The email opened into a block of text that filled the whole screen, one long gray column pressing down on my laptop like weight.
The subject line still blinked at the top: I FAILED JULIET THAT NIGHT.
I pulled the laptop closer until the edge dug into my ribs and scrolled to the first full line. The laundromat below exhaled warm detergent through the floor vents; the room carried that humid, soapy smell under a thinner layer of coffee and the faint chemical bite from the salon’s hair spray drifting in from the stairwell.
I was there, but I wasn’t invited, the email began. That’s important. People like me didn’t get real invitations to Harrow Island, we got loopholes. I came on the catering boat with the coolers.
My eyes halted.
Catering boat. Luz had told me the Harrows used a “service launch” that night, but we’d never said that on air. The subreddit always fixated on the idea of a private Harrow yacht, something cinematic and easy.
I kept reading.
You talk on the show about the dock like it’s a stage. That’s not wrong, but nobody ever talks about the back steps. The chipped concrete ones by the generator shed. The kids who didn’t match the curated photos ended up there. We smoked there. We puked there.
The word smoked landed like a flash of cold. I pictured the kids in my mother’s old stories, sneaking down to the rock shelf under our own cliffs after dances, breath fogging the night, the water swallowing secrets below. Different shore, same pattern: pretty spaces up top, castoffs somewhere lower, nearer the drop.
I copied the paragraph into my notes app and highlighted “generator shed.” That detail hadn’t surfaced anywhere. Not in the old reports, not in the Discord docs. Either this person had a good imagination or a good memory.
I scrolled.
You asked why nobody took photos. That’s not true. People did. Disposable cameras in plastic sleeves. One of the Harrow cousins had a Sony Handycam on his shoulder the whole night, acting like the prom DJ from “Can’t Hardly Wait.” The music was all over the place—Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, some “I’ll Be” slow dance nonsense.
I snorted despite the dread creeping up my neck. No Doubt again. Oracle loved Gwen Stefani the way high school boys loved plausible deniability.
I checked the time stamp. The email had arrived twenty minutes after the morning show segment ended. Whoever wrote it either watched and felt moved to confess, or they had timed it to land in the echo of my public humiliation.
My cursor hovered over the sender line. The relay address gave me nothing.
I scrolled further.
You keep calling it an after-party, like some neat epilogue. It didn’t feel that way. It felt like the regatta kids stole the prom and dragged it across the water. On the lawn, all the girls in their glass-rose centerpieces dresses looked the same under the floodlights. But down the path, near the cliff edge, the masks slipped.
The words “glass-rose centerpieces dresses” pinged something petty and painful at the same time: the way those prom decorations had become my logo, my brand, my crime-scene shorthand. They had been symbols long before I ever hit record.
I reached for the cold coffee and took a sip. It tasted burnt, with a film on the surface, but my mouth had gone dry. Down in the registers of my laptop fan, a faint tick rattled like someone flicking a pen.
I watched Juliet arrive from the shadows by the shed. This line sat on the screen, stark. She was later than everyone else. Blue dress, shoulders tense, hair not quite as big as the other girls because your mom never did her hair, did she? She wasn’t one of the clients. She smelled like CK One and bay water.
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose. My mother’s hands flashed in my mind, wrists flecked with hairspray glitter on prom nights. She had told me, years ago, that Juliet did her own hair, that she didn’t trust anyone else near it. I had never repeated that on the show.
The CK One detail knotted my stomach.
The sound of bass drifted up faintly from the waterfront—some soundcheck for a charity ball, a beat that vibrated the window glass. Crescent Bay loved an excuse to dress up, to circle the same donors around different causes; nothing cleared guilt like a new event poster with the Harrow name embossed at the bottom.
I kept reading. My hand shook just enough that the trackpad thought I wanted to zoom.
People talk about Noah like he was the only boy in her world. That’s a lie the town tells itself because it flatters their storyline about class and tragedy. Elliot was everywhere that night. He played host, poured shots, fixed the speaker when it cut out during “Don’t Speak.” He watched her dance with other people from the balcony and pretended not to care.
I thought of the still frame from the morning show: Juliet and Elliot under the SPARTANS banner, mouths pressed together. No pretending there.
You’ve already guessed some of this, the email went on. What you don’t know is what happened when the lights went out. Literally. The generator hiccuped around one in the morning. Music cut. House lights flickered. For a few minutes, the only sound was the ocean and drunk kids yelling. I was on the steps with a bottle I hadn’t paid for, and Juliet brushed past me in the dark.
My thumb left a damp print on the trackpad.
She asked me where the dock was. Not the big one with the lanterns, the other one. The service dock where the catering boat tied up. Her voice shook. I pointed her down the path and joked that the rock shelf was where the bad kids smoked after dances. I wanted her to look back at me. She didn’t.
I stared at that last sentence until the words blurred.
