I ride the high from the town hall all the way up the hill, on legs that feel like wet sand.
The night is humid in that Crescent Bay way, salt and hairspray hanging together in the air. Someone down near the marina is testing speakers for a regatta party; bass pulses through the dark, a distant thud that threads under my skin. I still smell the hotel ballroom from earlier—the over-chilled AC, the coffee burnt at the edges, the ghost of expensive perfume from the row of PTA power moms who sat in the back with their arms folded.
I keep replaying the last question I answered on the panel. A college girl with chipped blue nail polish asked, “What do you say to people who think you’re using trauma for content?” I remember how my hand tightened around the mic, how I told her, “I say they’re right to be suspicious. I say I’m trying to build something where survivors are partners, not raw material. And I say I’m still getting it wrong and still trying anyway.”
People had clapped. Some looked uncomfortable. A woman in a blazer printed with tiny anchors pressed a note into my hand afterward with the name of her sister and the words call me when you’re ready for another story.
My throat aches from talking. My cheeks feel overused from polite smiles. But underneath the exhaustion, a thin thread of contentment hums. The advocacy group didn’t just use me as a sideshow; they let me say “Juliet” into a microphone in a room that usually only hosts Prom Throwback fundraisers and yacht-club galas. For one night, Juliet’s name sat beside the donors’ on the program.
I turn the corner onto my block. The liquor store’s neon sign paints the sidewalk blue and red. The laundromat below my place has gone dark, the heat from the machines leaving a damp warmth seeping into the stairwell. I climb, keys already in my hand, brain finally drifting toward Theo.
He’s at my mom’s for the night. They probably fell asleep in front of some baking show, my mother criticizing frosting technique while Theo pretends not to care and secretly memorizes every step. I picture his hair flattened on one side from her couch pillow, his old earbuds still in, whispering his secret podcast into the cracked mic of my retired phone.
That thought makes me smile as I reach the landing.
Then I see my door.
It isn’t shut.
It stands a few inches open, the cheap wood catching on the frame. The chain dangles uselessly; I stopped using it after CPS, when I realized I needed officers to be able to walk in without kicking anything down. A rectangle of darkness gapes where there should be a solid line.
Every cell in my body goes rigid. The hairs along my arms rise. The keys bite into my palm because my fingers snap closed around them on instinct, metal teeth ready for a fight I’m in no shape to win.
For a stupid second I tell myself I probably just didn’t latch it. I left in a hurry, arms full of flyers. Maybe I pulled without checking. But my stomach has already dropped, and deep inside I know: I do not leave the door like this. Not anymore. Not with glass roses and CPS reports and bugs in vents in my rearview.
I press my back against the wall, out of the doorway’s direct line. My heart thumps so loud I half expect to hear it echo off the stairwell concrete.
“Theo?” I call, low and sharp, before my brain catches up and remembers he isn’t here.
No answer. No footsteps on the floorboards. No voices. Just the faint mechanical hum of my fridge and the muffled bass from the bay.
I edge my toe forward and nudge the door wider with my foot, staying to the side, keys splayed between my fingers like a ridiculous brass knuckle. The door swings open with a reluctant creak.
The apartment looks the same.
At first.
The hallway rug lies straight. The shoe pile crouches in its usual heap by the wall. The smell is familiar: detergent from downstairs, the onion from the cutting board I forgot in the sink, the ghost of my shampoo. Nothing is overturned, no drawers yanked out, no couch cushions on the floor.
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth hurt. The last time danger broke my perimeter, it came as a small black device in the vent. Neat, precise, designed to vanish in plain sight.
I clear the bathroom, bedroom, closet, the way Luz taught me, phone clutched in one hand and camera recording, just in case. No one. Just my unmade bed, Theo’s sweatshirt on the chair, the yellow duck my mother refuses to let me throw away on top of the hamper.
The kitchen draws me like a magnet.
My “studio” corner comes into view, the thrift-store quilt on the wall, the crooked framed photo of me and Theo at the cliffs the day he was born, the secondhand lamp that makes guests call the space “cozy” instead of “cramped.”
And the table.
My body knows before my mind catches up. Something inside me drops straight through the soles of my feet.
The table is empty.
Not just cleared. Erased.
The laptop-shaped dust shadow is a pale rectangle on the wood where the heat of its base had browned the varnish. The familiar tangle of cords is gone, leaving only a faint groove on the edge where the interface cable used to drag. The mic stand I scored from a closing studio has vanished. The little foam shield I clipped on to cut laundromat noise: gone.
The external drives that usually squat beside my mug—black bricks with masking tape labels stacked like tiny tombstones—are missing. The USB hub. The SD card wallet. The cheap headphones with the left ear peeling.
