I start appreciation night by cleaning.
I scrub the counter until my arm aches, wipe rings off the table, shake crumbs out of the thrift-store quilt that muffles the window. The lemon cleaner clashes with the usual cocktail of detergent from downstairs, fryer grease from the corner place, and the thin ribbon of salt air that slides through the cracked window. It gives the whole apartment a sharp, overbright smell, like I’m trying to sterilize a crime scene with grocery-store supplies.
Theo is at my mom’s for a sleepover. I sent him off with extra snacks and the stern warning that he is not, under any circumstances, allowed to listen live. He rolled his eyes and promised, and I believed him right up until the elevator doors closed and cut off his face.
Now it’s just me, the mic, the Harrow bug sitting dark in its ceramic bowl, and the muted glow of my screens.
On the laptop in front of me, the call software dashboard waits, little gray circles labeled with the pseudonyms from the form: LILAC-ROSE, HOMEFROMSEA, PROMNIGHTMOM. On the second monitor, our “testing a new platform” window shows a black background with white lines spidering between nodes. Sadie’s cursor blips over one corner like a nervous firefly.
My phone buzzes. I pick it up and read the Signal thread.
Sadie: Audio test good. VPN traps set. Kat says she’ll flag anything weird.
Kat is the queer IT friend who hates cops and regattas. Right now she lives in my second monitor as a green dot and a jagged acronym username.
Me: Reminder: no real names. No addresses. No airing anything that will get someone swarmed.
Sadie: Got it. Mara… breathe. You’re good at this.
I tuck the phone faceup beside the keyboard so the vibration will rattle against the wood and keep me awake. My hands feel too light. My heart feels heavy enough to drag my ribs down.
“Okay,” I tell the empty room. “Show time.”
I slide my headphones on, straighten the pop filter, and lean into the mic. The metal smells faintly like old fingerprints and dust.
I click “Go Live.”
The red indicator in the software blinks on. In my ears, the room narrows to a soft hiss and the hum of the laundromat downstairs.
“Hey, Glass Roses,” I say, letting my broadcast voice float up, warm and steady. “It’s Mara. Welcome to appreciation night.”
The viewer count jumps faster than I want it to. I watch the numbers climb in the corner of the screen, tiny digital proof that hundreds of people are now sitting in kitchens and bedrooms, walking dogs along dark streets, lying in beds next to snoring partners, all wired into my apartment.
“Tonight isn’t about clues,” I continue. “It’s about us. About how Juliet’s story, and this season, have landed in your lives. I want to hear from you. No sponsors, no chat circus, just calls.”
I cue the first caller and nod at nothing, rehearsed and automatic.
“LILAC-ROSE, you’re on the line,” I say. “What’s your glass-rose moment?”
“Hi, Mara.” The voice in my headphones is small and higher than I expect, with an East Coast clip underneath. “Um, first, thank you. I know you probably get that a lot. But thank you.”
I smile into the mic; my fingers knot around each other in my lap.
“Thank you for calling,” I say. “Where are you listening from tonight?”
“Providence,” she says. “I, uh. I was assaulted in college. At this stupid retro prom event. We had glass centerpieces too.” She laughs once, sharp. “Nineties nostalgia for people who never lived it. Anyway… I reported. Campus police told me it would ruin the guy’s career.”
I chew the inside of my cheek. The cliffs of Crescent Bay flash in my mind, the rock shelf below where kids snuck away from dances, the kind of place where stories fall instead of getting written down.
“Did listening to Juliet’s story change anything for you?” I ask.
“I thought I was over it,” she says. “But hearing about how they turned her into décor, into this pretty tragedy everyone could toast at fundraisers, made me so angry. Your show… I don’t know. It made me feel less crazy for still being mad.”
There it is. The paradox I keep building my life on.
“I’m honored that you trusted me with that,” I tell her. “I hope we’re worth your anger. That we’re doing something with it instead of just bottling it for the soundtrack.”
We talk for a few more minutes. I keep her name off air, double-check that I’m not inviting the fandom to hunt her down for more details. When we hang up, I drop a marker in the recording software so I can edit around anything that feels risky later.
My phone buzzes.
Sadie: Trace clean. Rhode Island ISP, normal route. Good call.
I queue the next.
“HOMEFROMSEA, you’re up.”
A man’s voice joins, rough with cigarette grit.
“Hey,” he says. “Uh. My sister graduated in ninety-seven.”
My shoulders tense, then loosen.
“From Crescent Bay High?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “We moved away after… everything. She still won’t say Juliet’s name. But she listens to you. She’ll never call in, so I’m calling for her.”
The bass from some waterfront party thumps faintly through the window, threading through his words. I picture the regatta crowd down there, all yacht shoes and hair spray, toasting at another charity ball while their stories stay safely unrecorded.
“Tell her I’m listening,” I say into the mic. “She doesn’t have to speak for her story to matter to this one.”
