The voicemail comes in while I’m staring at the hooded figure on Katie’s porch.
My phone buzzes against the table, jittering next to the screenshot of Lionel’s photo. The hydrangea leaves blur under my thumb. I should be texting Luz. I should be backing everything up to three different encrypted drives. Instead, I watch the notification banner glide across the screen.
New Voicemail – Glass Roses Tip Line.
I swallow a mouthful of lukewarm coffee and tap it before I can talk myself out of it. The laundromat underneath rattles steady, a metal heartbeat under my feet. Outside the open window, Crescent Bay’s night breathes in: salt air, distant boat horns, the low thump of bass carrying up from some waterfront fundraiser where people in 90s costumes are dancing under twinkle lights.
The message starts with silence. Four seconds of it. I check the playback bar to make sure it’s not frozen.
Then a breath.
“I… I don’t know how to do this.”
The voice is high and thin, sanded raw at the edges. No distortion, no playful Oracle filters, just someone’s throat trying to work around fear. I reach for the notebook beside my laptop, my pen already in my hand.
“You said you wouldn’t make people into clickbait,” she says. “You said you were learning.”
My grip tightens on the pen. I hear the rustle of fabric, a muffled car door slam in the distance on her end, or maybe just my building settling.
“I was there,” she says. “On Harrow Island. Same night as Juliet.”
The world closes in around that sentence. The dryer roar drops away, replaced by the echo of waves under the cliffs, by phantom music from the prom throwing itself across the water toward the private dock.
“They,” she starts, then stops. I hear her swallow. “A group of them. Upstairs. In that stupid glass room with the roses from the gym, like we were all still at prom. They… they laughed when I said no. Juliet walked in.”
My pen digs into the paper hard enough to tear it. I force my fingers to unclench.
“She kept saying, ‘Stop, she can’t even stand up,’” the caller whispers. “She pulled me out of there. She gave me her sweater. She told me to go downstairs and find my friends. I didn’t go to the police. I didn’t tell anyone. She did. I think that’s why she died.”
The message cuts off with a mechanical beep that feels obscenely cheerful.
I stare at my phone, my own breath loud in my ears. The salt in the air tastes sharper, like my mouth is full of seawater from the rock shelf below the cliffs. Somewhere far off, a gull screeches over the bay.
I hit replay and jot down the callback number. My hand shakes once, a quick shudder that ripples down my arm. Then I tap the phone icon.
She answers on the second ring, like she has been holding the phone, waiting to see whether she would regret leaving that message.
“Hello?” she says.
“Hi,” I say. “This is Mara. From Glass Roses.”
There is a sharp inhale. I hear traffic noise in the background—tires on wet pavement, a blinker ticking, the faint whoosh of passing cars.
“I can hang up,” I add quickly. “If hearing my voice is too much right now, you don’t owe me anything.”
“No,” she says. “Please don’t. I just… I didn’t think you’d call back this fast.”
“I don’t always,” I say. “Tonight I did. I’m glad you’re on the line, but I also want to be clear: your safety comes before my show. We don’t have to record. We don’t have to air anything you don’t approve.”
She lets out a short, humorless laugh.
“That’s not how this town works,” she says. “Once something is out, it lives forever. Your podcast. Their secrets. My silence.”
The word their hangs between us like a hook.
“We can shape what the recording holds,” I say. “We can distort your voice. Use a pseudonym. Cut anything that starts to feel wrong. You can listen to the whole thing before I decide whether to air any part of it. You can change your mind later. Those are my terms.”
There is a pause. I hear the soft click of a car door locking.
“Can you really promise that?” she asks.
I look around my kitchen: the peeling linoleum, the secondhand mic, the glass rose cover art on my laptop, glowing pale and perfect. I think of ad contracts and download graphs and my bank account, and then I think of Theo recording whispers into an old phone so he doesn’t burden me.
“Yes,” I say. “I can promise what I control. I can’t promise what the world does if they hear you. But I can make sure you decide whether they ever get that chance.”
“Okay,” she says. The word is quiet but solid. “Then I want the recorder on. I’m tired of Harrow men owning every version of that night.”
I set up the interview like a ritual.
Laptop open, pitch-shift plugin armed. Headphones on. The mic in the center of the table, wrapped with a scarf so the metal feels less clinical. The window is cracked enough to let in sea air but not street noise. The laundromat hum is mercifully low; the late loads ended hours ago.
I make tea. Not because she can drink it—she is on the other end of the phone—but because my hands need something gentler to do. Steam ribbons up, carrying the faint floral smell of the cheap grocery-store blend.
I press record.
