My inbox looked like a tide chart: waves and waves of notifications, swells of outrage and advice and “have you considered” essays from strangers who now spoke about Juliet Reeves like they’d shared lockers.
I hunched over my laptop at the kitchen table, the cut in my palm throbbing under its fresh bandage. The gauze pulled when I flexed my fingers on the trackpad. The glass rose had joined the cassette and the threat emails in my mental cabinet of “Things I Probably Should Have Walked Away From By Now,” but instead of walking away, I scrolled.
My listeners’ messages blurred together after a while—heart emojis, legal warnings, conspiracy charts that used more highlighters than my college notebooks ever did. I started tapping through them faster, eyes half-glazed, until a familiar username sliced through the noise.
SadieQ_mod: Forwarding you an anon DM, check your IG. Might be nothing, might be big. Pls be careful with this one. -S
The “pls” hooked me. Sadie didn’t usually abbreviate when she wanted to be heard.
My phone buzzed at the same moment, vibrating against a cereal bowl still rimmed in milk. I wiped my good hand on my jeans and unlocked it. A new Instagram DM sat in the request folder, profile photo a generic gray circle, username a mess of letters that didn’t spell anything.
I opened it.
you’re asking all the wrong people about prom, the message read. the real party wasn’t in that ugly gym. the real prom was out on the water.
A second bubble appeared beneath it, timestamped at three in the morning.
some stories don’t get told because no one outside the boat knew there was a story. harrow island. ask the king and his court about it. just don’t say my name.
A third line flickered in.
she wasn’t supposed to be there. that’s where everything changed.
The kitchen light hummed above me, a fluorescent whine that felt louder than it was. Outside the window, Crescent Bay was washed in pale morning sun, yacht masts etching thin lines into the sky. Harrow Island sat low and dark across the water, a lump of trees and private docks, always just far enough away to feel unreal unless you had an invitation or a boat.
“Of course,” I whispered to no one. “Of course it’s Harrow.”
The Harrows’ grip on this town reached from the regatta trophies to the school board plaques to the PTA donors’ list. Elliot had built his whole podcast empire on the idea of “giving independent voices a platform,” but he still lived in the glass-and-shingle mansion overlooking the cliff where Juliet’s official story ended. Harrow Island was their vacation playground, a chunk of rock and trees bought and manicured to be an adult version of the kids’ cigarette spot below the cliffs—more private, more dangerous, better catered.
My phone buzzed again. Sadie.
You saw it? she wrote. I can’t vouch obviously but cross-refs w/ old yacht club newsletters + some FB pics I’ve archived. Harrow Island is def where the cool kids went in the late 90s. “King and his court” is prob Elliot + them, right??
My thumb hovered over the keyboard.
Probably, I typed back. Don’t say that part out loud anywhere public yet. We’re not doxxing anybody else. I’m serious, Sadie.
A beat, then: I know. I’m still cleaning up the Mr. Cooke mess. I’m sorry, Mara.
I exhaled through my nose, feeling the sting behind my eyes and refusing to let it spill.
We’ll talk about that later, I sent. Right now I need someone who remembers the “cool kids” itinerary that night. Someone who liked being invited so much she kept track of where all the doors were.
I tapped open my contacts and scrolled down to Hailey Pierce.
###
The wine bar sat on the edge of the marina, all reclaimed wood and Edison bulbs and expensive cheese boards. It smelled like citrus cleaner, oaky chardonnay, and a faint edge of sea air sneaking in every time the door opened. Framed black-and-white photos of past regattas and Prom Throwback galas lined the walls—smiling adults in 90s dresses, glass roses on their tables, pretending time hadn’t thickened around their bodies and faces.
I chose a small table near the window so I could see both the harbor and the door. Harrow Island was a smudge in the distance beyond the boats, like someone had thumbed dark charcoal into the horizon. The stem of my water glass felt slick under my fingers.
Hailey arrived twelve minutes late in heels too narrow for the cobblestones outside. Her perfume hit the air a half-second before she did—sharp floral notes layered over hair spray, a scent I associated with locker rooms and prom photos.
“You didn’t say this was, like, an interview,” she said, shrugging off a tan trench coat and sliding into the chair across from me. The overhead lights glossed her blonde blowout, just a hint too bright to be entirely natural. “I thought we were doing… wine mom catch-up, or whatever.”
I smiled, letting her think I was off-balance. “Can’t it be both?”
She eyed my recorder on the table, a small black rectangle next to the menu. “Is that on?”
“No,” I said. “Not unless you want it to be. I just came from another thing.” That part was a lie; the recorder had been sitting idle on my desk for hours. “I’m not rolling without your consent, Hailey. I know that’s your favorite word right now.”
She snorted, then grimaced like she’d surprised herself. “You’re not wrong. Every PTA email has ‘consent form’ somewhere in it. Even the bake sale.”
The server appeared, all dark lipstick and efficient warmth. I ordered a seltzer with lime. Hailey ordered a second-glass-sounding chardonnay even though it was only five thirty.
“Rough day?” I asked.
