I drag the couch one more inch to the left and my lower back sends up a formal complaint.
The vinyl feet squeak against the tired laminate, loud over the hum of the laundromat downstairs. I pause, palms pressed into the armrest, breathing hard. The air smells like dust and lemon cleaner, with a faint undercurrent of detergent from below. Sunlight slants in through the front windows, catching on suspended bits of lint like tiny comets.
“Three more inches,” I mutter to myself. “You’re not winning, couch.”
I plant my heels, lean, and shove. The couch yields, scraping into its new place along the interior wall, finally freeing up the corner near the back window. The corner I’ve been eyeing for months, mentally measuring every time I walked past with an armful of laundry or takeaway cartons.
Now it’s bare. Just two blank walls, one outlet, and a narrow view of Crescent Bay’s rooftops and the far-off blue-gray line of cliffs. If I crane my neck, I catch a glimpse of white spray where the waves hit the rock shelf. The same shelf kids snuck down to after regattas and school dances, breath smelling like cheap beer and hair spray, bass from waterfront parties thumping faintly over the water.
I pull a folded desk out from against the opposite wall and carry it to the corner like an offering. My palms slip on the smooth wood from sweat. The weight steadies me.
“This is the last time I move this thing,” I say.
Behind me, a key rattles in the new deadbolt, metal on metal. My shoulders tense, then relax as Luz’s voice calls, “It’s me,” through the thickened door.
“Come in,” I answer, but the door doesn’t move.
“New rule,” she says. “You say the second phrase.”
I roll my eyes, but my lips twitch. “Prom Throwback is a bad idea,” I call.
The deadbolt turns, then the new chain slides, both sounds oddly comforting. Luz steps in, uniform swapped for jeans and a gray sweater, badge nowhere visible. She nudges the little doorstop camera with her toe in greeting.
“I’m keeping that line on record,” she says. “I have to work crowd control on that fundraiser every year. Men in frosted tips and plastic chokers should be a misdemeanor.”
I gesture at the rearranged room. The kitchen table now sits closer to the front windows, directly above the laundromat sign, leaving the back corner clear. Cardboard boxes labeled “gear” and “office” stack along one wall. Theo’s drawings cluster near his bedroom door instead of around my recording setup.
“Well?” I ask. “Security consultant’s verdict?”
Luz walks slowly through the space, eyes scanning door frame, windows, corners. She presses a knuckle into the new window lock and tugs. Checks the chain on the door. Drops into a crouch near the wall where I’ve propped a box of acoustic foam panels.
“You got the camera installed,” she says, nodding toward the small black eye above the door. “And the landlord didn’t pitch a fit?”
“I told him it was for insurance,” I say. “Also reminded him that the last time someone stalked me here, the cops asked some pointed questions about building security.”
“Ah yes,” she says dryly. “Institutional accountability via passive-aggressive landlord shaming. My favorite reform mechanism.”
I smile despite the pinch in my chest. “So the corner?”
She crosses to it, standing where my chair will go, back to the wall. “You’ll see the door and the window from here,” she says. “No one behind you. Cords off the floor so you don’t trip in a panic. Foam panels to cut down echo and block sightlines from outside.”
I tug the desk into its final position, flush against both walls. A small shelf waits nearby, ready for the mic arm and headphones. On top of the shelf, wrapped in a dish towel, sits the glass rose from Katie’s porch—the one she pressed into my hands and refused to take back. It’s fractured now, split into several petals after the dock, but I keep them nested in a bowl like sea glass.
Luz nods toward it. “That staying?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But not on camera. Just for me.”
Her shoulders soften. “Good,” she says. “You need some things that aren’t content.”
The word lands heavier than it probably should. I run my fingers along the desk edge, feeling the tiny imperfections where the laminate bubbles.
“You really think it’s a good idea?” I ask quietly. “Season two.”
“I think,” she says, leaning against the wall and folding her arms, “that people need models for what justice looks like after the trial, not just true-crime victory laps. And I think you don’t sleep right if you’re not building something out of all this. So yeah. With guardrails, it’s a good idea.”
