I watch the download counter jump like a heartbeat.
The mini-update about the mixtape has been live for twenty-six minutes and the numbers tick upward in real time, each refresh a little hit of validation. I only teased it—no audio yet, just my voice saying, “I’ve obtained a new artifact from prom night that includes Juliet’s own voice. I’m working with experts to verify and responsibly share it.” Vague enough to keep lawyers calm, juicy enough to keep listeners hooked.
Neon from the liquor store across the street bleeds through my blinds, painting the kitchen a sickly blue. The dryers downstairs thump rhythmically under my feet. From the open window comes the faint salt tang of the bay and a distant bassline from some waterfront soundcheck, the town already pre-gaming for the next regatta fundraiser.
I should open my editing software. I should be scrubbing the tape, isolating Juliet’s words from the wash of prom noise. Instead, I have Reddit open in one tab and the Discord in another, both feeds scrolling fast enough to blur.
OP dropped a PROM TAPE??
Is this the famous JR+? mix??
Mystery Boy CONFIRMED???
My cheeks warm, and not from the laundromat’s heat. This is what every independent podcaster secretly wants: a live, breathing audience that reacts within minutes, that cares enough to theorize in group chats and spreadsheets.
I click into a new thread climbing the sidebar: [DISCUSSION] Mystery Boy Voice ID Megathread (PROM TAPE SPOILERS).
I haven’t played them the argument yet, but of course I’d mentioned that there was one. “Private isn’t the same as secret.” “I’m not your secret anymore.” A little too quotable not to share.
I scroll past a few jokes, some half-baked acoustic analyses.
Then my eyes snag on a username I don’t recognize: GlassHouseTruth.
Their comment is long, and someone has given it a gold award.
Okay, I know we’re not supposed to speculate on real names until Mara confirms on air, but I can’t stay quiet watching everyone pretend they don’t remember WHO was missing from the prom staff photo.
The cadence, the way he says “ruin everything”? I’d bet money that’s Mr. C from English—the one who “resigned” after prom. He taught speech & drama. I literally had him. Same voice.
For anyone who wants to verify, here’s his faculty page from his current school:
Underneath, there are three links. A private school website two towns inland. A cached PDF of a faculty bio, complete with headshot. A LinkedIn profile.
My stomach drops.
Replies stack under it like falling bricks.
omg that FACE. He looks like the type who “mentors” pretty girls.
He works with kids still?? This is why we need citizen journalism.
posting his address in a sec. stay tuned.
I whisper, “No,” to the laptop, the word barely making it past my teeth.
More comments load.
134 Bayview Lane, right? Property records are public, babes.
I’m 40 minutes away. Low-key tempted to grab a megaphone.
Someone pastes a screenshot of a map, red pin dropped on a small house tucked not far from a tree line. The town name sits only a few inches from Crescent Bay on the screen, like contagion spreading.
My fingers go slick on the trackpad. I scroll faster, searching for a line—any line.
One user writes, “Mods are going to delete this, you guys are going too far.”
Another replies, “Mara literally asked us to help. ‘Crowdsourced justice,’ remember?”
The words jab at me, hot and stupid.
I never told anyone to post a home address. I never told anyone to drive forty minutes with a megaphone.
Someone adds a screenshot of an email compose window addressed to the school’s headmaster, subject line: URGENT: TEACHER IS PROM NIGHT PREDATOR? The body text is half-written, already dripping with certainty.
My mouth tastes like aluminum. I slam the laptop closed for a second just to shut the light off, plunging the kitchen into a low gold glow from the stove hood. My heart bangs against my ribs so hard my vision fuzzes at the edges.
I flip the laptop open again. The thread is still there. More comments now.
“I called the school. Left a voicemail.”
“Posting his phone number for anyone else who wants to share their concerns ;).”
The smiley face makes my skin crawl.
A notification pings from the top bar. New modmail in the Discord, tagged URGENT.
###
Sadie’s message is a wall of text, words stacked with that panicky energy I recognize from too many caffeine-fueled nights in my own drafts folder.
hey hey hey are you seeing the sub right now???
I JUST logged in and people are posting addresses. I’m nuking what I can but it’s like whack-a-mole, they keep reposting with screenshots.
I swear to god this wasn’t me. I didn’t leak his name. I only hinted about the missing chaperone. You told me not to dox, remember?? I REMEMBER.
