I sat at my kitchen table like it was an interrogation chair.
The mic waited in front of me, matte black and patient, its metal cool under my fingers. Downstairs, the laundromat thumped and hummed, spin cycles overlapping in a muffled heartbeat that my headphones usually swallowed. Tonight I left them off. I wanted to hear everything.
On the counter, the glass rose from my doorstep glowed faintly in the light from the over-the-stove bulb, its edges catching yellow and warping it into something sharp. Every time I looked away, my eyes still knew exactly where it sat.
My laptop fan whined. The recording software window gaped open, red circle ready. No script document, no bullet points, no carefully labeled segments.
Over the sink, the small window showed a slice of Crescent Bay night: a wedge of parking lot, neon from the liquor store bleeding magenta into the damp air, and beyond that, if I leaned at the right angle, the dark suggestion of the cliffs. Somewhere under that black line waited the rock shelf where kids used to sneak cigarettes after dances, pretending the drop wasn’t as long as it was.
I wrapped my bandaged palm around the handle of my mug. The tea had gone lukewarm, too bitter. I took a swallow anyway, for something to do with my mouth besides confess.
My phone lay facedown by the salt shaker. I’d turned off notifications for everything except calls from the school and from Luz. The silence from the Oracle inbox felt louder than any ping.
I exhaled, clicked the red circle, and watched the timer start counting up.
“This is Mara,” I said into the mic, my voice catching on the first word. I cleared my throat and tried again. “This is Mara Lane, and… this is not a normal episode of Glass Roses.”
Raw sound filled my ears—no music bed, no EQ, just my own breath and the distant whoosh of a dryer vent. I could already hear the parts I would normally cut: the hesitation, the uneven rhythm. I didn’t stop.
“I’m recording this in one take,” I said. “No script, no edits. I’m not even putting the intro clip in. If you hear my neighbor slam a door or the laundromat downstairs go nuclear, you’re getting all of it.”
My hand kept creeping toward the trackpad on instinct, wanting to mark edit points. I curled my fingers into a fist instead. The bandage pulled.
“I owe you an explanation,” I said. “And I owe some people an apology that goes beyond a disclaimer in fine print.”
The words hung there. I imagined them traveling out across town—over the cliffs, past the regatta docks where donors clinked glasses, through the old gym with its warped floor and dusty banners, into houses where my voice had become part of people’s dishwashing routine.
My stomach twisted.
“The short version is that something really bad happened tonight that I helped set up,” I said. “You know part of it, if you were on the live Q&A stream. The rest hasn’t hit Reddit yet, but it will, so I’m going to say it here first.”
My voice shook on first. I let the tremor stay.
“You watched Oracle call in,” I said. “You watched them drop a riddle that pointed straight at a real person’s name. Mr. Cooke, the English teacher some of you have been speculating about for weeks. You watched me scramble to shut it down, to tell everyone to be careful, to not go harass him.”
I stared over the mic at the chipped cabinet door where Theo had once stuck a dinosaur sticker and peeled it halfway off. The gummy residue still caught dust.
“What you didn’t see,” I said quietly, “is that later tonight, a group of listeners went to his building and started chanting that riddle in his hallway. He collapsed. He’s in the hospital right now.”
Air hissed in my headphones.
“He’s alive,” I added quickly. “As of this recording, he’s alive, and the doctors think it was a severe panic attack and not a heart attack, but that doesn’t make this okay. The point is, he got hurt. He heard my voice on that stream. He heard Oracle’s, and then he heard my fandom in his hallway.”
My throat tightened. I pushed my chair back an inch, the legs scraping the tile, and let the noise ride under the confession.
“I need to say out loud that I played a part in that,” I said. “I gave Oracle a mic tonight. I didn’t plan their call, but I opened the line, knowing they were unpredictable. I did it because their clues have driven this season’s biggest episodes and because part of me worried that if I shut them out, they’d just take their story to someone else—another podcast, a bigger platform, maybe one that cared less about accuracy than I do.”
My cheeks heated at the rationalization, and I forced myself to name the uglier piece.
“I also did it because I knew it would make great audio,” I said. “There it is. When I picture that moment in my head, right before I clicked ‘accept’ on the call, there’s this tiny voice saying, this will trend. And I listened to that voice along with all the others.”
I swallowed the sour taste in my mouth.
“That’s not the only time I’ve listened to it,” I said. “When I teased the mixtape before I had context, when I talked about the missing chaperone while he was still living a quiet life in another town, when I hinted at names that were only half-verified because it made for a sharper hook… every time, there was that voice saying, if this makes people lean in, they’ll keep caring about Juliet. And I told myself that trade was worth it.”