“No,” I whisper. The word comes out dry, like my throat forgot how to make sound.
I sprint the three steps to the table and drop to my knees, hands groping under the chair, behind the legs, under the lip. Nothing. I yank open the drawer where I keep spare cables and old earbuds. The plastic bag of screws is still there, the cork coasters, the Jolly Rancher Theo hid last week, but no flash drives.
My fingers move faster, frantic. I rip open the cupboard where I stash blank notebooks and pens, the box in the corner that holds Theo’s third-grade dioramas, the crate of Juliet research folders. Papers rustle, cardboard scrapes my cuticles, dust puffs into my face.
The drives are gone.
Every single one.
The rest of the apartment stares back at me, untouched. Theo’s game console sits under the TV, cables right where he left them after our argument about screen time. My sad little jewelry dish on the dresser still holds the fake silver hoops I wear when I want to look like a person on camera. Even the cash envelope in the kitchen drawer with tonight’s babysitter money lies right where I shoved it.
Whoever came here didn’t want my stuff.
They wanted my voice.
My chest tightens in a slow, vicious squeeze. I force myself upright, palms smearing wood dust into my jeans, and that’s when I see it.
The note.
A single sheet of printer paper sits dead center on the bare table, where my laptop usually lives. I have no idea how I missed it. Maybe my brain refused to process anything that wasn’t absence.
The paper is unlined. The message sits in the middle, written in dark blue ink, each letter neat and deliberate.
This isn’t your story to tell.
Underneath the words, tucked in the lower right corner, someone has drawn a tiny glass rose. No color, just ink lines: petals curled, stem short, a little base like the ones that sat on the 1997 prom tables and later on Juliet’s grave, on Katie’s porch, on my doorstep.
My hand hovers above the page. I don’t touch it. Luz’s voice echoes in my head: You don’t touch possible prints, Lane. You document. Then you call me. Or you call anyone who will get here before the chief’s golf buddies.
Luz is on administrative leave. Her badge is hanging in some internal affairs office while men who ate shrimp beside the Harrows at charity balls evaluate whether she’s “compromised.”
“Who are you calling now, Mara?” I whisper to the empty room.
My phone vibrates in my hand, making me jump so hard I nearly drop it. Theo’s name flashes on the screen.
I swipe to answer. “Hey,” I say, and my voice comes out tight enough that he notices immediately.
“You okay?” he asks. TV sound fuzzes in the background, my mother’s voice distant and tinny. “Grandma said you were probably talking to important people and I should wait to call, but I wanted to tell you the livestream re-upload has like thirty thousand views already. People are quoting the dock line.”
Dock. My stomach flips. “I’m home,” I say. “I—listen. Don’t freak out. Everything’s fine. But it looks like someone came into the apartment while we were gone.”
A pause. Then, sharper: “What do you mean, came in? Like broke in? Where are you right now?”
“I’m in the kitchen,” I say. I crouch automatically, muscle memory from active-shooter drills I wish I didn’t know Theo had practiced. “I already checked. No one’s here. They’re gone.”
“What did they take?” he asks. He doesn’t ask if I called the police. He’s too used to the answer being complicated.
My eyes sweep the room. I make myself say it out loud. “They took the laptop,” I say. “The mics. The hard drives. All the podcast stuff.”
His breath catches on the other end. For a second I picture another break-in years from now, different town, different reason, and him asking, What did they take, Mom? and me answering, You.
“Did they mess up my room?” he asks, voice smaller now.
“No,” I say, turning toward the hallway again just to be sure. “Your room is fine. The TV’s fine. They didn’t touch anything else.” I look back at the note and its tiny rose. “They were very specific about what mattered.”
He hears something in my tone, because his voice hardens. “They’re trying to shut you up,” he says.
“They’re trying to shut us up,” I correct. I press my free hand flat on the table so I don’t punch something. “I need you to stay where you are for now, okay? With Grandma. I just walked into this. I have to take pictures and… figure out the next move before you come home.”
“I want to be there,” he protests. “I’m not a baby.”
“I know you’re not,” I say. I close my eyes, fighting the urge to cave. “And that’s exactly why I need you somewhere safe until I know this place is clean. Please.”
There’s a long exhale on the line. “Fine,” he says. “But you have to FaceTime me and show me. So I know what it looks like. So I can remember. For later. In case people pretend it didn’t happen.”
That sentence lands with more weight than he probably intends. I picture future transcripts, future courts, future listeners parsing his voice.
“Deal,” I say. “Give Grandma a hug. Tell her I’ll call in twenty.”