Guardrails. Deadbolts. Foam panels. A camera eye watching the door instead of an anonymous one hidden in my vent.
I breathe in the lemon cleaner and faint salt and let myself picture it: a season that isn’t a scavenger hunt for a killer, but a map for living with what killers and institutions leave behind. The image steadies my hands more than any security hardware.
“Sadie’s coming in an hour,” I say. “We’re writing the new guidelines.”
“Do not let her live-stream that,” Luz says.
“She promised,” I reply. “And she’s terrified of you now.”
Luz snorts. “Good. Tell her I said hi. Off the record.”
She pushes off the wall and heads for the door. Before she leaves, she pauses. “You got the paperwork from Harbor Light, right?”
I nod. The folder from the survivor-centered nonprofit sits on the counter, next to Theo’s cereal bowl and a flyer for the next PTA meeting that I’m absolutely skipping. “Funding’s official,” I say. “No mattress ads, no crime scene merch. Just a modest grant and a lot of accountability.”
“Accountability’s cheaper than lawyers,” she says. “Call me before you publish the trailer.”
When she’s gone, the apartment feels bigger, quieter. The distant bass from a waterfront bar leaks up through the cracked window frame, muffled and steady. Crescent Bay keeps throwing parties on the shore while my life rearranges itself in twelve feet of rented airspace.
I unbox the foam panels and start sticking them to the walls, one by one, building my small, padded rectangle of sound.
“We need to say ‘no doxxing’ in a way that doesn’t sound like a Pinterest print,” Sadie says.
She sits cross-legged at the kitchen table, laptop open, a half-empty iced coffee sweating onto one of my thrift-store placemats. Her hair is pinned back with a glittery barrette shaped like a cassette tape. She’s been wearing old-media accessories ever since I told her about the Harbor Light grant, like armor made from nostalgia.
“I like the sentence we have,” I say, reading from the shared doc. “‘No sharing of personal information about private individuals, including addresses, workplaces, or identifying details without explicit, documented consent.’”
“It’s accurate,” she says. “It’s just…dry.”
“Dry is underrated,” I reply. “Dry doesn’t get you sued.”
She pulls a face at me over the screen, then types, adding a line beneath: “Translation: If you’re about to post someone’s home address, close your laptop and go touch grass.”
I huff a laugh. “Fine,” I say. “Legal paragraph, then your snark translation. Two languages, one rule.”
The new community guidelines sprawl across the document, a mix of bullet points and bold text we keep tweaking. No armchair investigating people who haven’t consented. No contacting sources behind our backs. No threats, dogpiles, or “vigilante action,” as Harbor Light’s lawyer phrased it in our call.
My mouse hovers over one header: CONSENT AND STORY OWNERSHIP. We wrote it three times and deleted it three times before landing on the current version.
“Read it aloud again,” I say.
Sadie clears her throat. “‘Stories shared in this community belong first to the people who lived them. We will not pressure survivors to share more than they offer, speculate about details they choose not to disclose, or treat their pain as a puzzle to be solved. If someone says they’re done talking, we stop listening, too.’”
The laundromat buzzes below, a dryer cycle beeping. I stare at the words until the letters blur.
“Do you think they’ll actually follow it?” I ask.
“Some won’t,” she says. “Some already left.”
She swivels the laptop so I can see the analytics dashboard. The numbers glaring back are a fraction of what they were before Elliot’s arrest—downloads cut nearly in half, subreddit membership dropped, Discord pruned down to a quieter, slower scroll.
“Our little empire,” I say lightly. “De-influenced.”
“We lost the rubberneckers,” she says. “We kept the people who send emails like, ‘Thank you for the content warning, I could plan my day.’ I’d pick them.”
I think of the early days, refreshing stats at two in the morning, chasing bigger spikes, more blue bars. The thrill that hit when an influencer mentioned us and the graph shot up. The hangover when that attention turned toxic.
“Harbor Light’s board signed off on the budget,” I say. “They’re not expecting clickbait numbers. They want impact metrics. Referrals to support services. Policy change, if we can get there.”
“You say ‘policy change’ now,” she says, grinning. “Who are you and what did you do with my messy podcaster.”
