“We can still back off,” I say, even though the panel countdown is already ticking in the corner of my browser. “We can text her and tell her not to do it.”
Sadie sprawls on my couch, one socked foot bouncing so hard the whole frame squeaks. The laptop sits between us on the coffee table, the screen a bright rectangle in the dark. Outside, Crescent Bay hums—bass leaking from some waterfront pre-regatta party, the muffled thump climbing the cliffs and squeezing through my open window along with salt air and fryer grease from the bar on the corner.
“You briefed her better than juries get briefed,” Sadie says. “She wants to do this. You want to do this. I… definitely want to do this.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” I say.
The event splash screen rotates slowly: Ethics, Tech, and the Future of Storytelling—Presented by Harrow Media. A photo of the arts center flashes in the background, all glass and cedar and tasteful uplighting, perched above water that I know hides the rock shelf beneath like teeth.
I swallow a mouthful of flat soda and ginger, the bubbles stinging my throat. “We’re using live survivors’ stories to bait a man on a stage,” I say. “I keep thinking about Roe hearing this and thinking I turned her into ammunition.”
“You didn’t,” Sadie says. “He did, when he built his whole empire on ‘independent voices’ while silencing the ones that actually matter. We’re just handing him his own marketing copy and saying, ‘Eat up.’”
A chat box pops up on my phone.
Harriet: in line for Q mic. sweaty lol.
I text back: Breathe. You can walk out at any time. No pressure.
A second later: Harriet: nah. he’s not the only one who gets to use microphones.
I show Sadie. She grins, a quick sharp thing.
“She’s fine,” she says. “You’re the one chewing a hole through your lip.”
I touch my mouth and taste iron. Of course she’s right.
The stream switches from the splash screen to a shaky handheld shot of the arts center auditorium. Rows of upholstered chairs fill with donors and tech bros and a smattering of Crescent Bay types in blazers that have never seen a discount rack. I recognize the space from my town hall walkthrough: the same polished floors, the same subtle sound of the bay slapping pilings beneath the building when the mics go quiet.
The moderator appears at a podium, an earnest guy in a blazer that fits too well to be bought by himself. “Welcome to Crescent Bay Arts,” he says. “Tonight we’re talking about ethics, technology, and the stories we tell about each other.”
“Drink,” Sadie mutters.
“We’re not playing the buzzword game,” I say, but my shoulders hunch.
The camera cuts to the panel: three men and one woman on stools. Elliot sits center-left, of course, in a charcoal jacket and a soft blue shirt, no tie. His hair gleams under stage lights, and the waterfront backdrop behind him paints him in hero colors—our hometown boy who made good and came back to host regattas and Prom Throwback fundraisers and ethics panels.
I hate how good he looks on camera. I hate how my body recognizes him the way the town does: the practiced half-smile, the folded hands, the eyes that project concern even when his mouth is doing PR.
“Okay,” Sadie says, leaning forward. “Showtime.”
The first forty minutes feel like chewing cotton.
Elliot talks about platform responsibility and “giving marginalized creators a seat at the table.” He nods solemnly when the woman on the panel mentions revenge porn and stalking. He uses the phrase “victim-centered” like a seasoning, sprinkling it over everything just enough to taste.
“We owe it to our communities,” he says, “to make sure that the attention economy doesn’t chew people up and spit them out.”
“That’s rich,” I whisper. My foot keeps tapping; the linoleum under my chair vibrates in sympathy.
“We’re taking notes, right?” Sadie says. “Because he just gave us a quote for the cold open.”
The camera cuts between panelists and close-ups. Every time the lens lingers on Elliot, the chat in the streaming window floods with emojis and hearts from his fanboys, plus a few bitter comments from my listeners that I recognize by username. IGNOREMARA69 posts a string of glass emojis and roses; another user replies with a dock icon and a skull.
My phone buzzes again.
Harriet: still Q 3. moderator says just one ? each.
Me: Remember: Juliet + Harrow Island + survivors. No dock. He needs to say it.
My hands shake as I send it. I’m asking a stranger to walk up to a man who controls school boards and police rosters and call his history into question in front of donors and cameras. I’m asking her to help me poke a man whose company planted a listening device in my vents.
My throat feels tight.
The moderator’s voice cuts through. “We’ve got time for a few questions from the audience,” he says. “Please keep them brief and respectful.”
