The teachers’ lounge smells like burnt coffee, dry erase markers, and the inside of a lunchbox that never quite aired out.
I sit alone at the little round table by the window, my tote bag at my feet, my notebook open to a page of questions I keep crossing out. Outside, the late afternoon light slants across the parking lot and the playing fields, touching the line of cliffs beyond the campus until the water glints like foil. I can’t see the rock shelf from here, but my muscles remember every cautionary story about kids sneaking cigarettes down there after dances.
“Empathy first,” I murmur to myself. “No tape, no pressure. You’re not in front of the mic.”
I write it in the margin anyway, under a list I started on the drive over: No ambush. No gotchas. She’s not content; she’s the collateral everyone keeps invoking.
My phone sits in the middle of the table, black screen turned up, a silent accusation. I powered it down before walking in, like I was checking into a secure facility, not a public high school with inspirational posters curling at the corners. I picture Sadie’s Discord window, the flood of messages about Oracle’s photo: timestamps, contrast adjustments, theories. I shut the image down like I shut the phone off, lid closing in my mind.
Somewhere down the hall, a locker door slams and sneakers squeak, then fade. The end-of-day announcements buzz faintly through the PA system, a blurred adult voice and the crackle of feedback. I tap my pen against the notebook and rehearse lines in my head.
Thank you for meeting with me. I won’t record you. You’re in control of what I share.
Too polished. Too much like an intake form.
Katie, I know I’m part of what’s hurting you right now, and I’m still asking for more. You’re allowed to tell me to go to hell.
Too honest. Too much like a confession I’m not sure I can afford.
The lounge door clicks open.
I stand so fast my chair legs screech against the linoleum.
Katie Reeves pauses in the doorway, hand still on the knob. For a second the fluorescent light from the hall behind her makes a halo around her hair, and my brain offers up a flicker of Juliet at seventeen under the gym lights, glitter in her curls.
Then Katie steps fully in, and the old picture shatters into something sharper.
She’s taller than I remember, or maybe grief stretched her posture into something straighter. Her hair is darker than Juliet’s, pulled into a low knot at the nape of her neck, a few strands frizzed free by the damp air that drifts through the cracked window. She wears a navy cardigan, black jeans, and a lanyard with her ID badge, the little laminated rectangle bouncing lightly with each step she takes toward the table.
“Mara,” she says. Not a question.
“Hi.” My voice scratches. I clear my throat. “Thank you for agreeing to this. I—”
She lifts a hand, palm out. The motion is small and decisive. “Ground rules first.”
“Of course.” I sit back down, but she stays standing for a beat longer, studying the room, my notebook, my phone. I can feel her inventorying all the ways I could be sneaking a recording.
“No mic,” she says. “No phone in your hand. No pretending you ‘forgot’ something was on. Off the record means off.”
“I understand.” I push the phone farther away, so it sits near the sugar packets by the coffeemaker. “You can check it.”
She hesitates, then steps around me, picks up the phone, and presses the side button. The black screen holds. No red dot, no recording app, just my reflection, pale and uneven.
“Good,” she says, and places it face down with a soft thunk. “I don’t listen to your show, but other people do. They send me clips. I know how you work.”
The words land heavier than the phone.
“I work with audio,” I say. I lace my fingers together to keep from gesturing too wildly. “I don’t work without consent. Especially not from family.”
“You work with grief,” she says. She slips into the chair across from me, crossing her ankles neatly. “You edit it into something people can jog to.”
I take the hit. There’s no way to argue without proving her point.
“You messaged me back,” I say instead. “You could have told me to stop using Juliet’s name and blocked my email.”
“Everyone else is talking about her,” Katie says, eyes flat. “You might as well ask me some of it directly.” Her gaze flicks toward the window, where the cliffs slice the horizon. “Better than hearing about my sister’s body from some guy in Ohio on YouTube.”
A radiator under the window ticks as it cools, little pings marking the silence.
“No one is entitled to your pain,” I say. “Not my listeners, not me. If anything I ask feels wrong, you can walk out. I won’t chase you.”
“You can’t chase me,” she says. “This is my building.”
There’s a flash of dry humor there, faint, like a line of highlighter in a used textbook. For half a second I see the kid I used to watch trail after Juliet in the halls, hugging a stack of novels to her chest.
“Right,” I say. “Your building.”
I look down at my notebook, where I wrote start with Juliet as person, not case. My throat tightens; the pen presses an ink blot into the paper.
“Can you tell me,” I ask, “what she was like that week? Before prom. Not just the fact of it. The… texture.”
Katie’s jaw shifts. “Texture,” she repeats. “God, you podcasters love a sensory hook.”
I hear the rebuke and leave it there, not defended.