“For the tape,” I say, “I’m going to call you ‘Roe.’ You picked that name. We are distorting your voice by five semitones. I will send you the file after this. You can tell me to delete the whole thing. Do you consent to recording under those conditions?”
There is a soft exhale in my headphones.
“Yes,” she says. The pitch-shifter drops her voice into a lower, flattened register. “I consent.”
“Do you consent to any part of this recording being used in a future episode of Glass Roses,” I ask, “with your pseudonym, distorted voice, and identifying details removed or changed as we agree together later?”
“Tentative yes,” she says. “With veto power.”
“You have veto power,” I say. “At any point, you can say ‘cut that’ or ‘no comment.’ We can take breaks. If anything gets too detailed and your body starts to react, we slow down or stop. How does that sound?”
“Safe,” she says. “Safer than the island ever was.”
My throat tightens. I adjust the headphone band and nod, even though she can’t see me.
“Where are you right now?” I ask gently. “Physically.”
“In my car,” she says. “Parked in a strip mall on the other side of town. You know the one with the tanning salon that smells like burnt coconut and hairspray?”
I do. Crescent Bay’s signature scent: salt, chemicals, and money.
“Do you feel okay staying there while we talk?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “The engine’s off. Doors locked. I can see the bay between two buildings. The water looks black. It helps.”
“All right,” I say. “Where do you want to start?”
There is a rustle of fabric, as if she is shifting in her seat, grounding herself.
“Prom Throwback,” she says. “The first one they did, a few years after Juliet. That fundraiser taught me something about this town. Grown men in ruffled shirts and plastic crowns joking about ‘that awful night’ while they drank champagne under banners with our class names on them. They built a whole annual event on pretending nothing rotten ever touched them.”
I picture the gym: new banners hanging over warped parquet, glass rose replicas glowing on tables while waterfront bass leaks in through the walls.
“Back then,” she goes on, “I told myself Juliet was the only real tragedy. Everyone else had bad memories, sure, but that’s life. Except that wasn’t true. Harrow Island turned into its own little universe of things boys did because no one would ever tell on them.”
“You were invited that night,” I say. “Ninety-seven. After prom.”
“I was a junior,” she says. “My date ditched me for better champagne, I guess. I ended up at the cliffs with a few kids who thought they might catch a ride to the island. The rock shelf smelled like seaweed and cigarettes. We could hear the muffled bass from the party floating over the water, like another world calling.”
A gull cries outside my window, sharp and lonely.
“A boat came,” she says. “Elliot’s friend. He waved us on with a beer in his hand. I remember the spray on my face, my hair gel tasting like salt. On the island, everything was bright and loud. The house had those glass roses from prom on every surface—centerpieces, little ones on the mantle, like they packed the whole night across the bay.”
I can hear the party in her description: speakers rattling, ice clinking, boys shouting over music, the air thick with hairspray and liquor.
“Who was there?” I ask.
“Everyone whose parents donated plaques and boat slips,” she says. “Elliot. His shadow friends. Some athletes. A couple of teachers who pretended not to see anything. They treated that dock like their private kingdom. Girls were… prizes. Background noise. Both at once.”
She stops. I wait. I hear her breath hitch once, then steady.
“I’m not going to ask you for details about what happened upstairs,” I say. “Unless there’s something you want on record.”
“You’re the first person to say that,” she says quietly. “Everyone else wants the horror reel.”
Something inside my chest goes rigid.
“I don’t need that to know it was real,” I say. “You said they laughed when you said no. You said Juliet pulled you out. What would you like people to know about that room?”
A long pause. Then:
“That there was more than one girl,” she says. “I wasn’t the only one they dragged in there that night. It was a pattern. Jokes about ‘initiation’ and ‘island perks.’ One of them was Elliot. He liked to stand near the wall and pretend he wasn’t leading it. But everyone watched his reaction. The boys wanted his approval more than anything.”
I write the word pattern in my notebook and circle it, ink pressing through the page.
“Juliet walked in,” she continues. “She looked at me on the floor and something in her face changed. I think she recognized my dress from the salon. My mom had booked us both with your mom that week. Juliet handed me this big hoodie and kept her body between me and them. She said, ‘You’re done. She’s leaving. Try that again and you’ll be explaining it to every PTA mom in town.’”
I can almost smell the hair spray from my mother’s station, hear the gossip about fundraising committees doubling as power councils.
“She walked you downstairs,” I say.
“Halfway,” Roe says. “I remember the feel of the carpet under my bare feet, sticky from spilled drinks. Juliet stopped on the landing. She squeezed my arm and said, ‘Go find Hailey, okay? Stay with her. Drink water. Don’t get back on the boat with them.’ I asked what she would do. She said, ‘Tell someone who can actually blow this up.’”
