The red LIVE light pops on with a soft click that my mic turns into a tiny gunshot.
I unmute, inhale, and taste dust and nerves and the faint chemical citrus of the cleaning spray rising from the floor. The gym hums—chairs creaking, someone coughing, the rustle of a program page—but all of it slides under the headphone feed, under the clean channel of my own breathing.
“This is Glass Roses,” I say. My voice comes out thinner than in my kitchen, pins-and-needles at the edges. I clear my throat, grip the edge of the table harder. “Coming to you live from Crescent Bay High School’s old gym, the last place Juliet Reeves danced before the town wrote an ending for her that never fit.”
A murmur runs through the front rows. Katie sits with her chin lifted, one hand on the glass rose in front of her. Under the stage lights the rose glows bruise-purple and wine-red, bending the room in its curves.
“Before anyone hears from me,” I say, “I want you to hear from Juliet.”
My finger hovers for a beat over the sample pad, sweat making the rubber slick. When I press it, the click sounds huge inside my headphones. A thin band of green jumps on the waveform monitor.
Then Juliet’s voice spills into the gym.
“If this goes wrong…” she says, teenage vowels still soft, a faint laugh hiding under the words. The tape’s hiss wraps around her like surf dragging back across the rock shelf beneath the cliffs. “Promise me you won’t let them make me into a story that isn’t true.”
My own voice on the recording answers with a whispered “Okay,” from that earlier tape, the younger me behind a locker bay. The moment hangs in the air, twenty-six years and forty minutes long.
I swallow. My voice shakes when I pick up again, and I let the tremor stand.
“Juliet said that in the girls’ locker room, about two hours before the last photos we have of her alive,” I say. “Tonight is me trying—late—to keep that promise.”
I tap a key on the laptop. The house lights dip a little; the projector behind me flares to life with a loud fan whir. On the screen, a simple slide appears: a horizontal line across a black background, glowing white dots marked with timestamps.
“We’ve all heard the official story,” I say. “Juliet leaves the prom with her boyfriend, Noah. They argue. She runs toward the cliffs. Around midnight, she falls from the overlook. Tragic accident. Case closed.”
A donor’s name glitters from a plaque on the wall. I look straight at it while I talk.
“Here’s what we actually have,” I say, and I click the next slide.
The timeline blooms. On the far left: 9:17 p.m., a scan of a disposable-camera photo—Juliet under the prom arch, glass rose glittering on the table behind her. The gym in that photo is softer, fogged with hairspray and rented lights, but the bones are the same.
“Nine seventeen,” I narrate. “Photo taken by a classmate. Juliet still here, still alive, still smiling.”
I tap again. 10:03 p.m. pops up, along with a screenshot of a beeper record the Discord had dug up, a call log from a now-defunct local service. “Ten oh-three. Text page to a Harrow family boat captain, flagged later in an internal memo. Message: ‘Shuttle’s late. Guests waiting.’”
Another click. 10:36 p.m. The grainy prom photo Oracle posted months ago appears: Juliet at the edge of the gym, clutching her glass rose favor, head turned toward a boy’s shoulder. The boy’s face is half-cropped, but the slicked-back hair and jawline are familiar from a hundred framed photos around town.
The audience ripples. I don’t look at Elliot. Not yet.
“Ten thirty-six,” I say. “Juliet leaving the dance floor, moving toward the side doors that lead down the hill toward the marina. Not toward the cliffs.”
I let that sit. I can feel the room leaning in, like a wave tipping before it breaks.
“Now,” I say, “watch what happens after eleven.”
The right side of the timeline lights up: 11:08 p.m.—a photo of the Harrow Island dock from my secret trip with Luz, planks slick and black under a flashlight beam, the carved glass rose in the boards catching light like a wound. 11:12 p.m.—a still image of the microcassette we pulled from the yearbook, inset with a transcript snippet.
I read from the screen, my voice steadying with each word. “Juliet: ‘I said I’m done being your secret, Elliot.’ Unidentified male: ‘You’re not done until I say so.’”
The gym goes quiet in a way I recognize now: the quiet of people calculating risk. The air feels thicker; the smell of too many bodies and hair spray and old varnish wraps around me.
“This tape,” I say, “recorded on Harrow Island, not the cliffs. This dock, not the overlook. These words, not some tidy fight with Noah in a police summary written by men with their names on those walls.”
