The side door banged open, and the gym’s roar snapped to a muffled roar behind me, like someone had dropped a lid over boiling water. Cold air slapped my face. Salt, wet asphalt, and distant exhaust rushed into my nose all at once.
Luz’s hand stayed firm between my shoulder blades. “Keep walking,” she said low, not for the recorder, just for me. “And don’t stop recording, Mara. No matter what.”
I glanced down at the small digital recorder clipped to my belt, the red light already steady. My fingers brushed it, confirming it was still rolling, the tiny machine humming with every shout, every breath.
The concrete ramp of the old loading dock rose ahead in the dark, its yellow paint peeling in curls. Beyond the chain-link and a fringe of scrub trees, the bay was a black sheen, dotted with white pinpricks from moored boats and the yacht club a little farther along the shore. Somewhere out there, a bassline thumped from a waterfront party, low and distant, a reminder that Crescent Bay knew how to dance while bodies broke on rock.
The off-duty officers had Elliot by the elbows, not rough, but without ceremony. His lawyers trailed behind, voices jabbing uselessly at the backs of their heads.
“You have no grounds to detain him,” the lead one snapped. “Let go of my client right now.”
Luz stepped off the final step of the dock and turned, holding up one palm. Her phone was already in her other hand, camera angled naturally, the lens pointed into the pool of light where the ramp met the parking lot.
“Nobody is under arrest out here,” she said smoothly. “We’re just getting some air. Everyone needs to cool down. Correct, Mr. Harrow?”
Elliot twisted his shoulders free with a sharp jerk. “I am not staying out here with her,” he snarled, chin jerking toward me. “She doesn’t get another second of my time.”
The wind off the water cut through the thin fabric at my back. I tucked my arms close, not from the temperature. My pulse still hammered against my ribs, the adrenaline burn buzzing in my forearms.
“Door’s right there,” Luz replied, nodding toward the metal bar. “You’re free to go back into the gym.” She paused. “The cameras are still live in there.”
His head snapped around to the door, where the noise seeping through carried the chant of a hundred bodies jockeying for narrative. Phones, press, witnesses, glass rose shards under shoes. Then he looked at the lot: the empty blacktop, dumpsters, the distant glow of streetlights along the road that curved toward town center and its neat plaques and PTA power tables.
He stayed.
“Fine,” he hissed. He paced two steps onto the dock, dress shoes clicking on concrete. “Fine. Let’s talk about what this really is before your little podcast cult rewrites it.”
Luz caught my eye, just for a heartbeat. Her brows lifted the smallest bit, a question and an instruction in one: you hearing this? Keep going.
I swallowed, throat sandpaper dry. My recorder hummed against my hip. Somewhere under my heel, a tiny crunch told me a sliver of glass rose had hitched a ride out from the gym, embedding itself in the tread of my boot.
“What this really is,” I said, keeping my voice low but clear, “is a story you’ve controlled for twenty-eight years finally being challenged by people you can’t invite to the country club. That’s what’s happening.”
He huffed out a bitter laugh and turned toward the dark water, hands flying up in frustration. “You think you know anything about what happened that night?” he snapped. “You weren’t there. None of you lunatics with microphones were there.”
He jabbed a finger toward the cliffs far down the shoreline, where the prom overlook sat above the treacherous rock shelf, now just a darker smudge against the sky. “You found some shards and a dock carving and turned them into a Netflix pitch. You don’t know shit.”
“Right,” I said. My teeth chattered once, from nerves, not cold. “I wasn’t there. Juliet was. You were. Why don’t you tell us, then? Off camera.”
Luz angled her phone a little higher, pretending to check a text, the glow lighting her cheekbones. Her voice stayed lazy. “You keep telling everyone you have nothing to hide, Mr. Harrow. This is a good time to demonstrate that.”
The lawyer closest to him barked, “Elliot, don’t answer any questions. Not one more word. We’re leaving.”
Elliot shrugged him off with such force the man stumbled. That flash of power, the easy way he dispatched the person paid to protect him, sent a chill across my shoulders.
“No,” he said. “I’m tired of being quiet while children and hysterics tear my life apart.”
His eyes locked on mine, bright in the dock’s security light. “She was drunk,” he spat. “They all were. You want to talk about Harrow Island like it was some kind of torture camp? It was a party. Do you remember those? Parties? Before every bad decision turned into a decades-long investigation?”
My stomach clenched, memories of sticky floors and hair spray and muffled bass crashing against the image of Juliet’s blue dress in the evidence photos. The town had been throwing proms and Prom Throwback fundraisers on loop while her body cooled in the bay.
