I start the last recording in silence.
No theme music, no sponsor bumper, no carefully calibrated opening hook. Just the soft whir of the laptop fan and the low industrial heartbeat of the washers thumping below my floor, shaking a teaspoon in the mug by my elbow.
The studio corner looks different than the first time I sat here. Foam tiles line the walls in uneven rows, like a Tetris game that got bored. The desk lamp throws a warm circle of light over my notebook, my interface, the microphone I kept—the new one, not the one rusting quietly at the bottom of the bay. Outside the cracked window the air smells like salt, dryer exhaust, and the faint chemical sweetness of somebody’s early-morning hairspray wafting up from the parking lot.
I pull the headphones over my ears and hear my own breath get closer. The cursor blinks in the recording software: “New Project.” No title yet. No episode number. No RSS destination. Just a flat, empty waveform waiting.
“Hey, Juliet,” I say, and my voice sounds smaller than any intro I’ve ever recorded.
I let the greeting sit there, hanging in the headphones. A few seconds of room tone join it—laundromat hum, a gull outside, the distant bass of some waterfront bar finishing last call, still echoing across Crescent Bay long after the regatta crowds went home.
“I know you never asked for this,” I say. “You didn’t plan a season arc. You didn’t consent to being a cold case, or a podcast logo, or a hashtag people printed on mugs.”
My fingers toy with the corner of my notebook, worrying the cardboard until it goes soft and fuzzy. The glass rose design Sadie doodled there is half-smudged from months of being moved, opened, slammed shut.
“You did ask for one thing,” I say. “You asked somebody to listen. First back in that car when I was fourteen and hyperventilating behind the salon, and you turned the music down and told me I wasn’t crazy. Then on that tape under your yearbook photo. And then, on that dock, in every girl you tried to pull out of reach.”
The cliffs come to my mind, those white-shingled houses perched above the treacherous rock shelf, pretending the sea below is just backdrop. I picture the regatta banners and charity gala posters that still litter Crescent Bay, laminated proof that the same surnames own the sails, the school board, the cops, and the prom photos.
“You trusted that someone would eventually push back against the story they wrote for you,” I say. “So I did. Messily. Loudly. With way too many downloads and not enough guardrails.”
My throat tightens. I swallow, taste coffee gone lukewarm and a hint of detergent from the air.
“I wish the listening hadn’t hurt so many people on the way,” I say. “I wish I hadn’t turned some of that pain into content before I understood the bill.”
I stop there, give myself three beats of quiet so the words don’t spill into apology-shaped static. The waveform curls and settles, a visual record of hesitation.
“This part isn’t for them,” I say. “Not for the listeners, or the reporters, or the lawyers quoting my own episodes back at me. This part is for you. And for the boy down the hall who has to grow up in this town while the cliffs and the dock and the old gym keep humming.”
I flip to a clean page in the notebook and write Letter – Not For Release at the top. My handwriting looks steadier than I feel.
“So,” I say, “let me tell you about Theo.”
The name lifts my mouth into a small, unwilling smile. In the kitchen, faint through the door, I hear the clink of a cereal bowl, the shove of a chair on linoleum. A cartoon theme song filters through, low enough to stay just under my headphones.
“He’s taller,” I say into the mic. “He argues about bedtimes like he’s filing a legal brief. He still pretends he doesn’t like hugs, but he leans into them half a second longer than he pretends.”
My fingers trace the cable along the desk, careful not to bump it.
“You’d like him,” I say. “He’s nosy and stubborn and keeps a stash of secret recordings on an old phone, because he thought the only way to understand fear was to narrate it. I taught him that. I’m trying to teach him something else now.”
I pause, then break the thought into smaller pieces so it doesn’t turn into one long confession.
“I’m teaching him that not every scary thing needs a spotlight,” I say. “That he gets to decide which parts of his story he shares and which parts he keeps in his own head, or in a therapist’s office, or at our kitchen table over burnt toast.”
My voice drops without my permission.
“I’m teaching myself the same thing,” I add.
The software’s timer ticks along the top of the screen. Six minutes. No intro music, no ad breaks, no calls to action.
“He told a judge he wanted to stay with me,” I say. “He used the word ‘safe’ in a room where people were quoting my most reckless sentences at each other. He said he felt safest when I was honest, not silent.”
Heat floods my chest at the memory—the courtroom’s stale air, the judge’s measured voice, Theo’s small shoulders squared over the microphone that wasn’t mine. My hand tightens around the pen until my knuckles whiten.