The timer ticked past five minutes. Normally, this is where I’d mark a section break and hunt for a music cue, something low and pulsing that made the words feel important. The silence now felt more honest.
“So I want to apologize,” I said. “First to Mr. Cooke. You asked me for anonymity when we talked the first time. I honored that on air, technically; I didn’t say your name. But I talked about you in a way that made it easy for people to connect the dots, and when you got doxxed, I kept telling myself that wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t hit ‘post.’ Tonight, when Oracle pointed at you in front of thousands of people, I didn’t hit ‘end call’ fast enough. I am sorry. You did not sign up to be a character in a live puzzle.”
My voice went rough at the edges. I let myself breathe, counted three inhales with the dryers downstairs.
“To the other teacher who got wrongly accused on the subreddit after the mixtape episode,” I went on, “I’m sorry. I read the messages you sent me, explaining how your kids saw your name trending in connection to a murder, and I still hesitated to say your name on the show to clear you because I didn’t want to feed the beast. You ended up waiting longer than you should have for me to say, loudly, that it wasn’t you.”
I reached for my mug and bumped it, sloshing tea onto the table. A dark stain crept toward my notebook, curling the edge of a page. I pressed the mug down harder, anchoring it.
“To everyone in Crescent Bay who has been dragged into this against their will,” I said, “from PTA moms who just wanted to plan a bake sale to kids who have to hear my show talked about in the hallways at school, I’m sorry for the way my work has spilled into your daily life.”
I pictured the cliffs again, the view from the prom-week overlook. On one side, postcard-perfect water shimmered in every tourism photo and regatta fundraiser; on the other, the drop nobody printed on t-shirts, feet of air and rock and then the shelf where Juliet’s body had washed up.
“I keep telling myself that reopening Juliet’s case is worth disturbing the surface of this town,” I said. “And I still believe that. I still believe that this pretty little bay with its charity balls and Prom Throwback fundraisers and school board minutes full of the same five surnames needs its myths cracked open.”
My fingers tightened around the mic stand.
“But there’s a difference between cracking open lies and cracking open people,” I said. “And lately I’ve been blurring that line, even when I didn’t intend to. That’s on me.”
I let those words sit, feeling them settle in my chest. When I spoke again, my voice came out lower.
“So here’s what’s changing,” I said. “I’m not doing live call-ins anymore. Not with Oracle, not with anyone. If you leave a voicemail, I will vet it with Luz when she’s allowed to talk to me, and with my lawyer, before it ever goes near an episode.”
The word lawyer felt strange in my mouth, like something belonging to the country club set, not to the girl whose mother used to sweep hair off salon floors after prom.
“I’m not reading anonymous DMs on air without independent corroboration,” I said. “I’m not teasing evidence before I understand it. If you send me a tip, you need to understand that we might sit on it for weeks or never use it at all because actual human beings’ lives are attached to every juicy detail you’re excited to share.”
I leaned closer to the mic, feeling the mesh graze my lip.
“And to the fandom side of this,” I said, “I have to say this directly: Juliet Reeves is not a puzzle. She was a person. She had bad bangs sophomore year and a chipped pinky nail and a laugh that made the gym feel bigger. She helped my mom haul boxes into a car once without being asked. She got bored at PTA award ceremonies. She snuck down to the cliffs after dances and stood too close to the rail because everyone did.”
My eyes blurred. I blinked hard.
“When you turn her into a game with levels and boss fights and ‘side characters’ you can harass for extra points,” I said, “you’re not honoring her. You’re reenacting the same power imbalance that killed her: a crowd of people deciding what they’re entitled to take from her body and her life.”
The words scorched their way out, but behind them I felt a weird, steady relief, like lancing something that had been swelling under the skin.
“If you’ve ever been misrepresented in a story,” I said, “if someone has ever stolen your narrative and twisted it to fit their version of events, you know it doesn’t matter that they ‘got the big beats right.’ The details matter. The way they talk about you matters. So going forward, I’m going to try to earn the trust I’ve been asking for. I’m going to make fewer episodes if I have to. I’m going to tell you when I don’t know something instead of rushing to fill in the blank with speculation.”
I sat back, pulse hammering.
“I don’t expect everyone to like this,” I said. “Some of you are going to think I’m ‘selling out’ or ‘protecting the powerful.’ I get it. I’ve built a show that makes you feel like you’re part of the investigation, and it’s going to feel like I’m taking toys away. But these toys are made of glass, and people are bleeding.”
My gaze slid to the glass rose on the counter.