I stare at her last line. My reflection wobbles faintly in the laptop screen—dark crescents under my eyes, hair scraped into a knot that’s losing the battle with humidity.
My fingers hover for a second, then I type back.
I’m seeing it.
This is bad, Sadie. Really bad.
Before I can continue, the typing indicator pops up on her side, three dots bouncing like a nervous heartbeat.
Someone made a whole voice-comparison thread and is citing our episode timestamps like a legal brief. They’re talking about “citizen arrest”??
I banned GlassHouseTruth but they made at least three throwaway accounts already. IPs are all over the place. VPN maybe? I don’t know.
I’m trying to DM you a screenshot… hang on.
Another attachment lands. It’s a screenshot of a Twitter reply to my promo, some rando quoting me: “We’re going to do this together.” The caption underneath says, “you heard the woman.” The tweet tags Mr. Cooke’s alleged handle.
I rub my forehead until it hurts.
I type, slowly, forcing each word through my stiff fingers.
This is not what I meant by together.
We have to shut this down.
My phone buzzes against the table, skittering slightly on the wood. Unknown number.
For a second I think about letting it ring out. Then the subreddit refreshes again in the background, more comments appearing, and I snatch the phone up like a lifeline.
“Hello?”
Static crackles, then a wavering exhale.
“Mara?” a man says. “Is this—this is Mara Lane?”
The voice is rougher than I remember, more gravel than chalkboard, but there’s a familiar cadence under the strain. Mr. Cooke.
My hand grips the edge of the table until my knuckles ache. “Yes. Mr. Cooke?”
“They found me,” he says. No preamble. No hello. Just that tight, strangled sentence. “I’m getting emails at work. Someone called the front desk pretending to be a reporter. My neighbor says there were kids outside the house taking pictures of my car.”
The laundromat hum drops away behind the words. My pulse roars in my ears.
“I didn’t post your name,” I say. “I haven’t identified—”
“You didn’t have to.” Paper rustles on his end, maybe a letter clenched too hard. “You put the gun on the table and walked out of the room. You knew someone would pick it up.”
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. From the corner of my eye, the laptop screen shows Sadie’s DM popping up again and again, little digital flares.
“I told you what I remembered,” he says. “I tried to give you something because I thought—” He cuts himself off, a bitter laugh scraping out. “They’re sending pictures of my students. Do you understand? They’re telling me to confess before ‘the bay takes another girl.’”
My fingers go numb. “I never asked anyone to do this,” I say. “I’ll tell them to stop. I’ll tell everyone—”
“You don’t control them,” he says. “You told me that at the bar, remember? That the story belongs to the listeners now.”
Each word lands like a stone.
“I have to go,” he adds abruptly. “The headmaster wants to see me.”
“Wait, Mr. Cooke—”
The line clicks dead.
I lower the phone slowly, the plastic slick in my palm. My knee bounces under the table, an involuntary rhythm.
On the laptop, Sadie’s newest message glows.
I just got a modmail saying “if the cops won’t protect girls, we will.” From a brand new account. Their only other activity is in some creepy vigilante sub.
I’m banning and reporting but it’s getting reposted on other platforms. I can’t put this back in the box, Mara.
I’m so sorry. I thought we were helping her.
I hear the catch through the text, hear the early bloom of tears she’ll apologize for later. My own throat has gone tight enough that swallowing hurts.
I type:
None of this means Juliet deserved silence.
But this? This isn’t justice. It’s a mob.Lock the thread. Sticky a post telling people to stop. Link to my show page. I’ll handle the rest.
I don’t know what “handle” looks like yet. I only know I can’t keep hiding behind the idea that I’m just making content and the fans are responsible for themselves.
Julien used a tape deck; I use RSS feeds and social graphs. The town might swap out disposable cameras for iPhones at the Prom Throwback fundraiser, but this is the same place where kids used to sneak down to the rock shelf below the pretty cliffs, thinking they were invincible. Back then, the danger was the fall. Now it’s the push.
###
The mic smells faintly like dust and my last recorded coffee breath.
I drag it closer across the table, the rubber feet squeaking softly. Outside, a car honks, someone shouts, and the muffled echo of bass from the waterfront rolls through like a reminder that other people in Crescent Bay are having a perfectly normal night—hair sprayed, boat shoes on, glass roses glinting on white-linen tables.
