The old gym breathes dust and memory when I push the door open.
My footsteps land soft on the warped parquet, each board giving a tiny complaint that the mic in my hand probably hears better than I do. The air smells like old varnish, cold concrete, and the chemical sharpness of the cleaning spray the janitor used an hour ago. Up in the rafters, new LED strips buzz faintly, cutting thin ribbons of light through the dim.
I click on the handheld recorder, bring it to my mouth, and hear the familiar hiss of live input through one of the floor monitors.
“This is Mara,” I say quietly, voice echoing back at me from the backboard and the half-painted bleachers. “I’m standing center court, under where the 1997 prom banner used to hang. To my left is the makeshift stage, ten feet deep, riser creaking a little under the weight of the mic stands and my nerves.”
“Levels are good,” a tech calls from the side, his voice bouncing around the high ceiling. Cables snake from the stage toward the control table like vines, taped down in crisscross patterns so no one breaks their neck.
I angle the recorder as I walk. “Front entrance directly behind the back row of chairs,” I narrate. “Two emergency exits on the right wall. One side corridor on the left, leading toward the old locker rooms and the loading dock. Cameras positioned front center, stage right, and back left. No blind spots we’re not choosing.”
My boots stick slightly where an old layer of finish turned tacky during some long-ago summer without air conditioning. Somewhere under my feet, Juliet once swayed under a mirrored ball while the bass from the waterfront parties thumped through the walls and kids whispered about sneaking down to the cliffs after. Now the only rhythm is the tech crew testing the intro stinger through the speakers: the opening bars of my theme music, stripped down to a low instrumental pulse.
“You’re pacing,” Sadie says from the edge of the floor. “You’re going to wear a groove.”
I look up. She’s perched on a folding chair by the control table, laptop open, headset around her neck, a clipboard balanced on her knee. The advocate liaison from the coalition sits beside her, scanning a printed schedule with a pen poised over it. Beyond them, the bleachers yawn up into shadow, half-disassembled, a couple of boards missing like teeth knocked out.
“Pacing is cardio,” I say. My voice shakes the slightest bit, so I keep talking into the recorder to smooth it out. “Tables for press and advocates along the right wall. Reserved seating front row for survivors and family—including Juliet’s sister, Katie Reeves.”
Saying Katie’s name out loud in this room sends a strange shiver up my arms.
“You don’t have to narrate every screw in the floor,” Sadie says. “We’ve got the fire code covered.”
“I’m not narrating for them,” I say. “I’m narrating for me.”
I pivot toward the stage, climb the two steps, and stand behind the mic that will be mine in less than an hour. The foam smells faintly like the disinfectant spray I insisted on, layered over years of other people’s breath. The chairs spread out in front of me feel both too many and not nearly enough.
I lower the recorder again. “Stage vantage point,” I say. “Rows of chairs, maybe a hundred, facing me. Press tables on the right, Discord volunteers and coalition staff on the left. In the back corners, off-duty officers who are technically ‘private citizens’ tonight.”
I don’t name Luz into the recorder, but I picture her anyway, a shadow near one of the exits, watching without a badge.
A tech up in the makeshift booth calls, “Mara, can you give me a line at your mic?”
I lean toward the stand. “Check, check. One, two,” I say. “Elliot Harrow once said the dock had ruined enough lives. Tonight we test that thesis.”
“Levels are hot,” the tech answers. “Pull that back to court-appropriate shade.”
A little ripple of laughter runs through the people already inside: a couple of early-arrival reporters, a trio of college girls in Glass Roses sweatshirts, two older women from the coalition who wear their exhaustion like armor. The sound eases something in the base of my neck.
“Doors open in twenty,” Sadie calls. Her voice crackles through the small PA we’re using for internal cues. “Press check-in at the west table, advocates at the east. No one touches the stage without a badge.”
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I glance at the screen. A new email from Harrow Media – Office sits beneath three messages from my lawyer, all of them still unread. I don’t open any of them. I already know the gist: Elliot confirming his attendance, promising to speak “to set the record straight,” laying the groundwork for whatever spin he plans to weave.