“So I’m talking to you now,” I say. “And I’m leaving this file where the court can’t subpoena it. Where sponsors can’t brand it. Where anonymous listeners can’t turn it into a meme.”
I exhale slowly, the breath fogging a faint patch on the cold laptop surface.
“Luz is still Luz,” I say, shifting the letter’s focus. “You’d like her too. She’s allergic to bullshit and still double-knots her laces before she walks into a room full of donors.”
My mind drifts briefly to the high school’s front lawn, engraved donor plaques catching the sun. Calder’s name is gone from one of them now, replaced with a fresh brass plate that hasn’t oxidized yet. Justice comes in tiny, municipal font sometimes.
“She paid a cost for getting us here,” I tell you. “Internal affairs memos, late-night interviews, the kind of whispers that follow a woman who says ‘no’ to the old story and ‘yes’ to the ugly version. She’s consulting on the new season, off the record. She still calls my worst ideas ‘incredibly bad’ before she helps me fix them.”
I let a short laugh slip through; it crackles in my headphones, more static than joy, but real.
“I told her about this recording,” I say. “She told me to lock it somewhere no one could monetize, then asked me if I wanted to go to Prom Throwback this year just to watch the town try to recreate 1997 without you.”
A vision flickers behind my eyes—parents in retro satin and chokers, hair sprayed into fragile helmets, gliding beneath balloon arches while the cliffs outside stand unchanged over the rock shelf. A charity ball to raise money for some safe cause, preferably one with no sharp edges.
“I said maybe,” I admit. “We’ll see.”
The name that comes next sticks in my throat for a second. I say it anyway.
“Sadie’s learning too,” I tell you. “We both are.”
I drum my fingers once on the desk, grounding myself in the cheap laminate under my hand.
“She doesn’t run the subreddit anymore,” I say. “She helps moderate a smaller group now. Survivor-led. No doxxing, no ‘suspect of the week’ threads. She still sends me compilations of case law in the middle of the night, but they’re about reform now. Not about finding the next villain.”
I hear my own heartbeat in my ears, quick but not panicked.
“You became her compass for a while,” I say. “Not you, exactly. The idea of you. The girl in the frozen prom photo, the glass rose centerpieces, the audiogram clips. She got lost in there. So did I. I’m trying to walk with her now, instead of letting her chase ghosts for me.”
I picture the anonymous survivor, too—hat pulled low on the boat, blanket clutched around her like armor.
“The women who talked to me for Glass Roses are still here,” I say. “They have bills and kids and therapy appointments and bad dates. They have panic attacks when they pass certain streets. They have nights when they dance in their kitchens just because they can.”
My voice softens further, nearly a whisper.
“They’re not plot points,” I say. “They’re not twist endings or episode hooks. They’re the part of the story that keeps going after my feed stops updating.”
I let that hang between us, a small knot of sound floating in the digital air.
“Elliot’s waiting for trial,” I add, because leaving his name out feels too clean. “The dock is on every local newscast now, the rock shelf suddenly very interesting to people who never followed the kids slipping down to smoke after dances. Lawyers will argue over your last moments in a courthouse that smells like coffee and floor polish. I’ll show up when I have to, not with a mic, just with an ID and a notebook I don’t plan to read out loud.”
I shift in my chair, the cushion underneath me sighing.
“Whatever happens in that courtroom, your story isn’t mine to finish,” I say. “I carried it this far, with help and harm both. The rest belongs to the people who actually lived it with you, and to the ones who will live in this town long after Elliot’s name is just a footnote under ‘disgraced tech mogul’ on some plaque.”
My gaze slides to the window. From this angle I can just see the edge of the bay, a dark sliver between buildings. The cliffs beyond are invisible from here, but I know their outline by heart.
“So here’s what I’m doing instead,” I say, and I lean a little closer to the mic, even though nobody but future-me will ever listen back.
“I’m making a folder,” I say. “Not in the hosting dashboard, not on the server at Harrow Media, not on any drive anyone else can log into. Just here, on this glitchy laptop, backed up to an external drive I will label with the least sexy name I can think of.”
I click over to my file explorer and create a new directory. My fingers type: Private – Do Not Publish. Then I laugh and rename it For Us Only.
“In this folder,” I say, narrating my own small act of rebellion, “I’m putting this letter. And anything else I record that belongs to you, or to Theo, or to me in a way that doesn’t require a share button.”
The text cursor blinks, waiting for a file name. I type: Letter to Juliet and Theo – Final.
“I’m allowed to have an archive nobody else touches,” I say. “I’m allowed to record not to convince, or expose, or persuade a town built on regatta trophies and PTA power plays—but just to hear my own thoughts complete a sentence in your direction.”
