I record the hiatus announcement with the mic two inches closer than usual, like shrinking the distance between my mouth and the metal will make any of this easier.
The kitchen smells like burnt coffee and laundry detergent. Downstairs, the spin cycle thumps like a nervous heartbeat under my chair. Neon from the liquor store sign pulses red through the blind slats, striping my laptop, my hands, the pages of the script I keep revising and crumpling and smoothing again.
“Glass Roses, interim note, take four,” I say into the mic. My voice sounds thin in my headphones. “Hi. It’s Mara. I know you’re expecting an episode this week, but—”
I stop, jab the space bar, delete the track. My waveform vanishes, leaving nothing but gray timeline.
I push my hair off my forehead, fingers catching in knots. The court’s evaluation order sits folded under my mug, the words psychological and capacity bleeding through in blue ink. I angle it out of sight.
“Okay,” I tell the laptop. “One more.”
I hit record.
“Hey, it’s Mara.” I stare at the chipped edge of the table and grind my thumb into a spot of old glitter embedded in the varnish, fallout from one of Theo’s school projects. “I want to talk to you for a minute about what happens next with Glass Roses.”
I let the silence breathe for two beats. The way Luz always tells me juries lean in when you don’t rush.
“The short version,” I say, “is that we’re taking a break. A real one. Not a cliffhanger. Not a bonus-episode gap. A hiatus while lawyers and—” I swallow the word judges—“and people whose job it is to think about ethics help me figure out how to keep telling this story without causing more collateral damage.”
My throat wants to close, but I keep going.
“You’ve heard me own my mistakes on this feed before,” I say. “You know I believe in transparency. Right now, I’m facing a custody review and an official psychological evaluation. Law enforcement is reexamining Juliet’s case. There are active threats under investigation. That’s not drama. That’s my kid’s life and other people’s safety. I owe them more than an upload schedule.”
I pause, listening to my own breath and the faint muffled bass from a waterfront party drifting through the window. Crescent Bay never truly quiets; there’s always another regatta wrap party, another PTA wine night with yacht-club donors, another bassline shaking the glass.
“So,” I say. “I’m pressing pause. I’m not abandoning Juliet. I’m not selling out to Harrow Media. I’m not handing the mic to anyone else. I’m stepping back long enough to make sure I can keep doing this without putting Theo, or Katie, or Mr. Cooke, or any of you in more danger than you’re already in just by listening.”
My chest tightens on that last word. Listening.
“In the meantime,” I finish, “take care of yourselves. Remember that you don’t have to solve this case in Reddit threads at three in the morning. Remember that Juliet was a person, not a puzzle box. When we come back, I promise we’ll focus on what actually moves us closer to truth, not just what makes a good clip.”
I force myself to say it.
“This is Glass Roses, signing off—for now.”
I stop the recording. The waveform sprawls across the screen, jagged and blue. I listen once, editing only for levels, not content. No rephrasing, no clever fix. Raw is the point.
Upload. Schedule: immediate. I type the episode title: “Hiatus: Why I’m Pausing Glass Roses.” The description box waits for a tidy paragraph. I give it two lines.
Short note from Mara about legal, ethical, and family reasons for a temporary hiatus. Please listen before speculating.
I know they’ll speculate anyway. I hit publish.
The hosting dashboard refreshes. Zero plays becomes twenty, then fifty, then a hundred while I’m still staring. The little map of the world blossoms with dots. Crescent Bay glows brightest, a tight cluster at the shoreline. The same town that once paid my mother in cash tips and whispered promises now consumes my every word through earbuds at the gym and on boats and in tidy kitchens strung with glass rose centerpieces from fundraisers.
My phone buzzes: texts from Sadie I haven’t opened yet, emails from sponsors who will want statements. I swipe to Do Not Disturb and close the laptop.
For the first time in months, the apartment is just a room with a table, not a studio. The hum of the laundromat becomes just noise. The air smells like overbrewed coffee and the faint tang of salt that sneaks in from the bay.
I should feel lighter. Instead I stand in the doorway and stare at the darkened screen, waiting for a quiet that refuses to arrive.
