I wiped the kitchen table with the flat of my palm, catching a smear of coffee I’d missed, and tried to convince myself that cleaning counted as preparation.
The microphone waited on its arm, black and glossy, a small red light winking on the USB interface. My laptop hummed, fans working harder than they should for such an old machine. Downstairs, the laundromat churned and beeped, the smell of hot detergent seeping up through the floorboards. Outside the cracked window, salt air pushed in around the frame, carrying the faint thump of bass from some waterfront party where adults pretended they were still at prom.
My bandaged palm tugged when I adjusted the mic, a reminder of the glass rose and the note about stories and endings. I flicked my eyes to the Post-it stuck to the wall in front of me, the one I’d filled after meeting Luz in the unmarked car.
Boundaries. No suspects. No real-time sleuthing. Talk without torches.
My phone buzzed beside the laptop. Sadie’s name lit the screen.
SADIE: stream overlay works
SADIE: I set slow mode + flagged keywords
SADIE: we’ve got this, promise
I exhaled through my nose, long and steady, and typed back with my good hand.
ME: no naming private ppl
ME: if anyone breaks rules, nuke them
She replied with a string of sword and shield emojis. I let that be enough.
The live-stream software counted down in the corner, a neat little timer marching toward zero. My call-in line window sat open, showing a list of numbers in gray, ready to flip green when connected. Somewhere out there, listeners waited with earbuds in, screens open, fingers poised over keyboards that could either heal or burn.
“Okay,” I told the mic, like it could give me better advice than Luz had. “Let’s try this.”
I clicked Go Live.
The timer ticked over. A small box in the corner showed my own face, slightly washed out in the yellow kitchen light, dark circles under my eyes. The chat column on the right bloomed with usernames.
hey mara!!
greetings from texas
can’t believe i’m catching this live
glass roses 4ever
I forced my shoulders down from around my ears and leaned into the pop filter.
“Hey,” I said, letting the familiar intro cadence wrap around me. “You’re listening to Glass Roses, and for the first time, you’re listening live. I’m Mara Lane, broadcasting from my very glamorous studio above Crescent Bay’s finest laundromat.”
A rush of laughing emojis scrolled by. The warmth of my own joke loosened my throat.
“Tonight is different,” I said. “No episode drop, no polished narrative, no new clue to pick apart. I wanted to do a Q&A, not about suspects or theories, but about impact. About Juliet, about this town, about what it means when a story leaves the safety of a microphone and ricochets through all of you.”
The chat slowed as people read.
“So ground rules,” I continued. “One: kindness, always. Toward Juliet, toward her family, toward each other, and toward the people who were kids that night and are middle-aged humans with mortgages now. Two: accuracy. If you reference something, try to ground it in what we actually know. Hearsay is not gospel.”
The Post-it on the wall glowed at the edge of my vision.
“Three—and this is important,” I said, gripping the side of the table until my knuckles ached. “No doxxing, no naming private individuals as suspects, no encouraging anyone to ‘confront’ people in real life. This is not a witch hunt. This is a conversation.”
A message from Sadie slid into the mod chat.
SADIE: pinned your rules
SADIE: most ppl are hearts and roses rn
Hearts and roses poured down the main feed, interspersed with we love you, mara and thank you for doing this respectfully. For a second, I believed the rules might hold.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk. I’ll be taking calls through our usual voicemail line, but live, and I’ve got an extra screen up with your questions. Sadie—who many of you know from the subreddit—is helping moderate. Be nice to her; she’s doing this for free and already has a day job where she argues with men in suits.”
A few hi Sadie messages popped up. I pictured her at her kitchen table two towns over, headset on, eyes bright.
I clicked on the first queued caller.
“Hi, you’re live on Glass Roses. What’s your name and where are you calling from?”
A woman’s voice, soft and shaky. “Um, hi. You can call me R. I’m from Rhode Island.”
We talked about Juliet’s smile in yearbook photos, about how R had lost a sister the same year and felt like Juliet’s story had been shoved into the same closet. Chat filled with candle emojis and stories of other sisters, other girls whose names never made it past local obituaries.
I kept my breathing steady, fingers resting on my notes but not needing them.
The next caller was a high school senior from Crescent Bay, who admitted he’d snuck out to the cliffs after listening, just to feel “how far down it really is.”
My stomach lurched.