She waved a manicured hand, nails shellacked a peel-of-orange color that matched her lipstick. “It’s Crescent Bay,” she said. “Every day’s a rough day if you’re not a Harrow or on the yacht club board. Or both.”
I took a sip of my seltzer to hide my reaction. “You used to run that world,” I said. “Class president, prom committee, Prom Throwback co-chair three years in a row. You can’t tell me you don’t still enjoy some of the perks.”
Her mouth twisted around the rim of her glass. “Perks are for the people whose names are on the plaques,” she said. “People like me just bring the deviled eggs and hope our kids get invited on the right boats.”
There it was: the soft spot, the ache under the glossy armor.
“Is that why you came tonight?” I asked. “To make sure your kid doesn’t lose his slot in sailing camp because his mom talked to the wrong podcaster?”
Hailey’s laugh had a brittle edge. “God, you’re dramatic,” she said. “No. I came because I am so sick of listening to your voice through my AirPods while I unload groceries, and then seeing people on Facebook twist halves of stories and drag all of us through the mud. I figured if I talked to you directly maybe I’d stop wanting to throw my phone in the bay.”
The bay outside the window lapped innocently against the pilings, reflecting the bar’s warm lights in broken lines. Out near the mouth of the harbor, the cliffs rose clean and picturesque, hiding the rock shelf, hiding everything else beneath their polished face.
“Then talk to me,” I said. “Off the record, at least for now. Help me tell the story right.”
She rolled the stem of her glass between her fingers, considering. “You already know everything about that night,” she said. “We did your little reenactment. You got your content.”
“I know what happened in the gym,” I said. “Glitter, glass roses, bad punch, slow dance. I don’t know what happened after.”
A tiny muscle jumped in her cheek. She looked down at her wine.
“There was no ‘after,’” she said too quickly. “Juliet left with the wrong boy, you tracked down Mr. Cooke, you got his sad little story. End credits.”
I let a beat stretch between us.
“An anonymous tip came in,” I said finally. “They talked about ‘the real prom’ being out on the water. On Harrow Island.”
The sound of the bar dropped out for a second. I watched the words hit her, watched the color shift in her face: a tiny drain of pink from under the makeup, the way her lips parted then snapped shut.
“Anybody can make up a story on Instagram,” she said, voice lighter than her eyes. “You know that better than anyone.”
“This one mentioned ‘the king and his court,’” I said. “Said Juliet wasn’t supposed to be there. You used to date the king, Hailey. You know who was on that boat.”
Her fingers tightened around her glass stem enough that I wondered if it might snap. Ivory-knuckle tight, the same way mine had around the glass rose.
“You’re reading way too much into a DM,” she said. “People are bored. They want to feel like they were part of something dark and glamorous. Harrow Island, ooh, secret party. It’s just…” She gestured vaguely toward the regatta photos on the wall. “Campfire story stuff.”
“Campfire stories don’t leave glass roses on my doorstep,” I said. The words slipped out before I could pull them back.
Her eyes shot up to mine. “What?”
I exhaled slowly. “Someone left one of those prom centerpieces outside my apartment,” I said. “With a note telling me to stop recording. Same style as the ones from 1997. Same as the ones that show up at the cliffs. At Katie’s house.”
Hailey swallowed. I watched her throat move.
“Jesus,” she whispered. “That’s… sick.”
“Yeah.”
The server dropped our cheese board between us, the air puffing up with the smell of truffle honey and toasted bread. Hailey didn’t look at it.
“I’m not telling you this to scare you,” I said, softer. “I’m telling you because whoever is doing this has a script they’re following. Rock shelf, roses, now me. The more holes there are in the original story, the easier it is for them to write their own ending. So if there was an after-party, if there was something that never made it into the police reports, I need to know before they weaponize it.”
Hailey stared at the table for a long moment. Her nails tapped a tiny rhythm against the glass, matching the bass thudding faintly from a boat bar down the dock.
“You ever notice,” she said finally, not looking up, “how every adult event in this town ends up being a prom? Charity balls, regattas, that stupid Prom Throwback where we all squeeze ourselves into stretchy satin and pretend we’re seventeen again. Same playlists, same glass roses, same people winning popularity contests. We never left that gym.”
“Some of us did,” I said. “Some of us weren’t invited back.”
Her mouth twisted. “You were a freshman,” she said. “You have no idea what it was like, being on top for one night and knowing it was the best it was ever going to get.”
There was the nostalgia—the ache, the static cling of her own youth. I reached for it.
“Then tell me about your best night,” I said. “Tell me where you went after they turned the fluorescent lights back on. Tell me about Harrow Island.”
She flinched at the name, then threw back the rest of her wine in one swallow. The glass hit the table harder than necessary.
“You’re an evil bitch,” she said, but there wasn’t much heat behind it. “You know that?”
“Frequently,” I said.
She let out a breath that sounded like surrender.
“Fine,” she murmured. “There was an after-party. Happy?”
The Edison bulbs hummed above us. I didn’t move.
“We left the gym, the official prom. Declared it boring in that way kids do when they’re scared of the quiet,” she said, eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder. “Elliot had arranged this boat situation through his dad. One of the yacht club guys owed him a favor. Only a few of us were invited. The ‘core group,’ he called it. He liked that phrase.”