That night, Theo sleeps at Eric’s—midweek overnights mandated by the same paperwork that ordered someone to take apart my brain and label the pieces. I try to turn the empty apartment into something soothing: chamomile tea, a true-crime-free show humming from the TV, no notifications except the laundry’s end-of-cycle chirp.
Around midnight, the building settles with a series of dry pops in the walls. Bass from a distant waterfront party throbs through the floor like a slow headache. Somewhere out on the cliffs, drunk alumni from the latest regatta fundraiser probably sneak down to the rope line to smoke, pretending the treacherous rock shelf below doesn’t exist.
I’m brushing my teeth when the first text buzzes through the Do Not Disturb.
Unknown number, local area code.
ORACLE: Breaks are for people who finished their homework.
Mint foam clings to my tongue. I don’t answer. I tell myself it’s a troll, a fan with bad boundaries who renamed their contact, not the original Oracle. The phone buzzes again before I can spit.
ORACLE: You’re not done.
I thumb the message thread open with a towel still looped around my shoulders. The bubble hovers, three gray dots pulsing. Typing.
“You don’t have this number,” I say out loud to an empty bathroom. My voice bounces off peeling paint.
Another message appears.
ORACLE: You changed your passwords after the courthouse. Good girl.
My teeth ache. I scroll up the thread—empty before tonight. No history, no previous contact. Whoever this is started fresh.
ORACLE: Two-factor on. New email. New auth app. You did everything right.
My thumb hovers over the contact info. The number has that weird too-clean look that screams VoIP. I hit block anyway.
The phone dings with a new text before I can set it down.
New number. Same signature.
ORACLE: Stories don’t stop because you press pause, Mara.
I don’t block this one. I don’t respond either. If this is Oracle, replies are just oxygen.
I move to the kitchen, turn on every light. The blinds rattle when I yank them up. Outside, the street glows orange and green from the liquor store and the bar two doors down. A couple argues on the sidewalk about who owes who gas money. Normal noise. Mundane.
My laptop wakes when I lift the lid. The hiatus episode’s stats have climbed into five digits. The top new review reads, Take as long as you need. We’ll wait. The next says, Don’t let them gag you. That’s what they did to Juliet.
My inbox pings even with notifications muted. The badge count jumps. One subject line cuts through the others: You forgot to clear your drafts.
No sender name. Just a generic address string that looks randomly generated.
I click it anyway.
The email contains a single embedded image: a screenshot of my podcast hosting dashboard. Not the public view—the backend. The Glass Roses workspace, with my username in the corner. The cursor-in-progress icon flickers over the “Drafts” tab.
Below the image, one line of text waits.
ORACLE: You were going to call it “The Dock Timeline.” Good working title.
Every hair on my arms lifts. I hover between fight and freeze.
That draft lives in a private folder I haven’t even told Sadie about, not in Slack, not in the shared Google Doc. It’s where I’ve been quietly building the Harrow Island episodes, arranging audio beats and witness quotes and the tape’s timestamp discrepancies. The folder is locked behind two-factor authentication, plus the security talk Elliot’s platform rep gave me months ago about “protecting your IP.”
I close the laptop so fast the screen snaps. My reflection flickers in the black—wide eyes, toothpaste bubble at the corner of my mouth, the word careful looping in my head in Luz’s voice.
A fresh buzz from my phone drags my attention back.
Email this time.
FROM: oracle@burnitdown.pro (the address alone sets my teeth on edge)
SUBJECT: Ethics Check.
I open it with one finger.
You told them you care about collateral damage.
You told them you want to be responsible.
Here’s what’s actually irresponsible:
Another screenshot loads. This one is a Google Doc, my cursor caught mid-blink in the sentence If Juliet left the gym at 11:23, the dock timeline collapses. Track Changes bubbles cling to the margins, notes to myself: [ask Luz about tide charts] and [Katie on memory of headlights].
The timestamp in the corner reads 1:08 a.m. Ten minutes ago. My throat goes dry.
I whisper, “How are you in here?”
Oracle’s next line appears below, no screenshot this time, just text.
You share links when you’re tired. You leave tabs open in public Wi-Fi. The hosting company recycles password reset URLs. Do you know how many doors your story left unlocked?
I slam the laptop shut again, like that can crush their fingers.