I click again. On the far right, I drop a new marker: 12:03 a.m.. A screenshot from the emergency call log fills the screen, numbers fuzzed except for the time. Under it, a transcript of a 911 call Luz showed me off the record.
“Twelve oh-three,” I say. “First call about a girl in the water. The caller never identifies the cliffs. He says, ‘off the far dock.’ That phrase never appears in the public file.”
My palms are slick now, but my voice doesn’t shake.
“You’ve heard the cliff story,” I say. “Tonight I’m asking you to consider the dock story. The island story. The story about what happens when a handful of boys whose surnames match those plaques throw private after-parties with no chaperones and no cameras, and the only record left is the sound of a girl arguing that she isn’t someone’s secret anymore.”
In the front row, Katie’s jaw works, but she doesn’t look away from the screen. Her thumb worries the edge of the glass rose until a faint squeak lifts into my headphones.
“I want to pause here,” I say, “and bring in the voice of someone who has never spoken publicly before, someone who reached out after I first started asking questions about Harrow Island.”
I nod at Sadie by the sound table. She hits a key. The screen behind me stays on the timeline, but a second waveform window opens on my laptop: the anonymized interview, voice shifted lower, names cut.
“You asked me what it was like there,” the survivor says through the speakers, her altered tone still carrying a tremor that no filter can erase. “It was…loud. Music from the boat docked out past the rock shelf, bass from some party on the mainland, waves slapping the pilings. Boys passing bottles around like party favors. Somebody had one of those glass roses, joking about it being a trophy.”
The gym is pin-drop quiet. Even the projector fan seems to pull back.
“I remember Elliot,” she continues. “He was…hosting, I guess. Making sure the right people had drinks, that nobody took photos, that the girls didn’t wander off alone unless they were with someone he approved of. He had that golden-boy energy. Everyone trusted him. So when the mood shifted, when certain rooms upstairs turned into…places you couldn’t get out of without paying a price, it felt like he had…curated that too.”
My stomach knots so hard I lean briefly on the table.
“I didn’t know about Juliet until later,” she says. “I heard the story the way everyone else did: cliff, accident, drunk boyfriend. But the night she died, people on that dock were talking about a girl who wouldn’t play along, who threatened to tell. They said Elliot would ‘fix it.’ I left on the last boat out around midnight. I’ve never slept right near water again.”
The clip ends on her filtered breathing and the click of me turning off the recorder in my kitchen weeks ago.
I let the silence after her words stretch, not for drama but because I don’t yet have anything worthy to follow her with. My heart bangs in my ears. The gym’s air tastes metallic, like old pennies and new microphones.
“Thank you,” I say finally, into the mic, to the nowhere and everywhere she is listening from. “For trusting me with that. And I want to name the paradox sitting in every chair tonight, including mine. To tell this story, I have to put her pain, and Juliet’s, into a format that can be paused and replayed and quoted in comment sections. I am asking all of you—here and online—to remember that these are not episodes. These are lives that the town decided were acceptable collateral damage.”
A woman in the advocate section nods sharply. Across the aisle, a PTA mother clutches her pearl choker.
“Which brings us,” I say, pulse steadying, “to the person who has shaped this town’s story more than anyone else on this stage.”
I look out over the crowd until I find him. Elliot sits three rows back at the aisle, flanked by his lawyer and PR rep. His shoulders are squared; his expression could win an award for Responsible Public Figure Under Fire.
“Elliot Harrow,” I say, “is here tonight because he asked to be. His office requested time to respond. In the interest of transparency, I agreed. Elliot, will you join me?”
I step back from the main mic. A tech hustles a wireless handheld down the aisle toward him.
Elliot rises with the grace of a man walking onstage at a charity regatta gala. The gym lights wash his face pale, but his smile holds. He takes the mic, presses the power button, waits for the tiny green LED.
“Thank you, Mara,” he says, voice warm and slightly amplified. “And thank you, everyone, for caring about Juliet after all these years.”
A few polite claps flutter, uncertain, then die. The gym smells hotter now, like bodies and dust and the faint vanilla of someone’s perfume.