“Okay, first of all, please stop doing that,” I said, the mom tone sliding in before I could stop it. “Those cliffs aren’t a set; they’re a real drop with a rock shelf that has already broken more than one body. The town puts fences up for a reason, even if they’re better at funding regattas and Prom Throwback parties than actual safety.”
Laughter in chat, but nervous, full of fr tho and stay safe dude.
“But thank you for being honest,” I added. “And for reminding us that this story doesn’t live in headphones; it lives in the places where real kids still smoke their first cigarette and dare each other to look over the edge.”
He thanked me, voice small, and hung up. I let the quiet sit for a beat, the hum of the dryers filling my headphones.
For a little while, it worked.
A former prom stylist called in to talk about the way hairspray and sweat and salt air mixed that night in the gym, how she’d watched boys in tuxes and girls in glitter line up under the glass rose centerpieces for photos, oblivious to the undercurrent. A listener from Chicago asked how the case had changed my relationship with Theo; I told her about his whispered questions at bedtime, about trying to explain murder to a ten-year-old who lived three streets from the cliffs.
The chat flowed with empathy. People shared stories of explaining true crime podcasts to their own kids, of drawing lines between content and reality. Every few seconds, Sadie’s mod-tag popped up, thanking someone, nudging the conversation back to humanity.
For the first time since the glass rose appeared at my door, hope started to unfurl in my chest. Maybe this was how I balanced Luz’s line in the sand—talking without turning anyone into a target.
Then the call queue flashed.
A new number slid to the top: Unknown / blocked.
At the same moment, a message pinged in the private mod chat.
SADIE: user “oraculr_97” is spamming “let me speak”
SADIE: IP masked, can’t tell origin
SADIE: i think it’s them
My pulse jumped, a hard knock under my collarbone.
I watched the main chat for a second. The username she’d flagged popped up between hearts and support messages.
oraculr_97: the wrong boy didn’t row the boat
oraculr_97: let those who were THERE speak
oraculr_97: i have a question, mara
Another mod message from Sadie.
SADIE: i can ban
SADIE: but ppl will lose it if we silence an “insider” in a q&a
SADIE: your call
Luz’s voice slid through my head: You need to find a way to talk to your people without handing them torches.
I leaned closer to the mic. “Okay,” I said, more to myself than to the audience. “We’re going to take one more caller.”
My finger hovered over the Accept button.
“One,” I whispered, then clicked.
“Hi, you’re live on Glass Roses,” I said, forcing brightness into the words. “This is Mara. What’s your name and where are you calling from?”
Static cracked in my headphones, a distant echo. Then a voice, filtered and warped, genderless and calm.
“You already know my name,” the caller said. “You gave me one.”
The chat exploded.
ORACLE??
no way
holy—
mods pls confirm
My mouth dried out. The detergent smell from below turned sharp.
“For the sake of anyone new here, I’m going to call you Oracle,” I said carefully. “And I’m going to remind you—and everyone listening—that this is a Q&A focused on impact and memory, not on naming suspects. So if you’d like to talk about how this story has affected you—”
A low chuckle slid through the distortion. “Always editing,” Oracle said. “Even live.”
My fingers tightened on the table edge.
“What’s your question?” I asked.
Oracle didn’t answer right away. I heard something faint on their end—wind? Music? The clink of ice against glass? It brushed the edge of my hearing and then faded.
“Here is my question,” Oracle said. “Who carried the queen from glass and glitter to black water and stone?”
A chill traced my spine.
“That’s not a question,” I said. “That’s a riddle. And I just said—”
“The answer is not the boy you blamed,” Oracle continued, voice smooth, almost gentle. “Not the one who smoked on the rock shelf, the one the town fed to the bay. No. The answer is the man who taught you all to love words about crossings.”
In the chat, usernames began to fire off.
what does that mean
crossing??
tennyson??
holy shit
Oracle kept going, unfazed by my attempt to cut in.
“He told you about ‘Crossing the Bar’ and smiled at the line about meeting the Pilot face to face,” they said. “He told her to meet him after the last slow song. Not under the cliffs, no. At the dock. He had a key he wasn’t supposed to have and a bottle he wasn’t supposed to bring. He said, ‘We’ll have the real prom out on the water.’”
My heart pounded so hard my vision jittered. I slapped the mute button on Oracle’s line, but the delay meant their words were already out.
Chat detonated.