“Juliet wasn’t a decision,” I said. “She was a person. Start there.”
His jaw twitched. He stepped closer, up onto the flat of the loading dock. The off-duty officers shifted without touching him, staying between his body and mine.
“She was a person who made threats,” he snapped. “You keep painting her like some perfect glass rose on a pedestal, and you ignore the fact that she was blackmailing all of us.”
The word blackmail scratched at my ear, hungry. “All of you?” I asked. “Meaning who, exactly?”
He waved that away, pacing again, shoes tapping a restless rhythm. “She got dramatic,” he said. “Kept saying she was going to ‘call the cops on all of us’ and ‘end Crescent Bay’s little fairy tale.’ Over and over. Like she was on stage.”
My fingers tingled. I pulled my phone out like I was checking the time, tapping the dark screen with my thumb until I felt the haptic buzz starting the backup audio recording. Twin red lights now, my old life as an audio editor and my new one as the town’s favorite problem child meeting on the dock.
“Where were you when she said that?” I asked. “Where were you standing?”
He scoffed. “You already know that, don’t you? You and your little detective friend broke in and walked it yourself. Thirteen steps out from the start of the dock. She stopped right there, on that warped plank, waving her hands and threatening to dial 911, like the cops weren’t on my father’s speed dial too.”
The number slid into my brain and latched on. Thirteen steps. My mind snapped back to the night Luz and I landed on Harrow Island, counting softly under our breaths from the shore to the end of the dock, boots thudding on damp boards. I had never said the exact count on the show. The property photos we aired cut off halfway down the walkway.
I didn’t answer immediately. The wind filled the space, hissing through the chain-link, carrying the faint tang of low tide and rotting seaweed. A gull shrieked somewhere out over the water.
Luz’s shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. Her gaze flicked to me, then back to Elliot. I watched her thumb slide along the outside of her phone, checking the tiny red dot in the corner of the screen.
“Thirteen steps,” I repeated, keeping my tone almost conversational. “I never said that number on the podcast.”
His head snapped back toward me. For the first time tonight, I saw a trace of real fear brush across his features, quick and fine as a hairline crack in glass. Then his expression hardened, and he barked a laugh.
“It’s—public record,” he said. “Measurements in the old reports. Anyone could know that.”
“The old reports say ‘approximately ten,’” I replied, words rolling out before I could think about how my voice would sound on the tape later. “The dock got extended by three planks for the Harrow regatta parties in 1996. Remember? Your father wanted room for more boats.”
He blinked. His jaw flexed again. His lawyer stepped forward, pallor showing even in the yellow security light.
“That’s enough,” the man snapped. “Elliot, do not engage. Ms. Lane is deliberately provoking you to create a clip she can monetize.”
“You’re damn right I’m provoking him,” I said, turning my head just enough to look at the lawyer. My hands shook, the recorder on my belt vibrating faintly with every movement. “I’m provoking him into telling the truth that your town buried with Juliet’s body.”
Elliot ignored both of us. His eyes had gone distant, fixed on some point over my shoulder, maybe at the cliffs, maybe at a night twenty-eight years ago when the air smelled like hair spray and boat fuel instead of cold sweat.
“She wouldn’t stop,” he muttered. “She backed me into a corner. Talking about press, about reporters, about making a scene at graduation. About telling your mother, Mara. Did she ever tell you that?” He laughed, short and bitter. “She said she was going to tell your mom what I did.”
My breath slammed out of my lungs. My mother’s salon, Juliet in the chair in her blue dress, the envelope of Harrow money years later—everything collided in the space behind my ribs.
“What you did where?” I asked. My voice came out thin. “On the island dock?”
He threw his hands in the air, voice rising. “She grabbed my arm,” he yelled. “She pushed me first, alright? She shoved me in the chest, right there on the edge. I grabbed her to keep her from going over, and she wouldn’t let go. She kept screaming she was going to blow everything up, and then—”
He broke off, chest heaving. Wind whipped the tails of his jacket. The dock’s metal railing hummed against my palm where I’d leaned for balance.
“And then what?” I asked. The words scraped my throat. “Say it, Elliot.”
His face twisted. “And then she went into the water,” he spat. “You want that? She went into the water, alright? I didn’t hunt her down and throw her off a cliff like your stupid podcast poster says. She slipped. She pulled me forward, and I let go. That’s it. That’s all.”
My knees softened. For a second I saw two overlapping images: Juliet on the tape, laughing against the dock boards, and Juliet on the coroner’s report, lungs full of bay water, body bruised in patterns that never matched a clean fall.