“There,” Sadie says. “Mic on the left. Red dress.”
The camera swings to a standing woman near the aisle. Harriet. I recognize the braid we saw on Zoom, thick and dark down her back, the way she rolls her shoulders like she’s shifting into battle stance.
She takes the mic.
“Hi,” she says. Her voice comes through the laptop speakers with a faint echo, and the shitty acoustics of my kitchen add another layer of tinny reverb. “My name is Harriet. I’m a Crescent Bay High alum and a survivor.”
The audience quiets in a way I can hear even through compressed audio. Somewhere, glass clinks against glass.
Harriet continues. “My question is for Mr. Harrow.”
Elliot folds his hands tighter. “Thank you for being here, Harriet,” he says. “And for your courage.”
He says it like he invented it.
“A lot of us know about what happened at Harrow Island in ninety-seven because of the Glass Roses podcast,” Harriet says. “And we also know that Juliet Reeves never got justice. Recently, more survivors from that party are starting to come forward. I want to know what you say to them. Not as a CEO. As someone who was there, whose family owned that dock, that house, that whole night.”
The laptop fan whirs louder, heating my palms. My heart bangs in my ears.
“She did it,” Sadie whispers. “God, she actually did it.”
Elliot doesn’t answer right away. He presses his lips together, eyes closing for a beat, like he’s slowing his breath. When he opens them again, the sorrow is already there, waiting.
“Thank you, Harriet,” he says. “Really. I—” He glances toward the moderator, then back to her. “Juliet was one of my closest friends. Losing her tore a hole in this town. And in me. I’ve watched the renewed attention on her death with a lot of complicated feelings.”
“He’s going for nuance,” Sadie mutters.
“On the one hand,” Elliot says, “I’m grateful that people still care. That they want answers. On the other hand, I worry about the spectacle. About turning a young woman’s tragedy into content. I question whether some of these narratives are really for Juliet, or for downloads.”
I feel that dart land where he intends it. I keep my face neutral even though Sadie’s eyes flick to me.
“As for survivors,” he continues, “I always, always want them to feel safe coming forward. To the police. To therapists. To trusted adults. I don’t believe a live-streamed show or a Discord server is the right venue for processing that pain.”
The audience nods along. The chat scrolls with people praising his thoughtfulness. A handful of my listeners are already dissecting the dog whistles in real time.
“He never said he wasn’t there,” Sadie says. “He never said he didn’t know.”
Harriet holds onto the mic. I watch her grip tighten.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says. “You talked about venues. I asked what you say to girls who got hurt on your family’s island, under adult supervision that failed them. Who watched your friends get protected while they got called liars.”
The moderator leans forward. “We have to move on—”
“No, it’s okay,” Elliot says. He lifts his hand, magnanimous. “It’s okay. I understand the frustration.”
His smile pinches a little around the edges now.
“I say I’m sorry,” he says. “From the bottom of my heart. I say I was a kid too, and I trusted the adults in charge to do the right thing. I say I’ve spent my adult life trying to build institutions that protect people instead of silencing them.”
“By spying on my vents,” I say under my breath.
Sadie’s jaw works side to side, like she’s grinding down a scream.
The camera lingers on Harriet. She is not satisfied. “If you’re so committed to protecting people,” she says, “why haven’t you spoken publicly until now? Why did it take a mom with a mic at her kitchen table to drag this into the light?”
A ripple of murmurs passes through the room.
Elliot’s hand tightens on the arm of his stool. He breathes in, slow, nostrils flaring for the first time all night.
“I’ve been quietly supporting efforts behind the scenes,” he says. “Funding scholarships, counseling. I don’t believe in performative guilt. I believe in—”
Harriet cuts in. “You believe in control. You control the school board, the Prom Throwback fundraiser, the arts center calendar, and now you want to control how survivors speak too. Is that ethical storytelling, Mr. Harrow?”
The moderator reaches for the mic, but she keeps talking over him, the edges of her voice fraying now. “Because from where a lot of us stand on the cliffs, that dock looks like—”
“That dock has ruined enough lives.”
Elliot’s words crack across the room.
He’s louder than before. Sharper. The mic picks up the sudden bite in his tone, no soft edges left. For a second the auditorium goes dead quiet. On my screen his face is not curated—eyes wide, jaw tight, shoulders too close to his ears.
