My mother’s kitchen never really sleeps.
Even at nine in the morning, the smell of coffee grinds clings to the air, fighting with the sweet chemical bite of hairspray that never quite washes out of the curtains. The little TV on the counter mutters about regatta weather, a cheerful anchor standing in front of footage of white sails cutting across blue water. A stack of PTA flyers sits under the magnet shaped like a lobster, right beside an old Prom Throwback poster where grown adults in 90s neon grin under a plastic disco ball.
I wrap both hands around my mug and stare at the chipped rim. The ceramic is still hot enough to sting. My mother put a glass rose on the table this morning without comment—one of the old prom centerpieces she swore she didn’t keep. Its petals glow faintly pink in the weak light, catching reflections from the bay outside her small window.
“You can’t stay here,” she says quietly. Her voice doesn’t match the bright regatta graphics behind the newscaster. “Not after the door. Not after that note.”
“We changed the locks,” I say. The words land with no conviction. “The landlord put in a new deadbolt. I’ll get a camera. It’s fine.”
She snorts, that sharp little sound she used to make at country club ladies who said “trim, not cut” and then cried over every inch. “Those Harrow people have cameras hidden in their art,” she says. “You think a fifty-dollar doorbell points the other way is going to keep them out?”
The glass rose winks up at me. The tiny sketch on the stolen-note flashes in my memory, ink petals curling like a taunt.
“So what?” I ask. I run my thumb along the mug’s crack. “We leave? Pack bags and pretend the cliffs don’t exist? Pretend Juliet never fell? That the island tape never existed?”
I taste last night’s panic in my mouth—metallic, sour. Alongside it, a tired acceptance has begun to settle, like silt in shallow water. The break-in, the missing drives, the note. CPS, the PI in the car, Luz suspended. Every move I make pulls someone else into the blast radius.
“Your cousin Mariana has that finished basement,” my mother says. She ticks points off on fingers stained faintly with hair dye. “Big TV, that little window that looks at some trees, good school district. Not as fancy as Crescent Bay, but the PTA there just cares about bake sales, not police rosters. You work remote now. Podcasts happen on the internet; the internet doesn’t care where your kitchen is.”
“Glass Roses is about Juliet,” I say.
“Juliet will still be dead in six months,” she replies, brutally even. “Theo might not still be safe if you stay here.”
Her words hang between us, heavier than the steam from the coffee. From the living room, the muffled roar of animated explosions drifts in; Theo has the volume too loud again. Cartoon voices yell over each other, and my mother glances at the doorway, lowers her voice.
“I can’t watch him go through another thing,” she says. “CPS, the cliffs, the man in the car, now this. That boy slept in my bed last night like he was five again. He pretended he didn’t, but he did.”
My throat tightens. I remember tiptoeing into her room myself after the prom, after the news, pressing my face into her shoulder while the faint echo of bass from waterfront parties pulsed through the window, the cliffs a dark shape waiting beyond the streetlights.
“If we go,” I say, “I lose access. No more cliffs, no more dock, no more town hall, no more people who only talk to me because they run into me at the laundromat. The case goes cold in the same town that froze it the first time. Elliot keeps smiling on panels about ‘independent voices’ while the only actual independent voice gets… relocated.”
“Relocated alive,” she counters.
I swallow. My eyes drift to the window. From here, you can’t see the cliffs, just a slice of the bay, steel-grey under a low sky. Somewhere out there, under postcard-perfect advertising shots, the rock shelf waits where kids used to sneak cigarettes after dances. Somewhere on the other side, Harrow House glitters above it all, full of hidden storage drives and backup servers that never go missing.
“We could go for a little while,” I hear myself say, testing the words. “Just until court settles. Until the cops finish the investigation. Come back when it’s less—”
“Less what,” my mother asks. “Less dangerous, or less embarrassing for the town?”
I huff out a humorless laugh. “Both.”