The timers on my screen hit the ten-minute mark. In my headphone cups, my breaths sound steadier.
“I don’t know what Glass Roses will be two years from now,” I tell you. “Maybe we’ll tell more stories about institutions changing their rules. Maybe we’ll cover cases where nobody dies. Maybe I’ll shut the whole thing down and teach Theo to sail instead, let the sound of the mast ropes slapping in the wind replace notification pings.”
I tilt my head, imagining us on the bay during a regatta, tiny in a sea of sponsor logos and old-money flags. Theo yelling at me about tacking angles, Luz heckling from a motorboat, Sadie live-texting from shore.
“What I do know is this,” I say. “You are more than your ending. Theo is more than a kid in a ‘podcaster’s son’ headline. Luz is more than a rogue detective. Sadie is more than a cautionary tale about fandom. And I am more than the woman with a mic who poked the wrong town.”
My hand hovers over the keyboard.
“I’m going to stop talking now,” I say quietly. “Not because the story is done, but because my part of it doesn’t need an audience tonight.”
I sit with that for a full ten seconds, counting silently. The waveform records the absence as faithfully as the words.
Then I reach forward and press the square button in the software.
The red light on the interface clicks off. The waveform freezes. The room noises slide away from my ears when I pull the headphones down around my neck; suddenly the world sounds wider—laundromat drums, cartoon voices, the faint shouts of someone loading a van down on the street.
I hit Save, watching the progress bar crawl. When the file name settles into the For Us Only folder, my shoulders loosen in a way no download number has ever managed.
My finger drifts toward the Export icon, out of habit. I stop halfway and let my hand fall to my lap. No show notes, no cover art, no queue.
I close the laptop. The click is soft, final without feeling like a slammed door.
Out in the kitchen, Theo calls, “Mom? Did you forget breakfast? I’m three bites away from calling Child Protective Services.”
I snort, stand, and stretch, my back popping. The studio corner shrinks behind me with every step toward the doorway.
“I was finishing something,” I say, leaning on the doorframe.
He sits at the table with a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice, hair sticking up in three directions. Sunlight from the small window over the sink turns the milk surface into a dull shimmer. The air smells like sugar, detergent, and the faint trace of salt from the open window where a breeze sneaks in.
“An episode?” he asks, spoon halfway to his mouth.
“No,” I say. I cross to the counter, reach for the pan and the eggs. “A letter. For me. For us.”
He squints at me. “Did you cry?”
I crack an egg into the pan and listen to the sizzle, the tiny applause of breakfast beginning. “A little,” I say. “In a good way.”
“Good-cry is weird,” he mutters, but he smiles into his cereal.
I move around the kitchen, bare feet on cool linoleum, the rhythm of ordinary tasks settling into my muscles: flip the eggs, drop bread in the toaster, nudge the window wider to let out steam. Outside, Crescent Bay carries on—bass throbbing from the waterfront, gulls arguing over trash near the cliffs, some over-perfumed mom in a SUV driving toward an early PTA strategy meeting.
“Hey,” Theo says, pointing his spoon at me. “Promise you’re not secretly recording right now?”
I lift my hands, palms out, spatula dangling from one. “No mic,” I say. “No phone. Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout,” he says.
“Single mom honor,” I correct. “Stronger badge.”
He grins, like he wants to argue and also doesn’t.
I slide a plate with eggs and toast in front of him and pour myself coffee. The mug warms my hands. The laptop in the other room stays closed, its quiet presence no longer a siren, just a tool waiting for the next right story.
I sit across from my son at the wobbly table, and for a moment we just chew, spoons clinking, cartoons murmuring from the TV. The world beyond the apartment still holds cliffs and rock shelves and court dates and Reddit threads.
Inside this small square of morning, I let the story rest in the only place I can still control it: between my own ribs, in the private archive on a hard drive, in the space between my voice and the people I love.
“Mom?” Theo says, mouth full of toast. “Do you think you’ll ever make a podcast that’s just about cool boats and dumb school dances and not, you know, murder?”
I take a sip of coffee, feel the heat run all the way down.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think I might. But not today.”
He nods, satisfied for now, and goes back to his cereal.
I reach across the table and straighten his collar, my fingers brushing the small scar on his wrist from a long-ago fall on the boardwalk. He rolls his eyes but doesn’t pull away.
In the other room, the saved file sits quietly in a folder named For Us Only, a story I finally chose not to share.
I take another sip of coffee, look at my son, and let that be enough.