I hover over Publish with the same dread I used to reserve for pregnancy tests and court dates.
The episode description is short. No lurid adjectives, no hooky true-crime verbs. Just Roe’s chosen pseudonym, a brief content warning, and a promise I recorded in a single take: I am not entitled to anyone’s trauma; I am a guest in the stories they decide to tell. The waveform on my screen looks smaller than other episodes, quieter, but it feels heavier than all of them.
“Okay,” I whisper to the empty kitchen. “We’re doing this.”
I click.
For a second nothing happens, then the upload bar finishes its last sliver, and the platform dashboard flips to “Live.” Outside, a car passes on Main Street, tires hissing on damp asphalt. The laundromat downstairs shudders into a new spin cycle, the sound of quarters rattling in metal guts. The apartment smells like stale coffee, sea air, and the faint detergent tang that never leaves the walls.
My phone vibrates once on the table—Sadie, already, Of course—but I don’t look. I back up the file to two different drives, shut the laptop, and go crawl under my quilt next to Theo’s room, counting the pulses of the dryer until sleep finally drags me under.
I wake up to the special kind of silence that means my phone has been busy.
Light presses around the edges of the blinds, pale and hazy. Crescent Bay’s morning smells like wet pavement and distant hair spray from the salon down the block gearing up for some yacht club brunch. I grope for my phone on the nightstand. The lock screen is a graveyard of notifications.
Downloads. Mentions. Subject lines stacked like accusations.
I swipe and open my email. The first subject line punches me straight in the stomach.
Termination of Partnership – CuppaCloud Coffee.
I tap it with narrowed vision.
Dear Ms. Lane, it starts, all sans-serif politeness. In light of recent content developments on Glass Roses Podcast, and after careful review with our legal and brand safety teams, we have decided to end our sponsorship effective immediately. While we respect your commitment to important issues, the escalating controversy no longer aligns with our company values.
My thumb smears the screen.
As outlined in Section 4(b)… They get to the numbers fast, to their credit. No thirty-day grace period. No final payout. Just one last line about “wishing me the best in my future endeavors” and a clean, surgical cut.
I back out, my pulse climbing in my throat, and scroll.
Regretfully, We Must Part Ways – Snoozely App.
Important Update to Your Campaign – MealCrate Media.
Every brand that ever sent me copy about “bold conversations” now uses the same two words: brand safety.
The laundromat spins louder. I carry the phone to the kitchen, pour coffee I forgot to refrigerate last night, and drink it cold because heating it would take time and a microwave I do not own.
I open my little budgeting spreadsheet on the laptop, the one my lawyer made me promise to maintain in case the custody judge ever asked for proof of stability. The cells look smug and tidy. I start deleting sponsor income line by line.
CuppaCloud: gone.
Snoozely: gone.
MealCrate: “paused pending review,” which might as well be gone.
Numbers slide down the column. Rent, electricity, Theo’s school activity fees, the ridiculously high co-pay for his therapist—the totals do not care about my principles. When I hit the cell marked projected quarterly, the number stares back at me in sickly red.
“Shit,” I say to no one.
My fingers go numb. I flex them until feeling crawls back, prickly and hot. Outside the window, the bay glints between buildings, glossy and postcard-ready. Down below the cliffs, the rock shelf waits, jagged and dark, the town’s real foundation.
I hear my mother’s voice in my head, that mix of love and bone-deep pragmatism: You can’t pay bills with outrage, Mar.
My inbox pings again. I flinch and brace for another Dear-Ms.-Lane bullet.
This subject line is different.
Before you freak out, read this – Sadie.
“Do I need to stage an intervention?” Sadie asks, her voice tinny through my headphones. “Or have we moved straight to wake?”
“Mourning my bank account,” I say. I spin slowly in my rickety kitchen chair, cord of my headphones twisting around my neck. “Three sponsors in an hour. That has to be a record.”
“Four,” she says. “Check the inbox for that bougie snack bar company. I saw their note in the shared dashboard.”
I close my eyes, inhale, and catch detergent from downstairs, salt from outside, and the faint sour note of my forgotten coffee. My stomach clenches.
“So this is it,” I say. “We hit the line where corporations care more about yacht club optics than documented patterns of assault, and they’re bailing to protect their regatta invites.”
“Brand safety,” she says, grinding the words. “Meaning, ‘Don’t say rape when our logo is present.’ Look, I’m not calling to help you spiral. I’m calling because I got there first and did something about it.”
I sit up straighter.
“What did you do?”
“Relax,” she says. “No doxxing, no rogue stunts. I learned my lesson. I made a page.”
“A page,” I repeat.
“A crowdfunding page,” she clarifies, a rush of excitement creeping in. “For Glass Roses. Direct support. No ad reads, no middlemen. I wrote copy, pulled some of your cover art, used that photo from the cliffs when you were recording in the wind, you know, with the headphones half off your ears and the water behind you—”
“Sadie.”