“You were there when she went in,” I whispered. “You admitted that. On record.”
“I tried to get help,” he snarled. “Noah was supposed to be watching her. He was the one who didn’t show up. He was the one who let her wander off drunk and hysterical—”
“Noah wasn’t there,” I cut in. “The tape proves that. The survivor’s statement proves that. You were the one who followed her onto the dock. You were the one who threatened to ‘make this disappear.’ Your words, Elliot. From your mouth at seventeen, and again tonight.”
He sucked in a breath, realization finally catching up to rage. His gaze dropped to my hand on the railing, then to my belt, to the tiny red light winking. Slowly, his focus slid to Luz’s phone.
“Turn those off,” he said. The polished tone tried to creep back into his voice. “Neither of you has my consent to record me.”
“We’re standing in a public place,” Luz replied. Her tone changed, the lazy cadence gone, replaced by professional clarity that sliced the air. “And you’re speaking loudly enough to be heard from the road.”
The lawyer dove into the opening. “This is coercive,” he snapped. “My client is being detained, he’s under extreme emotional duress, and your friend here is conducting an illegal interview—”
Luz shifted her weight, stepping forward. Something in her posture hardened, like steel setting. When she spoke again, she aimed her words not just at Elliot, but at some invisible future courtroom.
“Elliot Harrow,” she said, voice ringing off the concrete and metal, “my name is Detective Luz Navarro with Crescent Bay Police Department. My badge number is 4172, and my body—” she glanced at the phone “—my device is currently recording.”
She took one more step. The off-duty officers flanked her, shoulders squaring with hers in a seamless, unplanned line.
“Based on your statements tonight,” she continued, “and on previously gathered evidence, I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of homicide in the death of Juliet Reeves, along with related charges that will be specified at booking.”
The lawyer erupted. “Absolutely not,” he shouted. “You are on administrative leave. You do not have standing to—”
“I have a badge, a probable cause affidavit drafted and waiting, and two independent recordings of your client admitting he was present when Juliet Reeves went into the water after a physical altercation on Harrow Island,” Luz said. “You can argue about my employment status in court. Right now, step back.”
She turned to Elliot, eyes holding his. “You have the right to remain silent,” she said, crisp now, each word measured for the microphone. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney—”
“This is a stunt,” he snarled, voice cracking. “You’re doing this for her show. For clicks.”
Luz didn’t blink. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you,” she finished. “Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?”
He glared at her, chest heaving, hair blown out of its careful part by the bay wind. Behind him, across the parking lot, red-and-blue flickers grew brighter, the distant wail of sirens threading through the night like an answer to a decades-old question.
“I understand that my lawyers will own this town by morning,” he said.
“That wasn’t the question,” she replied.
She nodded once to the taller off-duty officer. He stepped behind Elliot, taking his wrists. Metal clicked in the cold air, louder than the sirens, louder than my breathing.
The handcuffs closed, and something inside my chest cracked. Sound rushed into the space: the scrape of his shoes, the clank of the chain, the wind rattling the chain-link. My vision blurred around the edges.
“Mara,” Luz said softly without turning. “Don’t stop recording.”
I pressed my palm over the recorder, feeling its small, impersonal hum. My face went hot, then cold. Tears slipped down before I could swipe them away, tasting of salt and old grief when they reached my lips.
For years, I had tried to imagine the moment justice would start, picturing headlines and triumphant podcast finales. Standing on that chipped dock, watching Elliot Harrow cuffed under a dull security light, I tasted nothing like triumph. I tasted bay water and hair spray and the metallic edge of everything we had broken open.
I heard Juliet’s laugh in my memory, layered over his last angry “she slipped,” and my knees shook so hard I had to lean on the railing to stay upright. A sob wrenched through me, loud enough that the nearest siren swallowed it.
Luz glanced back, eyes catching mine for a fraction of a second. There was no smile there, only a weary steadiness that held me upright better than the rusted metal under my palm.
“We’re not done,” she said, low enough that only the recorder and I heard. “This is just the part we finally get on tape.”
The approaching cruisers swung into the lot, light bars strobing red and blue over the dock, over Elliot’s bowed head, over my wet face and trembling hands. For one dizzy instant I saw the whole thing as a thumbnail on a podcast app: a dock, a confession, a town in freefall.
I tightened my grip on the recorder until my knuckles whitened and let the sobs come, the red light burning on, wondering what this tape would do to all of us once the world started listening and whether any of us would recognize ourselves in the story it told next.