A floorboard creaks in the hallway. I glance toward the living room. The cartoon noise dips, then rises again, like someone sat on the remote. Theo said he’d watch something stupid while we talked, headphones handy if we got too “lawyer-y.” He promised.
My mother leans forward, elbows on the table. “You can still do your podcast from somewhere else,” she says. “Tell the story from safety. You don’t owe these people your front door.”
The phrase lands with a strange echo. This isn’t your story to tell. The note on my empty table, accusing and possessive.
“Maybe they’re right,” I say quietly. “Maybe it isn’t mine. Maybe I’ve tangled it up with custody and downloads and my own teenage ghosts so much I don’t know where Juliet ends and I begin. Leaving might be the first non-selfish move I’ve made.”
My mother reaches out. Her hand covers mine, warm and rough. “Protecting your son is not selfish,” she says.
I stare at our joined hands and think about 1997, about envelopes of cash passed across salon counters, about statements changed “for the sake of the town.” Fleeing now would rhyme with that in a way that makes my stomach ache.
“So I take him away,” I say. “We change schools right when everyone has already made him the dead prom queen kid. He loses his friends, such as they are. I lose Juliet’s shoreline.”
“You gain distance from men who hire people to sit in cars outside your building,” she says. “From anonymous calls who know when Theo walks home. From glass roses on doorsteps.”
The cartoon volume dips again. My mother lowers her voice to a whisper.
“He can’t hear us,” she says. “Right?”
“Right,” I lie.
The word barely leaves my mouth before the TV clicks off completely.
Silence rushes in from the living room, so sudden my ears ring. Then Theo’s voice comes from the doorway, flat and too controlled.
“So that’s it?” he says. “We’re just going to run away like Juliet never mattered?”
I jerk around on my chair. He stands framed in the doorway, hair sticking up in soft brown spikes, the sleeves of his hoodie half covering his hands. His eyes flick from me to my mother and back again. The air in the kitchen tightens.
“You were supposed to be watching TV,” my mother says. Her tone drops into full abuela mode. “Eavesdropping is—”
“Kind of hard not to when you’re talking about moving states,” he snaps. His hands tremble where they grip the doorway trim. “When you’re talking about me like I’m a plant you can put in a different window.”
Heat flashes up my neck. “We weren’t—”
“You were,” he says. His voice cracks on the word, but he forces it steady. “You said ‘relocated.’ Like a witness. Except I’m not even allowed to be a witness, right? I’m just the reason you’re supposed to stop.”
My mother opens her mouth, then shuts it. For once, the woman who can talk anyone into bangs has no immediate argument.
“Theo,” I say. I push my chair back and stand, palms out. “We were talking through options. That’s all. After last night—”
“After last night,” he interrupts, “someone broke into your apartment and stole the stuff that proves you’re telling the truth. They didn’t take the TV. They didn’t take my games. They took the drives. They left a note saying the story isn’t yours. And your big plan is to give it to them?”
I flinch. He has my gift for stabbing right into the center of things when he’s hurt.
“It’s not giving it to them,” I say. “It’s… choosing you over it.”
His face scrunches like he just bit into something rotten. “I don’t get to be separate,” he says. He jabs a finger at his chest. “My friends know. The kids at school know. The lady at the corner store knows. I saw the panel clip on TikTok before I even watched it in your living room. Elliot talking about the dock, the comments calling you crazy, the death threats jokes. I’m already in it. You can move me to Vermont or Mars and I’m still the kid from the dead prom queen podcast.”
My mother inhales sharply at “death threats,” but Theo barrels past her reaction.
“Juliet didn’t get to leave,” he continues. “Noah didn’t get to leave. That woman who called you last week? She still lives here, right? In this town where everyone pretends nothing bad happened except some boy got carried away once near the cliffs. Why do they get to stay, and we have to go?”