The word slams into my chest: dock.
Not island. Not party. Not tragedy. Dock.
He hears it too. I watch the realization hit him: the tiny flinch at his own phrasing, the way he pulls his mouth back into something gentler, chastened.
“I—I’m sorry,” he says, forcing a laugh that doesn’t land. “What I mean is, that conversation has brought so much pain into the present. And I worry that rehashing it in public, without context, without due process, is dangerous. For everyone.”
The moderator pounces, grateful. “On that note,” he says, “we’re going to shift to a different angle. Data privacy—”
The camera cuts away from Harriet without showing whether anyone takes the mic from her. The panelists settle back onto their script. Elliot keeps talking, but my brain has already clipped and looped those eight words.
That dock has ruined enough lives.
Sadie’s hand flies to my wrist. “You heard—”
“I heard,” I say. My pulse bangs against her fingers. “He went straight to the dock.”
The chat window explodes. What dock? Wait, did he just confirm dock? He just admitted something, right? Emojis pile up: waves, roses, knives, docks.
“No one outside Crescent Bay knew that detail,” Sadie says. “We never said dock on the feed. Only ‘waterfront’ and ‘shoreline.’ We cut every time we accidentally said dock.”
My mind scrolls through the matrix of my edits, the notes where I wrote DON’T NAME DOCK YET, the late-night calls with Luz where we argued about how much geography to expose. The dock has been a private word, reserved for the tape, the case file, my nightmares.
“He’s telling on himself,” Sadie says, voice electric. “We got him to talk to the dock on camera.”
On screen, Elliot is answering a softball question about AI moderation with his calm, even cadence. No one looking at him right now would know he just punched a hole in his own narrative.
The arts center mics pick up a faint thud beneath the stage—waves hitting pilings, the bay lapping at the building’s bones. I imagine the water carrying his words out to the treacherous rock shelf where kids used to pass cigarettes after dances, where Juliet’s last laughs probably floated out into the salt dark.
“Wait,” I say. “Look at his hand.”
The camera zooms in for a question, catching his fingers. He’s rubbing his thumb against the edge of his ring finger, a small, repetitive motion. Not the relaxed politician clasp we saw at the PTA meeting, not the confident spread he uses on promotional shots.
“He’s furious,” I murmur. “He’s just better at freezing it.”
My phone buzzes.
Unknown: Cute stunt.
My throat goes dry. I tap into the message thread.
Unknown: You’re playing with fire, Mara. Plenty of things catch.
“Who is it?” Sadie asks.
I tilt the screen so she can see the unsaved number. Her mouth hardens.
“You don’t know that’s him,” she says, but there’s no conviction in it.
On the laptop, the panel begins wrapping up. The moderator thanks sponsors: Harrow Media, of course, plus the yacht club foundation and the town’s favorite family law firm. People clap. Elliot smiles his camera smile again, but the corners don’t quite reach.
The stream ends, cutting back to a static logo. The sudden silence in my kitchen amplifies everything else: the rumble of dryers downstairs, the hiss of the party bass in the distance, a siren wailing briefly near the marina then fading.
Sadie exhales. “I need to scrub through and clip that dock line before someone takes the archive down,” she says, already reaching for the trackpad. “We need mirrors, transcripts, backups on backups—”
“Do it,” I say. “But we’re not turning it into a meme. No dock reaction GIFs, no ‘DockDrop’ hashtags. This isn’t just a win. It’s a warning.”
She looks up at me, eyes bright. “A warning for him, you mean.”
“For us,” I say. “He doesn’t lose control in public. Ever. He just did. That means he’s scared. And men like Elliot don’t retreat when they’re scared. They escalate.”
The unknown number pings again.
Unknown: Enjoy your little moment. Tomorrow we talk about what stories you don’t want told.
My skin prickles, a cold sweep from collarbone to wrist.
The glass rose on the table catches the laptop’s sleeping-screen glow, its petals throwing fractured light onto the ceiling. I watch the shards of brightness tremble with each bass hit from the bay.
I know, in my bones, that we just cracked something open.
I also know gravity always wins when glass meets dock.
“Save the clip,” I tell Sadie, never taking my eyes off the text. “And tonight, back up everything. Every tape, every file. If we just poked the bear, we’d better be ready when it stands up.”