CROSS THE BAR = COOKE
mr cooke always used that poem!!!
didn’t mara say the missing chaperone was an english teacher??
HE HAD A KEY???
we found him once, we can find him again
“Stop,” I said, voice sharper than I intended. I raised both hands, forgetting only I could see the gesture. “Everyone, listen to me. We are not doing this. We are not turning a riddle from an anonymous caller into a man’s address. Mr. Cooke has already been harassed once because of this community. I will not—”
The mod chat flashed.
SADIE: i’m slowing chat but it’s still going
SADIE: they’re already posting screenshots
SADIE: someone dropped his town again, i deleted but people saw
My throat closed for a second. The headset felt too tight against my skull.
I hit Disconnect on Oracle’s call.
The line clicked dead, but the chat didn’t care. It had its new toy.
coward hung up
did you hear how calm they were
this confirms it, he lured her to the boat
someone should confront him again, on camera this time
justice for juliet!!!
My tongue pressed hard against my back teeth, trying to find words that wouldn’t pour gasoline on the screen.
“Everyone, please stop,” I said, leaning so close to the mic I could feel my own breath bounce off the pop filter. “I’m serious. Oracle is unverified. They are not law enforcement, they are not a court, and they are not speaking for this podcast. We do not know who they are or what their agenda is. You are not to contact, threaten, or harass anyone based on what just aired.”
A smaller wave of messages answered.
respectfully, mara, we’re not stupid
we remember your ep about patterns and power
if he lured her onto a boat, he needs to answer for it
why are you protecting him??
My skin prickled.
“I’m protecting the integrity of an investigation I’m not in charge of,” I said. “And I’m protecting real people from being turned into content. Including the ones who made terrible choices when they were twenty. That is not the same as covering for a killer.”
The timer at the top of the software read forty-three minutes. It felt like hours.
I glanced at the mod chat. Sadie was working in overdrive.
SADIE: ppl are clipping the call
SADIE: i can end chat but that doesn’t delete the audio
SADIE: say the word and i’ll kill the stream
My right hand shook on the trackpad. The bandaged left one stayed flat on the table, pressed there like a paperweight.
“I’m going to end the stream,” I told the audience, picking each word with care. “Not because I’m hiding anything, but because what just happened needs to be addressed off-mic with lawyers and law enforcement. I’ll release a statement. Until then, I’m asking you, as the person whose name is on this show, to not turn this into another round of Reddit vigilante work.”
A final burst of chat raced past, a jumble of support and rage and disappointment.
luv u mara, stay safe
this is censorship, tbh
ORACLE DROPPED A BOMB
mods, don’t delete the VOD
we heard you, we’re not going to forget
“This is Mara,” I said, voice low. “Signing off for tonight.”
I hit End Stream.
The chat froze mid-scroll and then vanished, leaving an empty gray panel. The sudden silence in my headphones roared. From below, a dryer buzzer went off, shrill and banal.
For a long moment I just sat there, staring at my own reflection in the blank preview window. My cheeks looked blotchy. The bandage on my palm had gone faintly pink at one edge, sweat seeping under the tape.
My phone vibrated nonstop.
SADIE: subreddit is losing it
SADIE: someone already posted “oracle transcript”
SADIE: i’m trying to pin your warning but they’re making new threads
Another notification slid down over hers.
Unknown Caller.
I didn’t pick up. The call went to voicemail, replaced instantly by a text.
UNKNOWN: We need to talk. –L
Luz.
I dragged the call recording into a folder labeled POTENTIAL EVIDENCE and hovered over the toggle that controlled whether the VOD stayed public.
Delete it and I controlled nothing; the clips were already out there. Leave it up and I became the host who gave a platform to a live accusation against a man who’d already been hounded to the edge of collapse.
The glass rose on my counter caught the corner of my eye, warped by the kitchen light, petals frozen mid-bloom. In my head, Oracle’s question replayed on a loop: Who carried the queen from glass and glitter to black water and stone?
I knew one thing with painful clarity.
Whatever I did next—call Luz back, pull the episode, issue an apology—wouldn’t put this genie back in its bottle. The fandom had a new villain, the police had a new mess, and I had just learned in real time how little control I actually held over the story I’d started.
My cursor trembled over the VOD setting, caught between public and private, while my phone buzzed and buzzed on the table, lighting my kitchen with a pulse that felt like a countdown I couldn’t stop.