The gym door creaks again. Cold air tumbles in, smelling like wet leaves and the distant salt off the bay. A few more early birds shuffle through the entrance: an older man in a Crescent Bay Sailing Club jacket, a pair of PTA moms with cautious eyes and impeccable hair, a high-schooler in a faded 90s band tee that might have belonged to a parent who once danced in this room.
I slip the recorder back into my pocket. My free hand curls around the mic stand until my knuckles whiten. This building used to feel like a party I could never get into; now it feels like a courtroom and a stage collided.
“Mara?” a voice calls from behind me.
I turn.
Katie Reeves stands in the doorway, framed by the hallway’s fluorescent light. She holds a plastic storage bin in both arms, fingers dug into the rim. A scarf is wrapped tight around her neck even though the gym is warm from the equipment. Behind her, a younger volunteer strains under a second bin.
“Let me help,” I say, hopping down from the stage.
The closer I get, the more the bins glitter. Inside, nestled in bubble wrap, glass roses catch the light and throw it back in fractured sparks. They look fragile and dangerous all at once.
“You’re sure about this?” I ask, grabbing the second bin before it slides from the volunteer’s hands.
Katie exhales. “They’ve been in my mother’s basement for twenty-six years,” she says. “Good for gathering dust and guilt. Might as well make them earn their keep.”
Her joke lands crooked, but she doesn’t flinch from it. We carry the bins toward the front row, where a few small tables wait, draped in plain black cloth.
“I thought we agreed no prom re-creation,” I say. “I don’t want this to turn into nostalgic cosplay.”
“It’s not decor,” she says firmly. “It’s evidence and memorial. These were on the tables while the town toasted a future Juliet never got. People should have to look at them when they listen tonight.”
I study her face. There’s a new steadiness there, beneath the grief I’ve known since our first off-the-record coffee. “You know being here, bringing these, means people will put your name next to mine,” I say. “In articles. In group texts. On the subreddit.”
“I saw the RSVP list,” she says. “Elliot’s donors, the moms from Prom Throwback, the same surnames on the school board plaques. They already use my name in rooms I’m not invited into. This is me walking into one on my own terms.”
My throat tightens. “Then front row,” I say. “With the coalition. I want you where I can see you.”
We set the first glass rose in the center of the front table. Even under gym lights, it catches something of that 90s ballroom glow: petals frozen mid-bloom, stem swallowed by the clear base. Tiny bubbles trapped inside the glass look like air reaching for the surface of water.
“One here,” Katie says, turning to the press table. “One at the advocates’ table. One at the sound board. Juliet deserves to be everywhere in this room.”
“We only brought four?” I ask.
“I kept one,” she says. Her voice dips. “At home. Not ready to put that one under any stranger’s stare.”
I nod. The paradox presses in: her sister’s death feeding my downloads, this whole event threatening to turn Juliet into content again, even as we try to claw justice out of the feed.
“For what it’s worth,” I say quietly, “I built this night to get the town looking at the people who hurt her, not at her dress.”
“I know,” Katie says. She brushes her fingers over the glass rose on the front row table. “That’s why I’m standing here instead of yelling at you on morning television.”
A reporter with a local-news mic spots her and starts to angle over. Katie sees the movement, straightens her shoulders, and shifts her stance so she’s half behind the advocates’ liaison.
“No comments until after,” she says under her breath. “You deal with them.”
“Gladly,” I say, stepping into the reporter’s path with a practiced smile and my own recorders dangling like tiny shields.
By the time we finish placing the roses, the gym has shifted from echo chamber to crowded hum. Chairs fill with bodies and rustling coats. Someone unwraps mints; the scent of peppermint mixes with sweat and dust. The coalition women cluster near the front, their tote bags full of pamphlets and tissues. Alumni drift in, some dressed like they might be heading to a regatta dinner after this, others in jeans and an old Crescent Bay High hoodie, collars turned up against the November chill.