There, buried in the narrative, lay the confession: not “I killed her,” but “I pointed her toward the edge and stayed behind.”
A wave of nausea rolled up from my gut. I pushed the laptop away and sucked in a breath. The apartment smelled thick now—too many old dinners baked into the walls, too much laundromat steam, not enough fresh air.
I grabbed my phone and hit Sadie’s contact.
She picked up on the second ring. “Please tell me you’re watching Twitter,” she said without hello. “They’re calling that kiss photo a deepfake and I’m losing my—”
“New Oracle email,” I cut in. My voice came out rough, like I’d been screaming at a concert. “Long. Detailed. I need your brain on it.”
A pause crackled. I pictured her in her apartment two towns over, blinds half closed, TV muted on the morning show replay, cursor hammering through spreadsheets.
“Forward it,” she said. Her tone shifted into the clipped, focused register I had learned meant adrenaline wrapped in data. “I’m opening the doc.”
I sent the message and set the phone on speaker. The laundry machines below clicked into a new cycle, a heavy rush of water that made the floor vibrate.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “Got it. Wow, they… don’t believe in paragraphs.”
“Right?” I said. My laugh came out too sharp. “Pick through it. Look for anything that proves they’re full of shit. Or that they’re not.”
Papers fluttered on her end. I heard typing, then a small intake of breath. “They know about the generator shed,” she said. “Did you ever say generator shed?”
“No. Luz mentioned it once. Off mic.”
“Okay.” More typing. “I’m dropping this into a timeline doc. I want to see how their version overlays the party stuff from Harrow Island Episode and the mixtape.”
“I’ll come over,” I said, already reaching for my keys.
“Better idea,” she said quickly. “You just got roasted on national TV. Maybe don’t be seen right now on the train crying over Word docs. I’ll come to you.”
I glanced at my reflection in the microwave door: hair in a frizz halo, under-eye circles smudged like fingerprints. I couldn’t argue.
“Fine,” I said. “Bring caffeine. And sticky notes. We’re going to need a murder board for one anonymous coward.”
She snorted. “On it.”
Twenty minutes later Sadie sat across from me at the table, laptop open, a rainbow of sticky notes fanned out between us. She’d arrived in her Glass Roses hoodie, hood up against the salt wind that still tasted like last night’s waterfront party. Her curls smelled faintly of cheap coconut conditioner and the coffee she’d balanced in a cardboard tray on the stairs.
“Okay,” she said, cracking her knuckles. “I broke it into chunks. We’ve got: pre-party, island arrival, generator outage, Juliet heading toward the dock, and then this weird vague fade-out.”
She tapped the screen. On her document, the email lived as bullet points lined up next to existing timestamps. Between us, the glass rose on my shelf watched like a tiny jury.
“Pre-party,” she read. “They mention ‘stealing your mom’s salon towels to use as makeshift capes while girls got their hair sprayed.’”
My shoulders jerked. “My mom used those towels,” I said. “They were ugly green ones from a hotel liquidation.”
“You never said the color on the show,” Sadie said. “They got that detail right. I’m putting a star.”
She scribbled on a sticky note and slapped it onto the table, then another for “catering boat,” another for “CK One,” another for “back steps by generator shed.”
“What about the music references?” I asked. “They sound like they were written by someone scrolling a 90s playlist.”
“Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, ‘I’ll Be,’” she listed. “You mentioned ‘I’ll Be’ in Episode One, remember? You used it as an example of a prom song. So that could be cribbed. But the generator hiccup lining up with the Harrow power logs Luz leaked, that’s more specific.”
She dragged her mouse, aligning the claimed time—around one a.m.—with the log Luz had shown me on her cracked phone in the parking lot weeks ago.
“It matches,” Sadie whispered. “Down to the minute.”
I watched her face, not the screen. Her pupils were blown wide, breathing shallow. For Sadie, this was catnip and poison in the same glass.
“Say this is Oracle,” I said. “Not a copycat. What are they doing here? Confessing? Or curating their own narrative again?”
She chewed her lip. “Both,” she said. “You taught your listeners that stories can fix things. They want that fix. They also want control over what version of themselves ends up in the feed.”
I rubbed my thumb over a coffee stain on the table. The stain refused to disappear.
“Let’s get to their ‘I failed Juliet’ moment,” I said. “The dock.”
Sadie scrolled. We read together.
She asked me where the dock was… I pointed her down the path… I wanted her to look back at me. She didn’t.
Sadie exhaled, shoulders hitching. “That’s… dark,” she said. “He positions himself as this sad bystander who gave her directions and then watched her walk into the underworld.”
“Or into him,” I said. “He never says where he went next. Or who he met.”
“Exactly,” she said. “This whole thing could be a smokescreen. ‘Look at what a guilty coward I am, not at that guy over there with blood on his shoes.’”