She leans back in her chair, eyes on the ceiling lights for a moment. “People talk about Juliet like she was all hair spray and flashing teeth. Prom queen, regatta princess, whatever Instagram thinks a nineties girl was. She worked hard. She didn’t drink before tests. She taped flashcards to the bathroom mirror for French verbs. She was… careful.”
Her fingers tap a rhythm on the tabletop, an old habit surfacing.
“That week,” she continues, “the careful went off the rails.” Her gaze drops to mine. “She was jumpy. Not sleeping. She’d be in the kitchen at midnight, staring at the glass roses from the prom committee meeting like they were a crime scene already.”
“The centerpieces?” I ask. “The glass roses they ordered for the tables?”
“They kept one at our house,” Katie says. “On the sideboard. Mom loved that thing. Said it made our dining room look like it belonged in a brochure for the yacht club.”
The picture forms in my mind: clear petals catching the light, beauty packaged and preserved while everything underneath rusted.
“Did Juliet say what she was worried about?” I ask softly.
Katie’s lips press together. When she speaks again, her voice is lower. “She came into my room the Tuesday before prom,” she says. “She sat on my bed and asked me to braid her hair, like I used to when we were kids. She hadn’t asked me to do that in years.”
The pen in my hand is still. My skin buzzes with the effort not to reach for a recording app.
“She said,” Katie continues, staring at her own hands now, “that she was scared of ‘ruining everything.’ Those were her words. Ruining everything. She kept twisting the edge of my blanket between her fingers.”
“Ruining what?” I ask. “Graduation? Her relationship with Noah? Her perfect image?”
“I asked her that,” Katie says. “She laughed. Not a fun laugh. She said, ‘You know how this town is. One story gets told, and everything else shuts up.’”
My stomach flips. I hear Elliot at the PTA meeting in my head, talking about narratives, about telling stories before someone uglier tells them.
“I told her not to go,” Katie says. “I told her we could fake a stomach flu, she could skip prom, we could stay home and watch Clueless again.” A faint smile twitches at the corner of her mouth. “She said she had to be there. That she owed it to people. Then she told me not to worry my pretty little head and stole my hair clip.”
“She refused to say more,” I say.
Katie nods. “That was the last night I saw her relaxed enough to joke.” Her mouth pinches around the word relaxed like it tastes wrong now. “After that, she just kept… moving. Dress fittings, nail appointments, meeting with the prom committee. And then you know the rest.”
Sirens flicker through my memory, the way they sounded from my mother’s apartment that night, blending with the bass from the waterfront party. The cliffs, the overlook, the stories of Juliet’s body below, pinned beside the rock shelf in a dozen whispers.
I swallow. “I don’t know the rest,” I say. “That’s the point. I know the official story. I know the missing pieces in the file Detective Navarro has now. I know someone called my voicemail saying Juliet didn’t die at the cliffs. I don’t know what she was afraid of ruining.”
Katie’s eyes sharpen at the mention of Navarro. “The cold case detective,” she says. “She brought flowers once, early on. Said she wanted to ‘earn our trust.’ Then she asked if anyone in the family had… regrets about that week.”
“Do you?” The question slips out before I can gauge whether I’ve earned it.
Katie’s hand curls around the edge of the table. “My biggest regret,” she says, “is that I didn’t followed her to that stupid prom and yank her off the dance floor myself.”
The sentence cracks in the middle, not in volume but in precision. She inhales through her nose, steadying, rebuilding.
I decide not to push further down that road. Luz can do the official regret inventory; I am already tiptoeing on thin ice.
I flip to a clean page and glance at my last item: anniversary pattern, glass roses. My pulse thuds in my throat. This is where the conversation might end or turn into something else.
“Katie,” I say carefully, “can I ask you about something strange I’ve been hearing, off and on, since I announced this season? It’s okay to tell me no.”
“You’ve been asking me strange questions since I walked in,” she says. “Go ahead.”
“Someone told me,” I say, “that glass roses show up around this town sometimes. At fundraisers, in storage closet boxes, old prom decorations. That doesn’t surprise me. They ordered hundreds of those things. But they also said… one ends up at your house. On the anniversary.”
The air in the room changes. The hum of the vending machine in the corner suddenly roars in my ears. Katie’s face doesn’t move, but something in her posture does; a tightness moves up from her shoulders to her jaw.
“Who told you that?” she asks.
“A listener,” I lie, because saying a Discord thread will only make things worse. “I haven’t talked about it on the show. I wanted to ask you first.”
She lets out a breath through her teeth. Her gaze shifts to the window, to the gray smear of clouds gathering over the water. When she looks back at me, her eyes are glossy but hard.
“Every May,” she says. “Every year since ninety-eight. Late at night. I wake up, check the porch, and there it is.”