My spine presses into the counter. His words hit every soft spot I have, all at once. A part of me wants to pull him into a hug, press his face into my neck, promise that I’ll burn Elliot’s world down from a safe distance while Theo learns algebra in a town that doesn’t know our names. Another part, darker and more honest, recognizes that he’s right. I dragged him into this story and then tried to edit him out in post.
“Because you’re my kid,” I say. My voice wobbles. “And you didn’t ask for any of this.”
“I did, though,” he says. He takes a step into the kitchen, then another. The faint smell of his body spray—a drugstore knockoff of some cologne the school’s golden boys probably wear to Prom Throwback—reaches me. “When I walked to the cliffs. When I started recording. When I watched that car outside and wrote down the license plate. I could have pretended I didn’t know. I didn’t.”
My mother seizes on the one detail that stings most. “Recording?” she repeats. Her eyes swing to me. “What recording?”
Theo looks at me, not her. “Tell her,” he says. “Or I will.”
The kitchen shrinks around us. The hum of the fridge, the tick of the cheap clock shaped like a clam shell, the distant bass test from the marina speakers all fade to a dull roar in my ears.
“Theo’s been… making his own audio,” I say. The words taste like confession. “On my old phone. Little episodes. For himself. I only found out recently.”
My mother’s gaze sharpens. “Episodes,” she repeats. “Of what.”
Theo answers before I can spin it softer. “Of our life,” he says. “Of the stuff you talk about when you think I’m in my room. The fights. The knocks on the door. The car. The glass rose. How I feel when CPS comes. What the cliffs look like. I talk about Juliet. About Elliot. I talk about you.”
My mother presses her fingertips to her temple. “Dios,” she mutters. “One podcaster wasn’t enough, we had to birth two.”
I wince. “He’s processing,” I say. “Therapists tell kids to journal. It’s the same thing, just with a mic.”
“It’s not just for me anymore,” Theo says.
We both look at him.
He squares his shoulders. “You’re worried you don’t have proof,” he says to me. “The island tape is gone. The drives are gone. Elliot’s lawyers will say you made everything up for drama and views. But you still have me.”
The words sit heavy in the space between us.
“You’re not evidence,” I say. It comes out faster than I can filter. “You’re my son.”
“I’m both,” he says. His voice is steady now. “I’m a person this story hurt. I’m a witness who can say what it’s like when the town cares more about regattas and charity balls and Prom Throwback than about a girl who died and a boy who almost did. I can say what it’s like to have your mom’s podcast make your friends look at you weird and to have grown-ups send cops to your house because they’d rather call you unsafe than admit their favorite tech guy did bad stuff.”
My mother reaches for the glass rose, then thinks better of it and lets her hand fall. “You want to testify?” she asks. “You want to sit in a courtroom and tell those things to a judge and Elliot and reporters?”
Theo shakes his head. “I don’t know about court,” he says. “That part scares me. But I can at least let Mom have my recordings. For her lawyer. For the episode where she explains everything, the one where she’s not alone. You keep telling everyone this story isn’t just yours, Mom. Prove it. Make it mine too. On purpose.”
His words slice me open in a place I didn’t know still had feeling.
“Do you understand what that means?” I ask. “Once your voice is out there, there’s no pulling it back. People will dissect it. Meme it. Stitch it. They’ll call you brave and broken and manipulative and whatever else fits their feed. You think I’m letting them do that to you?”
“You already let them do it to you,” he says. “And to Juliet. And to that woman who called. The difference is, you ask those women for consent now. Ask me.”
Silence settles thickly over the kitchen. Outside, a gull screams, sharp and ugly over the bay. I picture the cliffs again, the rock shelf beneath, waves chewing slowly at their edges. Gravity doesn’t care about consent. Stories don’t either.
“This is trauma,” my mother says softly. “Not raw material.”
“It can be both,” Theo says. He lifts his chin. “The bad guys already turned it into material when they left that note, when they watched the building, when they called CPS. They used us as plot devices in their plan to shut Mom up. Why don’t we use it back?”
