The sunroom was no longer a fishbowl; it was a confession booth.
Outside, the sun had dipped below the tree line of the wetlands, plunging the Sinks into a bruised purple twilight. Inside, Maya had turned off the overhead recessed lighting, leaving only a single architectural floor lamp to carve a circle of warmth against the encroaching dark.
The four women sat around the teak coffee table. No wine. No cheese board. Just four phones placed face-down on the wood, like weapons surrendered at a parlay.
The silence was thick, textured with the sound of Chloe’s ragged breathing. She was curled in the rattan armchair, clutching a throw pillow to her chest as if it were a life preserver. Her mascara had dried into jagged tracks on her cheeks.
“He’s going to divorce me,” Chloe whispered to the floor. “Rick. When he hears it… when he hears the numbers… he’s going to take the boys and leave me with nothing but the lease on the Escalade.”
“He won’t hear it from the podcast,” Maya said from her spot on the sofa. Her voice was low, devoid of the frantic energy that had driven her earlier. It was calm. The calm of someone standing in the center of a crater. “He’ll hear it from you.”
Chloe looked up, her eyes red and swollen. “What?”
“That’s how we beat him,” Maya said. She looked at each of them in turn. Sarah, staring out the window with the thousand-yard stare of a war widow. Elena, sitting rigid on the ottoman, her surgeon’s hands clasped tightly in her lap.
“The Podcaster deals in leverage,” Maya continued. “He hoards secrets like currency. He thinks that if he exposes us, we’ll scurry back into the dark. He thinks shame is a cage.”
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.
“So we break the cage. We bankrupt him. We tell the truth. All of it. To our husbands. To the police. To each other. Right now.”
Sarah turned from the window. “I can’t tell the police about Tom. I can’t tell the world I let a girl die because I was…” She choked on the word.
“Because you were in love?” Maya finished. “Or because you were bored? It doesn’t matter, Sarah. The world already knows. The podcast is out. The only thing left to decide is whether you’re the villain of this story or the witness who finally stood up.”
Sarah flinched. “He called me an accomplice.”
“And he called me a failure,” Maya said. “And a fraud.”
She reached out and turned her phone over. She opened the voice memo app and hit record.
“What are you doing?” Elena asked sharply.
“Immunizing us,” Maya said. “I’m going first.”
She spoke to the room, but her eyes were fixed on the black lens of the camera hidden in the birdhouse somewhere in the woods. She knew he wouldn’t hear this recording—not the digital file—but she hoped he was listening through the bugs they hadn’t found yet.
“My name is Maya Lin-Baker,” she said, her voice steady. “In 2018, I was working a story on union corruption in Chicago. I had a source. David Russo. He was a payroll clerk. He was scared. He wanted to talk, but he made me promise to keep his name out of it.”
Maya swallowed. The taste of bile was familiar.
“I got pressure from my editor. The story was thin. We needed a human element. So I used details. Specifics. I described his office. I described his car. I didn’t print his name, but I might as well have printed his social security number. The union figured it out in an hour. They fired him. They threatened his family.”
She looked at Elena.
“He jumped off the Wabash Avenue bridge three days later,” Maya said. “I went to the funeral. I stood in the back. His wife looked right at me. She didn’t scream. She just looked… disappointed.”
The room was silent. The air conditioner hummed.
“I didn’t leave Chicago because I wanted a garden,” Maya whispered. “I left because I couldn’t look at a byline without seeing his face. I came here to hide. I came here to pretend I was a good person.”
She exhaled, a long, shuddering breath.
“But pretending didn’t save me. And it won’t save us.”
She looked at Chloe.
Chloe wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She looked at the phone recording on the table. She took a shaky breath.
“I have six credit cards,” Chloe said, her voice small. “They’re all maxed out. The Chase Sapphire. The Amex Platinum. I opened a line of credit in Rick’s name last year to pay the minimums. I forged his signature.”
Maya nodded, encouraging her.
“I bought the furniture for the staging,” Chloe confessed, the words tumbling out faster now. “I bought the clothes. I bought the followers. Fifty thousand bots from a click farm in Russia. Because if I looked successful, I thought… I thought the money would become real. I thought I could manifest it.”
She laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “I’m not an influencer. I’m a con artist. And I’m tired. God, I’m so tired of smiling.”
“Then stop smiling,” Maya said gently.
Chloe nodded, tears dripping off her chin. “I’m going to tell Rick tonight. Before he hears the episode. He can divorce me. He can sue me. But he can’t blackmail me if I tell him first.”
Maya turned to Sarah.
Sarah looked at the other two women. She looked at her hands—hands that had held a noise complaint form instead of a telephone thirty years ago.