Three more calls roll through—one from a mom whose kid started asking questions at their town’s Prom Throwback fundraiser, one from a trans listener who never saw themselves in victim narratives until Juliet’s old mixtape and my messy monologues cracked open the mold, one from a local teen quietly asking what to do when her friends joke about the cliffs.
With each call, my voice settles deeper into its practiced cadence. I laugh in small, contained bursts, apologize where I need to, press gently when someone hints at something dangerous, back off when their silence tightens.
The numbers on the clock tick toward the slot labeled ORACLE-WAS-HERE in my queue.
Between calls, I flick my gaze to the second monitor. The node map pulses, dots lighting up and fading as Kat’s script traces routes. A message pops up in our shared window.
Kat: So far, standard. US servers, nothing masked. Might just be fans tonight.
I tap the ceramic bowl with one fingernail. The dead Harrow bug rattles like a seed.
“Next up, we have a caller whose name made me smile,” I say into the mic. “PROMNIGHTMOM, you’re on the line.”
“Hi,” a woman says, laughter already frayed around the edges. “I, uh, wore the exact same dress as Juliet to my own prom. Different town. Same sparkles. I found the yearbook photo in an article and my stomach dropped.”
We talk about daughters and sequins and how it feels to watch your kid pose at the top of a staircase thinking this night will just become a scrapbook page instead of evidence.
While she speaks, my phone vibrates twice.
Sadie: Two callers left before OR.
You good?
I flex my toes against the floor, grounding myself in the solid thump of the laundromat machines below.
Me: Stay on them. Once they’re in, we don’t stop recording.
I wrap with PROMNIGHTMOM, thank her, and breathe.
“We have time for one more before a quick break,” I tell the stream. “This next handle might be familiar to some of you.”
My throat tightens around the next words.
“Caller ORACLE-WAS-HERE, you’re live.”
For a second, I hear nothing but the room hiss and my own pulse in my ears.
Then a voice glides into my headphones, lower than the old distorted version, wrapped in a light digital filter that blurs the edges without swallowing them.
“Good evening, Mara,” the caller says. They roll the R in my name with slight exaggeration, like a practiced host. “Appreciate the invitation.”
My hand curls into a fist in my lap.
“Thank you for RSVPing,” I say, equal parts podcaster and trapper. “What do I call you tonight?”
“You can call me someone who remembers,” they say. “Someone who was bad at remembering for a long time.”
The cadence is familiar—not just from the edited voicemails this season, but from a hundred posts in the Discord and subreddit. Puzzles and apologies braided together.
“What sticks with you?” I ask, keeping my voice as flat and open as possible. “From ninety-seven.”
There’s a pause. I can hear their breath faintly under the filter.
“The smells,” they say. “The gym reeked of hair spray and punch and nervous sweat. The waterfront smelled different. Colder. Except for the dock.”
My fingers go still. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“The dock?” I echo.
“You’ve been there,” Oracle’s filtered voice says, almost conversational. “You know. The tar that layers the boards, heating up under the prom lights carrying across the water. On hot nights it leaks this… flavor into the air. Burnt licorice and gasoline. You feel it in your teeth.”
I see it: the black smear along the dock boards, the carved glass rose wedged in the wood, the smell that clung to my sneakers when Luz and I went out there. Kat and Sadie don’t know that exact description. I never aired it.
“Most people remember the view,” Oracle adds. “Postcard cliffs, waves breaking white over the rock shelf. They don’t remember how the dock felt like it might eat your shoes.”
My stomach drops through the floor.
I swallow, buying time.
“That’s specific,” I say carefully. “Sounds like you were standing there.”
A soft, synthetic chuckle slips through the line.
“We stand all kinds of places in our lives,” Oracle says. “Some of us stand on docks. Some of us stand in courtrooms. Some of us stand on little stages above laundromats.”
My phone vibrates on the table, frantic.
Sadie: K & I have them. Route bouncing like crazy. Don’t freak out.
On the second monitor, the node map goes wild, lines flashing between continents.
I keep my gaze on the waveform in front of me.
“Why did you RSVP tonight?” I ask. “You’ve had many chances to speak.”
“You framed it as appreciation,” Oracle says. “You told the ghosts they deserved a turn. I wanted to see whether that generosity extended to the ones who messed up. The ones who watched.”
My throat tightens.
“If you watched,” I say, “then you watched something happen to Juliet on that dock.”
Another pause. The filter fuzzes the edges of a breath that sounds heavier now.
“We watched a lot of things,” Oracle says. “The tar wasn’t the worst stain that night.”
My phone buzzes again.
Sadie: VPN through Iceland, Montreal, random clouds. It’s a chain.
WAIT.
We just got a hop through a node labeled CBAY-WATERFRONT.
My heart slams against my ribs.
Oracle keeps talking.