My heart twists at “bad guys.” I hear Juliet on the tape saying, I’m not your secret anymore. I hear my own unedited episode, my voice shaking as I confessed my mistakes to millions of strangers. Every step of this story has walked that knife edge between exposing harm and creating new spectacle.
“Let me get this straight,” I say. “You’re offering me your secret podcast—the thing you made so you had one place that didn’t belong to anyone else—as evidence.”
He nods. “You can decide how much to use,” he says. “Some of it, none of it, I don’t care. I just don’t want you to say you have to leave because you’re out of ways to fight. You’re not.”
My mother looks between us, eyes suspiciously shiny. “Mara,” she says quietly. “You can still go. You can take him away from all this and never let a single person hear those recordings.”
I know she means it as a lifeline. It feels like a dare.
I inhale the kitchen: bitter coffee, aerosol sweetness, the salt sneaking in under the door. I look at my son, standing in front of the fridge with his hoodie sleeves bunched in his fists, offering up the one thing he built in private to help me do the thing I dragged him into in public.
“Get the phone,” I say.
His shoulders sag in relief. He pulls it from his hoodie pocket, thumb flying over the cracked screen. He hands it to me like it weighs fifty pounds.
There, in his list of audio files, are titles typed with uneven thumbs:
EP1_CLlFFS_DAY
EP4_MAN_IN_CAR
EP7_GLASS_ROSE
EP12_DOCK_DREAM (the word makes my stomach lurch, but I know his therapist calls waking images dreams, so I let it pass)
EP15_MOM_IN_COURT
EP19_BREAK-IN_SOUNDS
My thumb hovers over the last one. “You recorded last night?” I ask.
Theo scratches the back of his neck. “I hit record when Grandma thought I was asleep,” he says. “The apartment on speaker. The way your voice sounded. The way you said Elliot’s name. I didn’t want to forget.”
My mother mutters a prayer under her breath.
I press play.
My own voice comes out of the tiny speaker, thin and strained. “Congratulations, Elliot. You found the part of me that still believed my kitchen was a vault.” There’s a faint echo of the laundromat machines through the vent, the soft scrape of my chair, the tremor I tried to hide from Theo when I called him.
Listening to myself through my son’s device feels like hearing a stranger. Or like stumbling onto a raw cut I never meant to release.
I stop the audio.
“We keep these backed up somewhere that isn’t my apartment,” I say. “Encrypted. Password no one in Crescent Bay knows, not even your father if he goes snooping through discovery. We show just enough to my lawyer and, later, to the listeners, to make sure they can’t pretend this didn’t happen.”
“So we’re not leaving?” Theo asks.
The question hangs there, heavy and bright.
I picture Mariana’s basement, some other coastline with cliffs that hold no ghosts. I picture Elliot’s tight jaw on the panel, his slip about the dock, the note declaring ownership over a dead girl’s story. I picture Juliet’s face in the yearbook, taped cassette hidden behind her glossy smile.
“We might still have to go for a bit,” I say slowly. “Hotels, safe houses, who knows. But we’re not abandoning Crescent Bay to its glass roses and gala memories. Not yet. Not like this.”
Theo exhales, long and shaky. My mother closes her eyes and presses the heel of her hand to her chest, as if steadying her own heart against the choice.
I slide the phone back across the table to him. “From now on,” I say, “we treat you like what you are. A kid. And a witness. Both. That means you and I decide together what parts of your voice become content. Deal?”
He nods. “Deal.”
His fingers curl protectively over the phone, but he doesn’t pocket it. For the first time, he leaves it in the center of the table, between the coffee mug and the glass rose, where anyone could see.
I look at that little triangle—cup, rose, phone—and feel the shape of the next move forming, not as a script, but as a collaboration.
“Then we’d better figure out,” I say, “how to tell a story they can’t steal without hearing you first.”
I don’t say out loud the fear curling under the resolve: once the world hears him, there will be no way to unring that bell, and I have no idea whether justice or harm will answer louder.