“To Mr. Cooke,” I said, one last time, “I am sorry. To Juliet’s family, and to anyone who’s been collateral damage in the chaos around this podcast, I’m sorry. I can’t unring the bells I’ve already rung. But I can control how hard I pull the rope from here on out.”
I swallowed, tasted oversteeped tea and the metallic tang of fear.
“If you’re still listening after this,” I said, “I’m asking you to do something with me. Before you post, before you message a stranger, before you drive to someone’s house with a group of friends because you think you’re defending Juliet, ask yourself: would you do this if she were standing in front of you, alive, watching? Would you be proud to explain it to her?”
The laundromat downstairs hit a loud spin; the floor vibrated under my bare feet.
“Juliet is not content,” I said. “She wasn’t content when the prom committee used her face for the glass rose centerpieces, and she isn’t content now that true crime TikTok has her dancing in loops. She was a girl, and now she’s a woman who never got to grow up. Please, for the love of her, treat her story like a life, not a level to beat.”
I let a full ten seconds of silence run. Then I did something that felt even scarier than everything I’d just confessed.
I hit stop.
I didn’t edit. I didn’t even replay it. I titled the file “Unedited Tape, Unedited Mara,” uploaded it to my host, wrote a bare-bones description—No script. No music. Just me, talking about what I’ve done wrong and what has to change—and scheduled it for immediate release.
The progress bar crawled across the screen. My heart tripped along with it.
By the time it reached 100%, my palms were slick. I closed the laptop so I couldn’t hover over refresh.
My phone buzzed on the table.
For a second, my body braced for Luz’s name, for a new emergency from the hospital, for some anonymous caller letting me know they’d watched me through the apartment window while I talked.
The screen said SADIE.
I picked up. “Hey.”
“You uploaded it,” she said instead of hello. Her voice sounded rough, scraped out. “I just got the push notification. I’m five minutes in.”
“You’re speed-listening,” I said. My attempt at a joke came out thin.
“I’m… taking it in,” she said. “I paused because I wanted to say—this is good. Like, real good. The servers are already heating up. There’s a thread in the Discord where people are sharing stories about being miscast in narratives. One girl is talking about a regatta crash from years ago where the boys got framed as heroes and she got framed as drunk trash because of her zip code.”
I pressed the cold rim of the mug to my forehead. “Of course there’s a regatta trauma thread.”
“There’s also a smaller channel,” she went on, hesitating, “where they’re… less thrilled.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “I’m protecting the powerful now.”
“Some are saying that,” she admitted. “Calling it your ‘pivot to respectability.’ They think the apology is about sponsors and court optics. One person literally typed, ‘This is what happens when PTA moms get in your head.’”
I pictured the school auditorium, the donor plaques, Elliot’s calm voice smoothing everything over while the bass from waterfront parties bled in from the bay.
“They’re not entirely wrong,” I said. “My lawyer is going to be relieved this exists. Luz too, maybe. But the rest of it is real, Sadie. I meant every word.”
“I know,” she said quickly. “I could hear it. They will too, most of them. People are… responding.”
“Responding how?” I asked.
My phone chimed with a new notification as if on cue. Then another. And another. I put her on speaker and opened my inbox.
Long emails stacked at the top, subject lines like Thank you for saying this and Misrepresented victim here. One listener wrote about being the “crazy ex” in her ex-husband’s memoir. Another talked about a local news story that turned her assault into a cautionary tale about drinking.
“They’re telling you their own stories,” Sadie said, reading the same flood from her mod panel. “They’re not just mad. They want this to be different too.”
Between the long letters, shorter comments popped in from the app: emojis, heart reacts, crying faces. And there, threaded in between, the other kind:
You’re losing your edge.
This is what the Harrows wanted from day one.
Thought you were one of us, not one of them.
One new comment scrolled into view, pinned to the top of the episode discussion thread by some overeager user.
If you’re done playing, move aside. Juliet’s real friends will finish her story. We know where the cliffs are.
A chill slid over my skin, lifting every hair.
“Sadie,” I said, my voice low. “Do you see that one?”
Her breath hissed across the line. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m on it. I’ll lock the thread, ban the user, screenshot everything for Luz.”
I stared at the words on my screen, at the casual certainty in we know where the cliffs are, and at the tiny wave of approval emojis already collecting under it.
My unedited confession was out in the world, raw and real and already being sliced into new narratives I couldn’t control.
I pressed my thumb against the glass rose, felt the cool curve bite into my skin, and wondered just how many people were looking at those cliffs tonight, watching the drop, waiting for someone—maybe me, maybe my son—to step too close to the edge.