“The same kind of glass rose from prom?” I ask.
She nods once. “Clear glass bud on a frosted stem. Same cheap felt pad on the bottom to keep it from scratching the table. Same weight when you pick it up. First year, Mom screamed so loud the neighbors called the cops. She smashed it in the sink.”
My skin crawls. “Did you keep any of the others?”
“Most.” Her fingers rub at an invisible line on the tabletop. “I put them in a box in the hall closet. I told myself I’d throw them away when I was ready. Then another one would show up, and I’d add it to the box. I couldn’t break them. It felt like… I don’t know. Letting whoever leaves them win.”
“You never told the police,” I say. It isn’t a question, but the way she flinches confirms it.
“Chief Calder told my parents, after the second one, that they were probably from a bored teenager or a weirdo who wanted attention,” she says. “He said the best way to make it stop was to ignore it. Don’t give them the satisfaction of a report. Don’t invite more of ‘that kind of attention.’”
That kind of attention. The phrase echoes in my skull, rubbing up against the PTA mothers complaining about my downloads.
“Navarro doesn’t know either,” I say slowly. “I would have heard it in the file, or from her.”
“I haven’t told her,” Katie says. “I don’t want another cop patting my hand and telling me it’s probably some creep from Stamford who read an article in the nineties and got fixated.” She holds my gaze. “And I don’t want to hear about those roses on an episode of Glass Roses.”
The warning hangs between us, solid as the glass itself.
“I swear,” I say. “I won’t put that in without your permission. Not the way you told it to me. Not tied to your name. If I ever use it, it’ll be because we agree it might help find whoever keeps doing this.”
“Help who?” she asks, voice thin and sharp. “You? Your listeners? Or Juliet?”
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. The honest answer is all three, and that order shifts depending on the time of night and how close Theo is sleeping to my laptop.
“Help us figure out why someone wants to keep poking at this,” I say. “Because whoever leaves those roses, they’re not bored. They’re sending a message. Maybe to you, maybe to themselves, maybe to the town. They chose the symbol on purpose.”
“You chose it for your cover art,” Katie says.
The words hit dead center. I remember designing that logo at two in the morning, tracing the outline of a stock image glass rose and layering it over an edited photo of the cliffs. I told myself it honored Juliet’s prom, took back something pretty.
“I did,” I say, my voice rough. “I thought… I was reclaiming it. I didn’t know someone was already using it to haunt your front door.”
Katie studies me for a long, uncomfortable beat. “You’re going to keep doing the show,” she says finally. “No matter what I say.”
“I don’t know how to stop,” I say honestly. My hands tremble on the table; I flatten them to hide it. “But I can change how I do it. I can choose what not to air.”
She exhales, a sound halfway between a scoff and a sigh. “If I hear about those roses on your podcast,” she says, “before you tell me why it matters to your case, we’re done. No more off-the-record. No more on-the-record. Nothing.”
“That’s fair,” I say. “It’s more than fair.”
She stands, chair legs scraping softly, and reaches for her lanyard, winding the strap once around her fingers. “I have essays to grade,” she says. “Tenth graders writing about The Crucible and mass hysteria. You’d love it. A whole unit about what happens when a town picks the wrong story and refuses to let go.”
The irony lands between us like a third chair.
At the door, she pauses. “Whatever you think you’re going to fix,” she says without turning, “remember my family has to live here after your season ends. Your listeners go back to their lives. We have to walk past those cliffs every time we drive to the grocery store.”
The door swings shut behind her with a soft click that rings louder than any slam.
I stay in the empty lounge until the sun slides lower and the light on the cliffs turns from gold to bruised purple. The vending machine hums, the old coffeemaker gurgles to itself, and the smell of burnt grounds wraps around me.
I picture a front porch somewhere in town, peeling paint, a doormat printed with seashells. On it, a single glass rose waits, catching the porch light, marking the day Juliet’s story was forced to stop.
My gut twists with guilt at every download counter I’ve watched climb, every ad read I’ve recorded with a smile in my voice. Then, underneath that, something else hardens. Whoever keeps delivering those roses is still telling a version of this story in secret. They’ve had twenty years of anniversaries.
I’m the one with a microphone.
On my way out, I pass the donor wall outside the auditorium. Harrow, Calder, Reeves, Kline—the same surnames engraved over and over in polished brass. My own name doesn’t appear anywhere. It lives in RSS feeds and comment threads and a Discord server where a user named Oracle has already started rearranging the past.
I run my fingers lightly over the empty space between the plaques and start writing the next episode in my head, knowing that every choice I make will either honor the girl Katie braided hair for or echo the hand that keeps leaving glass roses in the dark.