We fell quiet. Below, a dryer door slammed; someone cursed; coins clinked into a machine. My window rattled from a gust sweeping up off the bay, bringing with it that mix of salt, exhaust, and distant bass from the waterfront.
“Skip to the end,” I said. “They always tuck the real thing where attention spans die.”
Sadie nodded and scrolled to the bottom.
The final paragraph didn’t describe the party at all. It shifted into the voice Oracle used in riddles.
You keep looking for truth in air—audio, rumors, breath, it read. That’s your medium. But the town archived its lies in paper and glue. Faces printed in ink. Smiles that never reached their eyes. If you want to hear us the way we were, you have to look behind us. Sometimes the tape hides under the picture.
Goosebumps pricked my arms.
“Faces printed in ink,” I repeated. “Could be anything. Old newspapers, composites, prom posters.”
“Yearbooks,” Sadie said immediately.
I looked up. “Why yearbooks?”
She wrinkled her nose at me. “Come on. ‘Faces printed in ink’ is Yearbook 101. All those glossy heads, all that Kodak regret in one place. And you told us in the Prom Reenactment episode the 1997 book was like scripture in this town.”
I thought back to the old gym, the dusty display case with the yearbooks lined up like a family of bricks. 1997 had a glass rose silhouette on the spine, a design decision someone probably regretted now.
“What about ‘look behind us’?” I asked.
Sadie grabbed one of her sticky notes and drew a rectangle with a smaller shape inside it. “Every yearbook has a cover board and an endpaper,” she said. “You can peel them apart if you’re patient. Kids used to hide weed in them. Or cheat sheets. Or mix CDs in later years.”
“You went to some intense schools,” I muttered.
“We had a prom throwback every year,” she said. “People got creative. But listen—if I wanted to hide a microcassette in 1997, gluing it under an endpaper, behind somebody’s senior photo? That’s genius. Nobody throws out yearbooks. They live in closets forever.”
The word microcassette made my pulse kick. I hadn’t said it. She had.
I pictured the 1997 book again, heavy in my hands, pages smelling of dust and old ink. Faces lined up in grids, surnames repeating: Harrow, Calder, Reeves. Underneath one of those, a hidden throat.
“You think Oracle knows exactly where it is?” I asked. “Or are they guessing, like us?”
Sadie hesitated. “They say ‘you have to look behind us,’” she said. “That sounds like somebody who’s in those pages. Not just watching from the dock.”
The idea lodged in my chest like ice: Oracle smiling out from a row of senior portraits, wearing a tux or a sequined dress, signature looping over a quote about “making memories.”
“So either a remorseful classmate who watched Juliet walk down that path and never said anything,” I said, “or the person who walked down after her.”
“Or both,” Sadie added quietly. “You can be guilty of standing there and guilty of worse.”
We sat there, our laptops humming in fragile harmony. The glass rose caught a new sliver of light from the window and threw it across Oracle’s final lines on the screen. Paper and glue. Faces in ink. Tape hiding under pictures.
“We need that yearbook,” I said.
Sadie nodded, lips pressed tight. “School archive,” she said. “Or the library. Or some PTA dragon with a shrine in her den.”
I thought of the PTA meetings where yacht club wives and school board fathers turned budget line items into power plays. I could already hear the cluck of tongues when they realized I wanted to paw through their sacred memorabilia.
“Luz can get us in,” I said. “If Oracle isn’t sending us straight into another trap.”
The line on the email about pointing Juliet toward the dock flashed in my mind again. That tiny confession wrapped in self-pity.
I closed my laptop halfway, leaving the screen like a half-open mouth.
“Tell me the truth,” I said. “Your gut. Are we dealing with a coward who watched a girl die, or the person who made sure she went in the water?”
Sadie’s fingers tightened around her coffee cup until the cardboard dented. Her eyes never left the line about faces printed in ink.
“My gut?” she said. “My gut says nobody writes this much about their guilt unless they want someone to tell them a story where they’re not the villain.”
The laundromat buzzed louder, a spin cycle hitting full speed. The sound vibrated up through the table and into my forearms.
I stared down at Oracle’s riddle and felt something twist between empathy and revulsion. Whoever they were, they had stood close enough to Juliet to smell her perfume and hear her voice shake. Close enough to know the shape of the generator shed and the exact point where the path forked toward the dock and the rock shelf.
Close enough to hide a tape under a picture and walk away.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “We go find their inked face.”
I shut the laptop, cutting the glow.
In the sudden dim, the glass rose on the shelf gleamed dully, its petals catching the last of the light. For a second, in the reflection on the microwave door, I saw myself holding it like a microphone, Oracle’s words bleeding into my own.
I wondered which frightened me more: the possibility that I was about to follow a killer’s treasure map, or the possibility that I already had—and that they were counting on me to give them the ending they wanted.