“She’s in witness protection,” I say. “New identity: measured adult.”
We both know that’s a lie. The mess lives in my bones. But the guidelines on the screen, the foam panels in the corner, the Harbor Light folder—they’re scaffolding. Maybe that’s enough.
“How are you really feeling about survivor interviews?” Sadie asks more quietly. “You’re not worried we’re just…repackaging pain with nicer fonts?”
The question sits there, sharp and familiar. I look at my hands, at the faint scars near my knuckles from that night at the dock when I grabbed rusty metal.
“I’m worried every day,” I say. “That’s the point. The moment I stop worrying, someone gets hurt.”
She nods, chewing her straw. “We could build a panel of advisors,” she says. “Survivors, advocates, maybe someone from Harbor Light’s legal team. They get to veto anything that feels off.”
“A mini board for the show,” I say. “I like that.”
She types another note: “Advisory circle, quarterly review of episodes and community dynamics.” It looks official and faintly terrifying.
“Okay,” she says, closing the guidelines doc with a flourish. “Rules written. Mods briefed. Harbor Light happy. Time to make the thing.”
I glance at the corner studio. The desk is set up now, mic arm installed, headphones coiled neatly. The glass rose fragments sit in their bowl, catching the late afternoon light. The corner smells faintly like new foam and coffee.
“Time to make the thing,” I echo.
Three hours later, the foam panels swallow my voice and feed it back to me in the headphones, rounder and closer than I remember.
“Levels good,” Sadie says from the makeshift control station at the kitchen table. She watches the laptop screen, fingers hovering above the spacebar. “You’ve got a little hiss at the top; lean back half an inch.”
I adjust in my chair. The vinyl creaks. The hum of the dryers downstairs threads into the silence, a low, familiar baseline. Outside the window, Crescent Bay shifts into evening. The cliffs darken to a single jagged silhouette; the rock shelf disappears, hidden under the tide.
I rest my hand on the desk, fingertips brushing the edge of the glass rose bowl. The shards are cool, smooth where they broke clean, razor-sharp where they splintered.
“Trailer, take one,” Sadie says. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I exhale, let my tongue find the worn groove of my front tooth, my old pre-recording ritual. For the first time in a year, my stomach doesn’t flip at the red light.
“This is Mara Lane,” I say into the mic, voice steadying as I hear it. “And this is Glass Roses, Season Two.”
I pause for a beat, picturing a waveform blooming on the screen.
“Last season, we dug into a murder,” I continue. “We pulled at threads that had been knotted since 1997. We followed anonymous tips and institutional failures and the cliff edge of what one town was willing to admit on the record.”
The words taste like metal and salt. I glance at Sadie; she nods.
“This season,” I say, “we’re not doing that.”
I let the silence stretch, a hook where a gasped What? will land in some listener’s kitchen. Old habits die slow.
“This season,” I say, “we’re talking about what happens after the headlines. After the verdict. After the cameras move on. We’re talking to survivors and advocates about systems that broke, and how they’re trying to fix them—not with vigilante justice, but with policy, community, and messier, quieter kinds of courage.”
I lift a hand and Sadie hits a key, dropping in the first clip we queued earlier. A woman’s voice fills my headphones, slightly tinny from the remote recording but steady.
“I didn’t report,” she says. “Not because I didn’t want justice, but because I knew who sat on the boards and who went to the charity balls. I knew which surnames were on every plaque.”
Harbor Light’s outreach coordinator, in a small office two states away. She signed a consent form that was three pages long and marked every box twice before saying yes.
The clip fades and I pick up the thread.
“We’ll talk about what it means,” I say, “to grow up in a place where the same last names show up on police rosters and regatta trophies. Where PTA meetings double as power-broker summits. Where kids sneak cigarettes on a treacherous rock shelf below postcard-perfect cliffs, thinking they’re invincible, until someone isn’t.”
Another clip. A social worker from a nearby town. “People binge the tragedy,” she says. “Then they go back to work, and we’re still here in the aftermath.”