“Right. Point is, it’s live. ‘Keep Glass Roses Independent.’ I posted it on the subreddit and the Discord like fifteen minutes ago.”
I drag the laptop closer, the plastic warm under my palms, and type in the link she texts. The page loads slower than usual, or maybe my heartbeat just speeds up.
There I am in the header photo, slightly blurred, hair whipping in the breeze at the clifftop overlook, mic in hand. The cliffs drop off behind me into a smear of blue-gray where the bay meets the treacherous rock shelf. Underneath, in Sadie’s careful prose:
This story belongs to survivors, not sponsors. If you value an independent Glass Roses—no corporate gatekeepers, no soft-pedaled episodes to keep yacht clubs happy—consider becoming a monthly supporter.
“You wrote this?” I ask.
“I had help,” she says. “Some people in the server work in non-profit comms. They gave notes. I ran it by them first. I… wanted to do it right this time.”
The donation bar below the text isn’t empty. It’s already shading in, a growing stripe of blue. Names scroll in a column: tiny avatars, usernames I recognize from late-night theory threads. Ten dollars. Three. Fifty. One big anonymous chunk labeled Local, with a note: For Roe and everyone still on this side of the dock.
My throat tightens.
“Another anonymous from Crescent Bay,” Sadie says. “They DM’d me to say they’re on the PTA and they’re tired of the same five last names running everything. I think you made a dent, Lane.”
“This isn’t just about me,” I say, thumb brushing the trackpad, tracing the curve of the glass rose logo on the page. “If I take this money and then turn Roe’s story into the same consumable product sponsors wanted, I don’t deserve any of it.”
“So don’t,” she says. “Make fewer episodes. Longer ones. Focus on survivor voices. No more ‘Did she really fall?’ cliffhanger garbage. You get to define what the work looks like. We just keep the lights on.”
“Public funding is volatile,” I say. “People love you one minute and move on the next. Subscription accounts charge back. Trolls pledge just to get inside your world and twist it. I still have to pay rent when the fandom finds a new shiny murder.”
“I know,” she says, and for once there is no edge of fandom flail in her tone, just the tired steadiness of someone who has watched too many campaigns spike and drop. “But this is what you’ve got right now. A bunch of women and queers with debit cards who don’t want you muzzled by CuppaCloud.”
My computer dings with another pledge notification. Then another. The little bar inches higher.
“Also,” she adds, “someone else noticed. I got an email for you. I forwarded it.”
“If it’s Elliot offering me a branded trauma series, I’m throwing my laptop out the window,” I say.
“Better,” she says. “I think.”
The subject line reads:
Invitation: Town Hall on Institutional Abuse in Crescent Bay.
The sender is an address I don’t recognize: cb-coalition@risebay.org. My shoulders rise toward my ears as I click.
Dear Ms. Lane, it begins. We are Crescent Bay Voices, a coalition of local women and advocates who have been organizing quietly for years around issues of institutional abuse in our town—at the school, on Harrow Island, within law enforcement, and in other civic spaces.
My eyes drag over phrases that snag on familiar wounds: regatta culture, Prom Throwback fundraisers, disciplinary “exceptions” for students from donor families. Words I have spoken into a microphone, over and over, feeling like I was shouting into wind off the ocean.
In light of your recent episode amplifying a survivor from the island party, the email continues, we would like to invite you to participate in a town hall next week at the community arts center. We hope to center survivor voices and discuss how Crescent Bay can move beyond a model of hush money and charity balls toward real accountability. We understand your work is fraught with ethical complexity and public scrutiny. That’s precisely why we believe your perspective is important.
At the bottom: three names and titles.
Leila Ortiz, Director, Harbor Women’s Resource Center.
Denise Chang, CB High alum & teacher (retired).
Patrice Garrison, Co-founder, Bay Survivors Network.
The arts center sits on a bluff just south of the cliffs, a renovated boathouse with sliding doors that open to the water. I picture it now: folding chairs, fluorescent lights, the faint echo of bass from a wedding rehearsal in the main hall while we talk in a side room about kids whose complaints never made it onto police blotters.
I read the email twice, then forward it to Sadie with a single line: Tell me this isn’t a setup.
My phone rings before I can overthink it. Unknown local number.
I risk it and answer.
“Mara Lane.”
“Ms. Lane, this is Leila from Harbor Women’s,” a low, steady voice says. “I figured you might be tired of talking to screens.”
“Screens are my natural habitat,” I say automatically, then cringe at myself. “Hi. I just read your email.”
“And?” she asks. I hear the clatter of dishes behind her, the murmur of other voices. The scent of tea and dish soap arrives in my imagination before she even describes the scene.