He hangs up without a goodbye, which is his new way of communicating both fury and love.
I plant my phone on the counter and switch to camera mode. I photograph the door, the frame, the empty table, the rubber mark on the floor where the mic stand used to rest. I circle the note, capturing it from every angle, zooming in on the tiny glass rose. Only when I have a dozen shots do I slide it carefully into a plastic sleeve from one of my research binders, gripping the edges so my fingers don’t touch the ink.
When the panic ebbs enough to let another thought in, it hits me: Sadie and I backed up everything after Elliot’s panel.
I lunge for the bookshelf and yank down the ancient Chromebook Theo uses for homework. The plastic casing is cracked, the hinge a little loose, but it boots, bless its stubborn heart. I connect to our building’s temperamental Wi-Fi, the little spinning wheel grinding through each second while sweat cools on the back of my neck.
I log into my cloud storage.
The folders load one by one: EPISODES_MASTER, B-ROLL, VOICEMAIL_ARCHIVE, TRANSCRIPTS. Each little blue icon feels like a lung inflating.
“Come on, come on,” I whisper, clicking into the HARROW_ISLAND subfolder.
Files populate the window: RAW_MICROCASSETTE_LOW, LUZ_NOTES, JULIET_LAUGH_LOOP, TIMELINE_DOC. But the file I’m hunting for, the one I named ISLAND_TAPE_CLEAN_ORIGINAL, is not there.
I sort by name, then by date, then by size, fingers clumsy on the mousepad. Nothing. No typo variant, no older version.
A pit yawns open under my ribs. I click the trash bin.
Empty.
Whoever walked into my apartment didn’t just take the physical drives; they signed into my account with credentials they had no business possessing and made sure the one thing I couldn’t rebuild evaporated.
I stare at the screen, trying to remember the last time I saw that filename. I picture myself hunched over the laptop two weeks ago, headphones on, listening to the cleaned-up tape where Elliot’s young voice emerged from the static. I remember dragging the file into a folder, writing myself a note: BACK UP TO EXTERNAL ONLY UNTIL EP AIRDATE—DON’T LEAVE ONLINE.
My own paranoia bit me. I’d decided the cloud was too hackable for the most sensitive file. I thought the metal shell of the drive on my table was safer.
“Congratulations, Elliot,” I say to the empty room. “You found the part of me that still believed my kitchen was a vault.”
My eyes burn, but I refuse to cry over his victory lap. I scan the remaining list and spot one slender lifeline: TRANSCRIPT_ISLAND_TAPE_V2.
I open it.
The words unfurl: [MUSIC, PARTIES IN BACKGROUND], [UNIDENTIFIED MALE LAUGHING], JULIET: “I’m not your secret anymore.” NOAH: “Jules, don’t—”. Then the line we isolated as Elliot’s threat, the one the audio tech helped us hear. It’s all there, typed out in my own shorthand.
The voice may be gone, but the story isn’t fully kidnapped yet.
My phone rings again. FaceTime request: Theo.
I accept, angling the screen so he can see the empty table. His face fills the corner box, eyes wide, hair sticking up from the side where he’s been lying on Grandma’s couch.
“Whoa,” he says. “They really only took the podcast stuff.”
“Yeah,” I answer. “They left the thrift-store plates and my three whole pieces of jewelry. The Harrows have very specific taste.”
His mouth twitches despite himself. Then his expression firms. “So what now?” he asks. “If they keep erasing your files, how do you prove anything? How do you keep telling the story?”
I look from his face to the note on the table and back again. The question hangs between us, heavier than the humid air, heavier than the cliffs that used to feel like the edge of the world when Juliet and I were kids.
“I don’t know yet,” I say.
I glance at the Chromebook, at the flickering cursor in the transcript, at my own words capturing Juliet’s last recorded fight. Somewhere down in town, in houses with perfect alarms and better insurance, regatta playlists rattle champagne flutes. Up on the cliffs, the rock shelf waits under the black water, patient and sharp.
“But they’re right about one thing,” I add, voice low. “This story doesn’t just belong to me. Which means they can’t steal it completely. Not unless we let them.”
Theo studies me through the screen, thinking in that quiet, scary way of his. “Then we don’t let them,” he says.
The conviction in his voice rattles me more than the open door did.
“Go to sleep,” I tell him gently. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I hang up before he can argue and stand alone in the hollowed-out quiet of my apartment, the note’s words burning into my back like a brand.
This isn’t your story to tell.
I stare at the bare table, at the empty space where my mic used to stand, and wonder what they’ll come for next: more files, my witnesses, or the kid whose life has already become part of the story whether any of us consented or not.