Luz’s notes sit propped against the monitor, her handwriting cramped and neat. Avoid active legal details. Emphasize systemic patterns, not individual cases, unless fully closed and consented. She refused to record a segment, but she sent bullet points and offered late-night calls when I got tangled between jurisdiction and storytelling.
“We’ll look at what institutions promised to do differently after Juliet Reeves,” I say, “and what they actually changed. We’ll talk about reforms that worked, reforms that didn’t, and where ordinary people—with microphones, with clipboards, with voting ballots—fit in.”
My throat tightens on Juliet’s name, but the word doesn’t knock me off balance anymore. Her story sits at the center of my life like a stone at the bottom of the bay: heavy, immovable, shaping the currents long after the splash.
“We’re funded this season by Harbor Light Collective,” I add, reading carefully. “A nonprofit dedicated to survivor-centered storytelling and institutional accountability. That means no corporate ads, no crime-scene merch, and no listener bounties.”
I smile into the mic, letting a hint of wryness color my voice. “It also means fewer episodes, more editors, and more people I have to answer to when I get something wrong.”
“You’re doing great,” Sadie mouths from the table.
“Our community is smaller now,” I say. “You might notice that. Fewer comments. Less speculation. More content warnings and more reminders to drink water and log off. That’s by design. If you’re here, I’m asking you to be here on purpose.”
Another clip drops in, this one from a college student who wrote to us after the trial. “Hearing someone talk about safety plans in between episodes, not just plot twists, made me build one,” she says. “For me. Not for a story.”
The words loosen something in my chest.
“In Glass Roses, Season Two,” I say, “we’re going to talk about safety planning, about online boundaries, about what justice looks like when it doesn’t trend. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll correct them. We’ll keep each other honest.”
I take a breath, feeling every inch of the foam-lined walls, the weight of the headphones, the solidity of the desk under my hands. Downstairs, a washing machine hits its spin cycle, rumbling faintly through the floor.
“I can’t promise happy endings,” I say quietly into the mic. “But I can promise that we won’t treat anyone’s pain as a cliffhanger.”
Sadie lets out a tiny breath I barely hear.
“Some stories,” I add, fingers resting on the glass shards, “we’ll tell in detail, because their owners want them told. Some stories we’ll talk about in wider strokes, because institutions need naming. And some stories we’ll only bear witness to in private, no waveform, no upload—which might be the biggest change of all.”
I hold the last sentence in the air, thinking about the dock at dawn, the visit Katie and I have planned with one of the survivors who trusted me with her voice but not her face. No microphones. No backup recorder hidden in my bag. Just the water, the rock, and whoever we are without an audience.
“This is Glass Roses,” I say, voice steady again. “The story after the story.”
I tap the desk lightly. “Trailer, cut.”
“Got it,” Sadie says, hitting stop. The red light dies. My voice lingers for a moment in the room, then quiets.
We sit there in the padded corner, listening to the layered silence: laundromat hum, faint bass from the waterfront, a car passing below, the soft whirr of the laptop exporting the file. On the screen, a progress bar crawls from left to right, turning my words into data ready to leave the safety of my hard drive.
“You ready?” Sadie asks. “We can schedule it for next week, like we planned.”
My cursor hovers over the “Publish Trailer” button on the hosting dashboard. My reflection stares back faintly in the laptop screen: tired eyes, foam squares framing my face, a glass rose’s broken petals glowing in the corner of the frame but invisible to anyone listening.
I think of the judge’s warning. Of Theo asleep down the hall, his new comfort playlist whispering through the door. Of Harbor Light’s board, of Luz’s careful notes. Of Katie standing on the dock, wind tearing at her hair, deciding what pieces of Juliet’s story belong to the world and which belong to the bay.
“Yeah,” I say, pulse thudding in my ears. “I’m ready to try.”
I click “Schedule,” not “Publish,” giving myself a few more days of air. The date pops up: one week from today. Enough time to visit the dock. Enough time to decide which parts of that morning, if any, will ever touch a microphone.
The window closes with a soft click. In the padded quiet of my rebuilt studio, surrounded by rules and guardrails and the same humming town outside, I sit with the strange, electric knowledge that for the first time, I’m in charge not just of what I reveal—but of what I refuse to turn into a story.