“I saw Thomas Garrett kill her,” Sarah said. The words were quiet, but they hit the table like stones. “I saw him force his way in. I saw the violence. And the next morning, when he told me to keep my mouth shut… I was relieved.”
She closed her eyes.
“I was relieved because it meant I didn’t have to lose my house. I didn’t have to lose my standing at the club. I traded a girl’s life for a membership at the Gables Country Club. That’s my sin. It wasn’t the affair. It was the math. I did the math, and she wasn’t worth as much as my comfort.”
Sarah opened her eyes. They were dry now. Hard.
“But the math has changed,” she said. “Because now he’s threatening us. He’s threatening you. And I’m done paying dues.”
Maya looked at Elena.
The doctor hadn’t spoken. She sat with perfect posture, her face unreadable.
“You weren’t in the episode, Elena,” Maya said. “He didn’t have dirt on you. Why are you here?”
Elena picked up her phone. She tapped the screen, bringing up a photo. She slid it into the center of the table.
It was a picture of a prescription pad.
“I wasn’t here in 1994,” Elena said calmly. “But I’ve been here for five years. And in this neighborhood, pain is a currency.”
She pointed to the photo.
“I write prescriptions,” Elena said. “Oxy. Xanax. Adderall. Not for my patients. For the neighbors. For the moms who can’t get out of bed without a boost. For the dads who need to focus on the quarterly reports. I keep this street medicated, Maya. I keep it functional.”
Chloe gasped. “You wrote me the script for the anxiety meds last month. You didn’t put it in my chart.”
“I never put it in the chart,” Elena said. “I thought I was helping. I thought I was being a good neighbor. But the Podcaster… he knows. I got an email yesterday. A list of every script I’ve written off the books. If he sends it to the medical board, I lose my license. I go to prison.”
She looked at Maya.
“He saved me for the next episode,” Elena said. “Or maybe he thinks I’m useful. But I’m not useful. I’m angry.”
Maya looked at the women around the table. A disgraced journalist. A bankrupt fraud. An accomplice to murder. A drug dealer in scrubs.
They were a mess. They were broken.
And they were formidable.
“We’re not the Gables Gals anymore,” Maya said, standing up. She felt a shift in the room’s gravity. The fear was still there, but it was no longer paralyzing. It was fuel.
“He wants a finale,” Maya said. “He wants to write an ending where we all destroy each other. Where the husbands leave, the police arrest us, and the neighborhood burns down while he records the sound of the flames.”
She walked to the glass wall, staring out at the black void of the wetlands. She knew the birdhouse was there. She knew Elias might be watching from next door. She knew Rick might be checking his burner phone.
“We’re rewriting the script,” Maya said.
She turned back to them.
“From this moment on, total transparency. If you get a text, we all see it. If you find a note, we all read it. If he contacts you, you don’t panic. You screenshot it.”
“The Pact,” Chloe said, wiping her face and sitting up straighter.
“The Pact,” Maya agreed. “We act normal on the outside. We go to the grocery store. We wave at the mailman. We let him think his Episode Four worked. We let him think we’re broken.”
“But?” Sarah asked.
“But on the inside,” Maya said, “we hunt.”
She pointed to the map Chloe had drawn on the whiteboard earlier—the diagram of the cul-de-sac, the Sinks, the lines of sight.
“We know he’s local,” Maya said. “We know he’s male. We know he has access to the 1994 evidence. We know he has technical skills.”
“Elias,” Elena said.
“Rick,” Chloe added.
“Or someone we haven’t looked at yet,” Maya said. “But we have one advantage he doesn’t know about.”
“What?”
“He thinks we’re characters,” Maya said. “He thinks we’re tropes. The Desperate Housewife. The Nosy Neighbor. The Failed Career Woman. He expects us to behave according to type.”
Maya smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was the smile she used to wear when she walked into a corrupt politician’s office with a tape recorder taped to her chest.
“Characters do what the author wants,” she said. “Real people do whatever the hell it takes to survive.”
She reached into the center of the table and put her hand out, palm down.
“No secrets,” she said. “No lies. Until he’s in cuffs.”
Chloe placed her hand on Maya’s. Her manicured nails were chipped, but her grip was firm. “No secrets.”
Elena added her hand. “No secrets.”
Sarah stood up. She looked at the darkness outside, then at the women. She placed her hand on top of the pile.
“No mercy,” Sarah said.
The pact was sealed.
Maya picked up her phone and stopped the recording. She saved the file.
File Name: The_Club_United.
“Go home,” Maya said. “Tell your husbands. Clean your slates. Tomorrow, we start digging into the only thing the Podcaster hasn’t talked about yet.”
“What’s that?” Chloe asked.
“The money,” Maya said. “Murder is messy. But money leaves a trail that never goes cold.”