My small apartment feels even smaller with the blinds drawn. The laptop screen throws pale light over my notes, though there aren’t many—a few bullet points where I tried to outline something coherent and kept writing STOP in capital letters.
I hit RECORD.
The software’s red dot lights up. The waveform waits.
I inhale, let the air burn down my throat, and start.
“This is Mara Lane,” I say. My voice sounds thinner than usual in my own ears. “Host of Glass Roses.”
I pause, listening to the hum of the laundromat, letting it anchor me.
“I wasn’t planning to drop another episode this week,” I say. “But I need to talk to you. Not about new clues or theories. About what we are doing. What I have helped create.”
I can feel myself slipping into the cadence I use on the show, but I force more raw edges in, less polish.
“Tonight I watched a thread spiral on our unofficial subreddit,” I say. “In that thread, listeners named a real person as a suspect in Juliet Reeves’s death. They posted addresses. They called his workplace. They threatened him.”
Saying it out loud makes my stomach clench.
“I want you to hear me clearly,” I continue. “That is not investigation. That is harassment. It is dangerous. It can ruin the life of someone who has already been chewed up once by this town’s rumor mill, whether or not he made mistakes in 1997.”
My fingers tighten on the edge of the table until the wood cuts into my skin.
“When I invited you into this story, I asked for help,” I say. “Help digging through public records. Help remembering songs and faces and corners of the gym the adults painted over. I did not ask anyone to confront suspects at their homes, or call employers, or send threats.”
I think of Theo asking if I “like dead girls.” Of Katie’s hands twisting around each other, knuckles white. Of Mr. Cooke’s voice, thin and wired with fear.
“Juliet deserves the truth,” I say, each word careful. “But she does not deserve to have someone else’s life destroyed in her name because a bunch of strangers on the internet decided they recognized a voice through twenty-six years of tape hiss.”
I swallow, my throat dry.
“If you love this show, if you care about Juliet, you will not participate in doxxing, harassment, or vigilante ‘justice.’ You will not show up at anyone’s house. You will not contact employers or family members. You will report those posts and you will walk away.”
My voice wobbles on the last phrase. I leave it in.
“I’m talking to all of you,” I say, softer now. “The ones who send me your own stories of being hurt and ignored. The ones who are furious that men like Elliot Harrow keep smiling in yacht-club photos while girls like Juliet land on rocks. I understand that fury. I share it. I live in the same town full of glass houses and polished plaques.”
I think of Calder saying the town won’t forgive anyone who throws rocks at those houses.
“But turning that rage into new harm doesn’t make us better than the people who let Juliet fall,” I say. “It makes us part of the same machine that uses girls’ pain for entertainment and then spits out the next scandal.”
The mic picks up the faint, watery inhale I drag in.
“I’m asking you to stop,” I say. “Not because anyone’s making me legally. Because I’m realizing in real time that I cannot unring this bell. I can only decide what sound I add to it.”
I reach out and tap the stop button with more force than necessary. The waveform snaps still, a solid block of my own voice fossilized in pixels.
My shoulders sag. The kitchen feels like it’s exhaling with me.
I edit just enough to slice out the dead air at the beginning and end. I don’t touch the wobbles. I leave in the places where my breath catches, the little scrape of my chair when I shifted. For once, I want them to hear that I am not in control.
When I upload, I title it: EMERGENCY UPDATE: THIS IS NOT JUSTICE.
The progress bar crawls. My leg bounces. Outside, a siren wails somewhere along the main road, then fades toward the harbor. The salt in the air has gone sharp, like metal on my tongue.
As soon as the episode is live, my phone buzzes again and again—push notifications from the subreddit, the Discord, my email, Twitter. Tiny digital hands pounding on the glass of my life.
One notification floats to the top, a new Reddit post tagged META: “Mara Tries To Reel It Back (Thoughts?)” The author is GlassHouseTruth again, somehow already unbanned.
The first line of their post shows in the preview:
“Cute speech. But maybe the real problem is who she chooses to protect…”
I don’t click.
I just sit in the dim kitchen, the hum of the laundromat under my feet and the cliffs and their treacherous rock shelf hidden somewhere in the darkness beyond town, and I wonder which direction the next rock will fly—and who it will hit when it lands.