Sadie moves through the crowd with a stack of color-coded index cards. “If you want to ask a question,” she says, dropping cards into waiting hands, “write it down and bring it to the moderators’ table. No shouting from the floor. We’re not reenacting cable news.”
A woman in a pearl choker and PTA polish lifts an eyebrow. “And if we just want to observe?” she asks.
“Then you get to observe,” Sadie says, voice pleasant and firm. “No one is obligated to perform tonight. Except the people who chose microphones.”
Her eyes flick toward me when she says that. I give her a tiny salute.
Near the exits, I spot two of Luz’s “private citizens” leaning against the wall, dressed in jeans and neutral jackets but standing with that unmistakable cop posture: feet planted, gaze scanning. Their presence steadies me even as it underscores the risk.
The school’s Prom Throwback committee once filled this room with rented fog and 90s playlists so adults could relive their youth in sequins and hair spray. Tonight, the only mist hangs in the cold corners near the ceiling, and the soundtrack is the low murmur of a town trying to decide whether it’s here for justice or spectacle.
“Ten minutes,” Sadie calls through the internal channel. “Livestream is up, chat’s in slow mode. Mods are ready.”
I climb back onto the stage, now with a small audience watching. The handheld recorder lies on the table beside my printed script, its red light blinking patiently. Theo’s phone—our backup recorder, his secret podcast origin device—sits next to it, screen dark.
I put on my headphones. The world narrows to the soft roar of room tone and the occasional cough.
The main doors open again.
I don’t have to turn to know who it is. The shift in the room tells me before my eyes catch up: the sudden uptick in camera shutters, the way conversations drop by a decibel, the subtle pivot of necks and shoulders orienting toward the entrance.
I force myself to look anyway.
Elliot Harrow walks into the gym like he owns the floorboards.
He wears a charcoal suit that probably costs more than my annual rent, the fabric catching the light without shining. His tie is a muted blue, “trustworthy tech founder on magazine cover” shade. Flanking him are two men and one woman in dark suits, laptops and leather portfolios in hand—lawyers and PR, the clean-up crew he brings to every narrative fire.
The local-news camera swings toward them. A reporter I recognize lifts her mic.
“Mr. Harrow,” she calls, jogging up to match his pace. “Why attend tonight’s event when your office has called the podcast ‘reckless’ in past statements?”
“Because I believe in community dialogue,” he says, voice carrying clearly even without a mic. “And I won’t let misinformation about Harrow Island stand unchallenged.”
He does not say Juliet’s name. He does not look at Katie, even though she stands in the front row now with her hand resting on the glass rose.
His gaze sweeps the room and lands on the stage.
On me.
For a heartbeat, the gym falls away. It’s just my body, every nerve lit, and his face, composed into an expression I could teach in a media literacy course: concern around the eyes, a faint line between the brows, mouth pressed into something that reads as reluctant duty.
Then the expression shifts. The corners of his lips tug up a millimeter into a tight, controlled smile.
He holds my eyes and gives the smallest nod, an acknowledgment that feels less like greeting and more like a gunshot’s first echo.
I grip the edge of the table to steady my hands. I imagine the treacherous rock shelf below the cliffs, the place that started this whole story, and the gym floor between us turns into a narrow path between those rocks and the polished donor plaques on the walls. There’s no side exit from here that doesn’t cost somebody something.
“We’re at five minutes to air,” Sadie’s voice crackles in my headphones, cutting through the static in my head. “Mara, you good?”
Good is not a word I recognize right now.
I lift the handheld recorder, click it on again, and bring it to my mouth without taking my eyes off Elliot.
“Pre-roll note,” I whisper into it. “The man who says he’s here to correct the record just walked past Juliet’s glass roses without seeing them, or pretending not to. I am recording anyway.”
Elliot turns away toward the press table, already reaching for the mic they offer him.
My finger hovers over the mute button on my own mic, the last sliver of silence I control before the red LIVE light clicks on and everything we say turns into permanent tape.