“I knew Juliet,” he says. “I cared about her deeply, as a friend and classmate. Hearing her voice again tonight…” He pauses, eyes glistening just enough. “That hurts. And hearing what the survivor you just played went through hurts. No one deserves that.”
He presses a hand briefly to his chest, thumb rubbing a circle into his breastbone, like he’s self-soothing on cue.
“But I need to be very clear,” he continues. “I did not assault anyone. I did not know there were assaults happening in my orbit. If I had, I would have shut things down immediately and gone to the police.”
A low murmur breaks out; someone in the back snorts. From the front row, Katie’s eyes narrow, fixed on him.
“These Harrow Island parties have turned into a kind of urban legend,” he says. “An easy symbol for everything people don’t like about old Crescent Bay. And Mara’s podcast has…poured gasoline on that symbol. Connected dots that were never meant to be connected.”
My fingers curl into fists behind the table, nails biting my palms. I keep my face neutral and my mic muted. For now.
“The dock, the cliffs, the boat rides,” he says, gesturing toward my timeline on the screen. “Yes, my family hosted events. Yes, kids drank. That doesn’t turn me into the villain of every rumor. Tragedies happen. Accidents happen on dangerous coastlines with treacherous rock shelves, especially when teenagers sneak off after dances. Turning that risk into a serialized horror story for downloads doesn’t change that.”
A sharp exhale leaves my lungs. I have used those exact cliffs as atmospheric B-roll in early episodes. The reminder lands like a slap.
“Mara talks about paradoxes,” he goes on. “Here’s one. She says she wants justice, but her income and public profile soar every time there’s a new twist. A new tape. A new traumatized woman willing to talk on her show. I watched a teacher get harassed into the hospital after a live Q&A she hosted. I watched CPS show up at her apartment because lines between storytelling and real lives blurred. That isn’t justice. That’s a feedback loop of pain dressed up as activism.”
A few heads turn toward me, then toward the glass roses, then back to him. The narrative is a living thing now, bouncing between us in the air.
“I’m not perfect,” he says. He lowers his voice, injecting it with practiced confession. “I drank too much in college. I threw parties that, in hindsight, lacked the structure they should’ve had. For that, I am sorry. But I am not a murderer. I am not the mastermind of some decades-long conspiracy. I am a father, a husband, a community member who has put time and money into making sure kids in Crescent Bay have opportunities beyond regattas and charity balls.”
The line about regattas gets a dutiful chuckle from his donors. My stomach twists. He is walking the line expertly, reframing institutional privilege as community service, painting himself as a scapegoat of cancel culture without ever saying the words.
“I support revisiting Juliet’s case,” he says. “By trained professionals, using evidence, not fan theories. I support survivors coming forward—to law enforcement, to appropriate advocacy groups. I do not support turning my family, my employees, and this town into content for a global audience that doesn’t have to live with the consequences when the cameras leave.”
His last sentence lands heavy. The gym’s old wooden beams hold the weight.
He looks up at me then, over the top of the mic, eyes wide with public hurt and something sharper just under the glass.
“Mara,” he says, “you always have the last edit. Tonight, you have the live feed. I just hope you’ll ask yourself, when this is over, whether you told Juliet’s story—or used it.”
He hands the mic back to the tech.
The room buzzes like a nest kicked open. Some faces turn toward me with open expectation, others with crossed arms and guarded brows. Katie’s hand has gone white-knuckled around the stem of the glass rose. On my laptop, the chat counter climbs, little hearts and skulls and question marks racing up the side of the stream window.
A chill walks up my spine, settling at the base of my skull. It’s not just his words; it’s how easily they could stick, how familiar their cadence is in a world where any woman who speaks about harm is asked if she’s just chasing attention.
I reach for my mic button, the only square of power left between us.
“We’re going to take a breath,” I say, voice steady by sheer force. “And then we’re going to talk about what happens when the people who built the dock get to define what counts as evidence on it.”
I glance toward the side of the room where the coalition women sit, toward the cameras, toward the students in the back row with phones held high.
“And we’re not done with the tapes,” I add. “Not by a long shot.”
Somewhere near the middle of the audience, a masked figure shifts in their seat, head angled toward the stage in a way that prickles the back of my neck.
I tighten my grip on the mic and cue up the next clip, heart drumming on the question floating over all of us: when the dust settles, whose version of Juliet’s last night will this town believe?