“And I’m honored,” I say. “And wary. In equal measure.”
“Good,” she says. “Wary means you’re paying attention. I’ll be clear. We’re not asking you to headline a show. We’re asking you to sit on a panel with survivors, not above them. You’d talk frankly about media, power, and how institutions—including yours—help and hurt.”
My fingers toy with the edge of the glass rose figurine on my table, the cheap knockoff I once thought looked darkly glamorous on my podcast art. Its sharp edge catches my skin.
“There’s already an institution in this town that hates me,” I say. “Two, if you count the Harrows as their own monarchy. I don’t want to give them another excuse to argue I’m whipping people into a frenzy.”
“They’re already saying that,” Leila says calmly. “I have friends on the charity ball committee. I hear the hissed updates between hair spray clouds. The question is whether you want to keep arguing with them on their platforms—sponsor meetings, school board hearings—or help us build our own.”
Through the open window, the distant thud of a sound system carries up from the waterfront. Someone is testing speakers for a daytime regatta party, bass line warping as it hits the water and climbs the cliff.
“Who else will be there?” I ask.
“A former student whose complaint about a coach went nowhere,” she says. “A mother who got iced out of PTA after she questioned Prom Throwback money. An alumna from Juliet’s year who’s finally ready to say what the dock parties were really for. We’re still confirming. All of them decide together what gets recorded or not. We’ve been working on this long before your show caught fire, Mara. You aren’t the spark. You’re just gasoline on dry grass.”
I wince, but she’s right.
“What about Elliot?” I ask. “Or the school board. Are they invited?”
“We invited a district representative,” she says. “They have not responded. Harrow Media is sponsoring an ethics-in-tech panel here the week after our town hall, though. Their logo is already on the seasonal brochure.”
I cross to the fridge and slap my hand against the cool metal, grounding myself. I picture my name printed in the same building’s calendar as Elliot’s. Different nights. Same air.
“So we’d be opening for him,” I say.
“In a way,” she says. “Or softening the ground. You can say no. We’ll still hold the event. We’ll still fight. But your presence tells a certain group of people—the ones who listen to podcasts instead of going to PTA—that we’re on the same side.”
Money flickers through my mind again: the red deficit cell in my spreadsheet, the crowdfunding bar creeping higher, Theo’s soccer shoes with the busted sole. I think about currencies that aren’t dollars. Trust. Rage. Attention.
“I have conditions,” I say.
“Name them,” she replies.
“Survivors speak first,” I say. “Always. I don’t want to be the person re-packaging their words in real time on stage. Second, I get time before to talk privately with anyone who has concerns about their story becoming content. I can explain my boundaries and my mistakes. Third, no one is required to be recorded. Not by me, not by anyone.”
Leila hums thoughtfully.
“Done,” she says. “We already operate that way. I’ll put it in writing if that helps you sleep.”
“It might,” I say. “One more thing. I’ll need to prep my listeners. Frame this not as a spectacle but as a civic event. And I’ll be blunt about sponsors fleeing. That might scare off new donors.”
“Good,” she says. “Transparency works better than any ad read.”
We’re both quiet for a beat. Somewhere on her end, a kettle whistles.
“So?” she asks.
I look around my small kitchen: the chipped mug, the stacked mail, Theo’s field trip form under a magnet shaped like a boat. I picture the arts center on the bluff, facing the same water that swallowed Juliet and reflected every charity gala fireworks show since. The town wants regattas and prom nostalgia. We’re planning to hand them grievances and names.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “Send me the details.”
“Welcome to the coalition, Mara,” Leila says. “And start thinking about how you want to talk about responsibility without turning yourself into the main character. We’ll need that from you.”
After we hang up, I stand at the window for a long minute, watching boats cut white wakes across the bay. The cliffs are clear this morning, sun washing their edges in gold, making the rock shelf below look deceptively gentle.
My laptop pings again. Another pledge. Another message: I can’t show up in person yet, but I’m here. Keep going.
I open the calendar attachment Leila sends. My name sits in black text under the heading Town Hall: Stories the Plaques Don’t Hold. A week later, on the same page, in glossy teal, a different event: Harrow Media Presents: Ethics, Tech, and the Future of Storytelling with Elliot Harrow.
Two nights. Same room. Same town that watched Juliet go from prom queen to cautionary ghost.
I touch the glass rose on my table, feel the give of the cheap stem under my thumb, and imagine it shattering against the polished floors of the arts center.
“Okay, Elliot,” I murmur to the empty apartment, to the bay, to whatever bugs or hidden mics might be listening. “You brought your sponsors. I’m bringing mine.”
Outside, the distant bass from the waterfront swells again, muffled by salt air and distance, like the town is already testing how much noise the walls can hold before they crack.