“You’re very good at making people feel safe in their headphones,” they say. “You promise editing. You promise control. But you know better than anyone that once stories hit the feed, they belong to everyone.”
I press my heel down on the floor until it hurts.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’ve hurt people by putting their stories out there.”
“You’ve hurt yourself,” they correct mildly. “Your son. People whose jobs depend on staying out of these narratives. You turned Juliet’s glass roses into a logo. That’s quite a choice.”
The glass rose print on my notebook stares up at me, glossy and frozen.
My phone screen lights again, urgent.
Sadie: CBAY node is near Harrow House fiber. Business cluster. It blinked for a second then bounced.
They’re using Harrow’s backyard as a stepping stone.
I keep my tone conversational.
“You signed up under ‘ORACLE-WAS-HERE,’” I say. “Where is ‘here’ to you tonight?”
For the first time, the voice hesitates.
“Here is where the signal goes,” Oracle says finally. “Here is the line between what gets buried and what plays on loop.”
My second monitor flashes.
Kat: They just torched the chain. Last node is a commercial VPN out of Nevada. No subscriber info.
Dead end.
I feel a small, sharp spark of triumph anyway. They slipped. They routed their confession through Crescent Bay.
“You said the dock tar felt like it might eat our shoes,” I push. “Our shoes, not just yours. Who else stood there with you?”
The filter warps their inhale into an underwater sound.
“Careful, Mara,” Oracle says softly. “You’re not the only one who can set traps. You invited more than survivors tonight.”
Something in their tone scrapes over my nerves. A private joke, shared with himself and whatever servers he’s hiding behind.
“Then tell me who you are,” I say. “Tell Juliet.”
“I’m the one who didn’t pull her back,” Oracle says. “And you’re the one walking toward the edge right now. See you at the next fundraiser.”
The line goes dead.
My headphones flood with silence. The little gray circle on the dashboard winks out.
I stare at the empty call slot, breathing through my nose in short, controlled bursts. The laundromat machines thud below; the faint echo of bass rolls in from the waterfront, dull and distant.
I have three more callers in the queue. Regular listeners with handles that sound like usernames, not threats.
I paste a smile into my voice.
“Okay,” I say lightly. “That was… intense. Let’s take a quick breather and then hear from a few more of you.”
I throw a pre-recorded musical bumper into the stream—Juliet’s mixtape instrumental warped just enough to avoid copyright—and mute my mic. My hands start shaking the second I’m off air.
My phone buzzes nonstop.
Sadie: That was them. That had to be them.
Kat: Route used a paid VPN and multiple hops. Only useful artifact is that brief Crescent Bay node.
Sadie: Harrow waterfront cluster. His house. His offices. That’s the neighborhood.
I type back, fingers clumsy.
Me: Can you prove it? Logs, screenshots, anything a court would touch?
Kat: Not with what we have. It’s circumstantial. Could be any device on that segment. Could even be a compromised router.
I lean back, the chair creaking, and stare at the ceiling. The old water stain above the light fixture looks like a warped rose, petals pulled into a swirl.
On air, the bumper track is ending. I sit up fast, unmute, and finish the night on autopilot—thanking callers, repeating privacy reminders, promising a full edited episode later. I smile with my voice while my insides feel like I’ve swallowed ground glass.
When I finally click “End Stream,” the red light dies. The apartment exhales.
Sadie calls. I put her on speaker and set the phone between the laptop and the bowl with the dead bug.
“I know we didn’t get what you wanted,” she says without preamble. Her voice shakes; a keyboard clacks under her words. “But that node. Mara, that node—”
“Is a dot on a screen,” I say. “Near a house owned by a man who sells the gadget that was in my vent.”
I drag a hand over my face. My skin smells like lemon cleaner and headphone plastic.
“I heard waves behind them,” I add quietly. “In the pause before they started talking about the tar. The same rhythm as the break on that rock shelf under the cliffs. That’s not proof either.”
“They’re smart,” Sadie says. “Kat says whoever routed that call knows their stuff. This isn’t some bored fan and a free app.”
I look at the Harrow bug in its bowl, that tiny waveform logo catching the light.
“I know,” I say. “They’re better at the wires than we are.”
I let the silence sit for a beat, listening to the machines below and the faint rush of traffic heading down toward the waterfront parties.
“But they still wanted to be heard,” I say. “They couldn’t resist calling. They needed me to know about that tar.”
“So where does that leave us?” Sadie asks.
I look at the dark window, at my own reflection layered over the ghost glow of my screens, and think about the man in the big glass house on the cliff, the dock that reeks of burnt licorice and gasoline, and the unknown voice that knows both better than any tourist.
“It leaves us exactly where they want us,” I say. “Listening.”
I hang up and sit alone in the humming apartment, staring at the waveform of Oracle’s call frozen on my screen, wondering how many other lines they’ve tapped into—and who else in Crescent Bay has been listening to me in the dark.