keyboard, then drop away. I can’t send her this. I cannot drop a live grenade into a community already vibrating with conspiracy.
I grab the phone and stab out a different message, to a different name.
ME: Luz. Call me ASAP. Threat involving Theo. And Juliet’s dress.
My thumb hesitates over the send arrow, then hits it. The message whooshes away.
Back on the laptop, the photo of Theo blurs as my eyes sting. I reach for the trackpad, hand trembling, and force myself to scroll, looking for more text. There’s a single line buried in the metadata at the bottom, probably auto-inserted by whatever device they used.
Taken 7:42 a.m.
The time stamp hits me harder than the words. They stood there with a camera while I was upstairs counting sponsor dollars and worrying about my “brand voice.”
I slam the lid of the laptop closed. The sound is too loud, a slammed door in miniature.
“No,” I say to the kitchen, to the reek of fryer oil and the hiss of the kettle reheating. “You don’t get to do that.”
My hands shake, but the shaking has a different edge now. Heat crawls up the back of my neck, fury sliding in alongside the fear.
Whoever they are, they want me trapped between two images: Juliet’s ivory dress flying over the cliff and my son’s navy hoodie at the curb. They want me to fold, to decide that truth isn’t worth that risk.
I march to the bedroom and yank open Theo’s top drawer, pulling out a different hoodie—a red one from his old soccer league. I lay it on the bed like a talisman against repetition.
“We’re changing your route,” I whisper to no one. “We’re changing your clothes. We’re changing the rules.”
Back in the kitchen, I open the laptop again, this time with deliberate movements. I forward the email to Luz with “URGENT” in the subject line and drag it into a folder labeled Threats that didn’t exist ten minutes ago.
My mouse hovers over the “New Episode” button on my podcast dashboard.
I can hear Oracle’s measured voice from their last voicemail, the way they called my show a “game board.” I can hear the PTA mothers calling me reckless, Elliot’s smooth concern about “community harm.”
I look at Theo’s tiny, pixelated face in that bus stop photo until it swims.
“You picked the wrong player,” I whisper toward the screen. “You want me to walk away, you should have left my kid out of Juliet’s story.”
My finger lowers toward the trackpad, and I start planning the next episode in my head—not about downloads, not about virality, but about what happens when a town’s ghosts start stalking the living in broad daylight, and who gets to decide when the story stops.