“Who?” I whisper.
“She didn’t say,” Roe says. “But I heard her mutter something about ‘their dads’ and ‘the board’ and ‘let them lose their regatta trophies for once.’”
I picture donor plaques at the high school, Harrow carved into brass and marble.
“I didn’t stay,” Roe adds. “I got on a different boat with some kids leaving early. I watched the house shrink behind us. I thought I was getting away from all of it.”
We let the quiet sit for a moment. The only sound in my headphones is a faint car passing her parked spot.
“You said in your voicemail that you think Juliet went to the police,” I say. “Or someone.”
“Not the police,” she says immediately. “She knew Calder would bury it. Everyone knew. She had another plan.”
“What do you remember next?” I ask. “That connects her to Elliot at the dock.”
I hear her inhale sharply, then exhale through her nose.
“When we left, we passed the dock,” she says. “I looked back. Juliet was there with him. Elliot. They were at the far end, near the piling with tar all over it, where the boards feel slick. She had her arms folded, that sweater of hers around her waist. He was too close.”
The tar smell from my own secret trip to the island fills my nostrils, heavy and chemical, glued to memory.
“Could you hear them?” I ask.
“Bits,” she says. “The water was loud. But I heard her say, ‘I’m not your secret anymore.’ That same line from your tape. And he said, ‘You’re not thinking clearly. You’ll ruin everything. For everyone.’ The word everyone came out like he owned the town.”
My pen scratches across the page on its own.
“She pointed toward the house,” Roe says. “Toward the window of that room upstairs. She said, ‘Then maybe it deserves to burn.’”
The hairs on my arms rise. The laundromat downstairs clicks into a new cycle, the sound swelling in my ears like surf.
“I wanted to stay,” Roe says. “I wanted to watch. But the guy driving our boat shouted at me to sit down before I fell in. When we pulled away from the island, the last thing I saw was Juliet and Elliot on that dock, silhouettes against the water. I told myself she’d make it home. That she’d fix everything. Next morning, she was in the bay.”
She goes quiet. I hear the faint chirp of a car unlocking in the distance, someone else’s evening moving forward while we sit stuck in 1997.
“Roe,” I say, “you did not cause what happened to her.”
She lets out a sound halfway between a scoff and a sob.
“I left her there,” she says.
“She sent you away,” I say. “She wanted you off that island. She wanted you safe. That choice belongs to the people who hurt you and the system that protected them, not to you.”
My own hand trembles where it rests on the table. I press my palm flat against the cool laminate.
“Why now?” I ask gently. “Why tell this part of the story after all these years?”
There is a long silence. When she speaks again, her distorted voice carries a new steadiness.
“Because your show made everyone talk about Juliet like a tragic cliff story,” she says. “One girl. One bad night. Clean edges. But that island was a factory. That dock was a funnel. I need people to know she wasn’t a fluke. She was a line they were terrified she would cross.”
Heat rushes up my neck. I stare at the waveform moving across my screen, every spike a piece of her.
“I can stop the recording now,” I say. “We have enough.”
“You don’t,” she says. “Not until I say one more thing.”
“Okay,” I say. My thumb hovers over the space bar, ready.
“If you air any of this,” she says, “I want you to say direct into that mic that the story doesn’t belong to you. Or to Elliot. Or to the town. Glass Roses can point at the pattern, but then you shut up and let survivors talk. Got it?”
A bitter little laugh escapes me through my nose.
“Yes,” I say. “Got it.”
“You can stop now,” she whispers.
I press the space bar. The waveform freezes. The kitchen fills with the dull hum of the fridge, the faint hiss of the ocean outside, the ghost of party bass still echoing up the cliffs.
I take my headphones off and set them on the table, careful, like they are fragile evidence. On the laptop screen, the file name blinks: Roe_master.wav.
I know the moment I shape this into an episode, sponsors will flinch. Harrow lawyers will rattle their sabers. Anonymous creeps will line up to dissect every gap in her story. My downloads will spike. So will the risk.
I reach for the mouse, then stop midway.
Before I do anything else, I open a new track, arm the mic, and pull it closer.
“This is Mara,” I say quietly into the empty room. “Before any edit, I need to say this for myself.”
My voice sounds thin and naked without music.
“From this point on,” I whisper, “this isn’t about one prom queen in the bay, or one man on a dock. It’s about a pattern everyone in Crescent Bay learned to ignore. And if I turn that into content without changing the rules, I’m part of it.”
I sit there in the salt-thick dark, finger hovering over the save button, and try to decide which will break first when I air Roe’s story: Elliot’s glass house, or the fragile trust of the women who finally stepped into the light.