The paradox I keep preaching—the one I wrapped in theme music and ad reads—sits suddenly, heavily, right in my kitchen. Publicizing buried crimes can force justice. It can also turn my files into a live feed for whoever wants to weaponize them.
Another email slides in before I can breathe.
SUBJECT: Don’t make me talk to Theo instead.
The room tilts. I yank the phone cord to pull it closer, then realize I don’t have a landline. Just the habit. Just my mother’s panic in my bones.
The body of the email is mercifully short.
I’m joking. I’m not Calder.
But the longer you stay quiet, the more people improvise endings.
You know what they did to Noah.
I picture Noah’s mugshot from ’97 next to a younger Juliet in her glittering dress, the way I juxtaposed them in my second episode. The fandom built whole universes on those still frames. They pored over the angle of his jaw, the crease between her brows. They made him priest and monster on alternating days.
I type a reply with fingers that shake so hard I keep hitting the wrong keys.
Stay away from my son.
I don’t send it. I delete every letter, then shut the email client entirely. I won’t give Oracle the satisfaction of seeing me react in real time.
Outside, muffled bass swells, then cuts abruptly, replaced by the clatter of bottles being loaded into crates. The cliffside mansions will still be glowing, their windows lit like teeth. Somewhere beyond them, the treacherous rock shelf waits, wave-smoothed and patient below the postcard views.
I lock the front door even though it’s already locked, twist the deadbolt until the metal grinds. I check the window latch. I do not check the vents yet. That paranoia will come later.
On the table, the folded court order peeks from under my mug. I slide it fully into view. Reduce your son’s exposure to the volatile aspects of your work.
Pausing the podcast felt like the only way to do that. Now the work has seeped around the pause, through the cracks in my passwords, into the parts of my life I don’t record.
My phone buzzes one more time.
A single message, no text, just a photo attachment.
I know the dock before the image finishes loading.
The photo is grainy, low-light, caught in that hour when the sky goes from navy to ink. Wooden planks stretch out from the bottom edge of the frame toward dark water. The boards are warped and wet, reflecting thin lines of light from a shore I can’t see.
At the far end, a single post rises, rope looped around it. Beyond that, only blackness. No stars. Just the suggestion of cliffs in the distance, jagged shadows against a slightly lighter sky.
I pinch to zoom, heart thudding.
The camera flash catches a detail near the middle of the dock: a carved rose, roughly gouged into the wood, its petals shallow but unmistakable. Someone traced the outline of the glass rose logo I use on every thumbnail and plaque, etched it directly into the planks.
I don’t need GPS tags to recognize the place. I’ve seen that dock from a distance at regattas, when the Harrow boats bobbed in neat rows and the island looked like a private kingdom. Hailey’s drunken confession sketched it out in my notebook months ago. Luz’s old photos in the case file matched it: the angle of the pilings, the way the shoreline curves away.
Harrow Island.
The caption arrives a beat later, like a whisper following a touch.
ORACLE: Come finish this.
I stare until the pixels blur. Somewhere out there, a real body once hit that water. Juliet’s hair floating like a halo for a few breathless seconds before dark closed over her. Somewhere out there, someone stood on that dock and decided her story would end at the cliffs instead.
My hiatus announcement plays in my head, line by line. Legal review. Ethical review. Collateral damage. Take care of yourselves. We’ll be back.
The investigation doesn’t care about my schedule. Oracle doesn’t care about my evaluation. While I sit here trying to look responsible for a judge, whoever holds that camera is standing on the exact boards where my private dock timeline says the lie begins.
I lower the phone to the table, then pick it back up. The photo waits, patient. The glass rose in the wood looks like a target.
If I walk away, Oracle still has the dock and the tape and whatever they’re planning next. If I go toward it, I drag Theo, my mother, Luz, everyone orbiting me closer to the drop.
I lock the screen and shut the laptop again, sealing all that light and data behind plastic. The room goes darker than it should with every bulb burning.
The hiatus is real. The break is not.
I sit at the kitchen table until the sky outside the window turns from black to dull gray, the smell of salt pushing under the sash, staring at the outline of my mic and the ghost of the dock burned into my brain, trying to decide whether I’m more afraid of the story stopping without me—or of where it will go if I follow that wooden path out into the dark.