My fingers tingled. “Who’s ‘us’?”
“The usual suspects,” she said with a brittle smile. “Elliot, obviously. Me. A couple of his lacrosse buddies. Their girlfriends. A few legacy kids whose parents paid for half the scoreboard. We met at the marina, got ferried out under the cliffs. The bay looked like a postcard. You could see the rock shelf under the moon when the boat lights hit it right.”
I pictured it: the same cliffs where the town said Juliet slipped, the same shelf I’d stared down at with Luz while glass shards glinted in the dark. A boat gliding past, music spilling, kids in tuxes and gowns leaning over the rail with red plastic cups.
“And Harrow Island?” I asked.
“We docked there,” she said. “The big house was locked up; his parents were in Bermuda or Paris or somewhere rich. But the guest house was open. Bar stocked. No parents, no teachers, no retired cops doing chaperone duty. It was… a place where rules didn’t exist.”
The phrase hung between us, heavy.
“Was Juliet there?” I asked.
Hailey shook her head slowly. “Not at first. It was supposed to be ‘our’ night. Elliot kept saying that. No drama, no boyfriends who didn’t belong, no surprises. Then—” She cut herself off, biting her lower lip.
“Then what?”
Her eyes met mine, bright and suddenly sharp. “Then he got a text,” she said. “He went out on the deck to take it, came back in and announced we were getting a special guest. He looked… wired. Like he’d just heard the best or worst news of his life.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. “From Juliet?”
“I don’t know,” Hailey said. “He didn’t say. He just kept repeating, ‘She’s coming. She wants to come. She gets it now.’ We all assumed he meant Juliet, because who else did that pronoun ever mean in 1997?”
Glass clinked at the bar. A group of women laughed near the entrance, their voices riding up on the wave of some joke about PTA drama. Hailey lowered her voice.
“We were shocked,” she continued. “Juliet wasn’t supposed to be there. She’d sworn she was leaving after the gym, heading to some… I don’t know, boyfriend thing. She’d made this big production earlier about not needing Elliot’s world anymore.”
“A secret that would destroy someone important,” I said under my breath, remembering her blurting that out in the gym.
Hailey’s gaze flickered. “She said stuff like that when she was mad,” she said. “But that night, there was a tone. Like she had… receipts.”
Like a tape, I thought. Like an argument recorded over a prom song.
“When did she actually arrive?” I asked.
Hailey’s fingers went still. “I don’t know,” she said. “I told you, we were drunk. People were in the hot tub, on the dock, doing shots in the kitchen. I remember hearing a boat motor later, voices carrying across the water. I remember Elliot disappearing. I remember him coming back soaked up to his knees and telling us the cops would be doing a quick sweep because there’d been ‘an incident’ near the cliffs and everyone needed to say we went straight home from the gym.”
My skin crawled, tiny prickles rising along my arms.
“You’re telling me,” I said slowly, “that the night Juliet died, Elliot Harrow had a half-dozen drunk teenagers on his family’s private island, and you all agreed to pretend the party never happened.”
Hailey’s jaw clenched. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“I’m putting sequence in your mouth,” I said. “You’re the one who brought me to the island.”
She stared at me, eyes going glossy but not spilling. “You can’t put this on the podcast yet,” she said. “You’ll light the whole town on fire. You’ll light me on fire. I have kids in this district, Mara. The Harrows fund their theater program.”
“I won’t go public without corroboration,” I said. That, at least, I could promise and keep. “But I need to know what happened on that island. Even if the official story never wanted it to exist.”
She let out a shuddering breath and reached for her glass, forgetting it was empty. Her fingers closed around air.
“There’s more I don’t remember than I do,” she said. “And I’ve spent twenty-six years trying not to remember any of it at all. But if you’re right, if you poke this, the whole regatta board, the PTA, the donors… they’re not going to come for Elliot. They’re going to come for anyone who admits they were there.”
My bandaged hand itched.
“They’re already coming,” I said. “They just haven’t had to get on a boat yet.”
###
Outside, the marina air hit my face in a wet, chilly rush. The scent of the bay wrapped around me—salt and diesel, fried food from a shack down the boardwalk, trace notes of hair spray riding the breeze from women heading to some fundraiser. Boat masts clinked softly against their lines, a hollow chime underscoring the muffled bass from a yacht party in the next cove over.
Harrow Island lay out beyond the breakwater, darker than the surrounding water, a silhouette that didn’t care whether I looked at it or not.
Harrow property. Harrow boat. Harrow “core group.” Juliet invited last-minute to the place where, in Hailey’s words, rules didn’t exist.
I thought of the glass rose on my doorstep, the note’s handwriting precise and calm.
Stories have endings. Know when to stop recording.
My fingers tightened around my phone in my pocket. For the first time since I started the podcast, I felt the story’s center of gravity shift away from the gym and the cliff fence toward that darker shape on the horizon.
If the real prom happened on Harrow Island, then so did the real ending to Juliet’s story.
The only question was whether I could get there—on tape, in court, or in person—without that island swallowing me and everyone I loved whole.