The room smelled of iodine and expensive apology flowers.
Maya Lin-Baker lay in the adjustable hospital bed, counting the acoustic tiles on the ceiling. Thirty-six complete tiles. Eight partials around the perimeter. She had counted them four times in the last hour, using the mental arithmetic to distract herself from the sensation that her chest had been replaced with a bag of crushed glass.
Her ribs were bruised. Her left arm was in a cast, fractured by the airbag. Her lip was split, stitched back together with a thread so fine it felt like a spiderweb against her tongue.
But she was alive.
She shifted her weight, wincing as the sheets rubbed against the road rash on her shoulder. The movement drew the attention of the four people keeping a silent, terrified vigil in the cramped room.
“She’s awake,” Chloe Vance whispered. Chloe was sitting in the visitor’s chair, looking less like an influencer and more like a refugee. She wore no makeup, and her usually glossy hair was pulled back in a messy bun that looked like it hadn’t been touched in twenty-four hours.
Elena Russo moved from the window to the bedside. She checked the monitors with a professional detachment that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“BP is stabilizing,” Elena said quietly. “The pain meds should be wearing off about now. How is the head?”
“It feels like someone parked a truck on it,” Maya rasped. Her voice sounded like gravel—like the Podcaster’s.
“You’re lucky,” Sarah Vance said from the corner. She was standing with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at Maya with a mixture of guilt and horror. “The police said if you hadn’t hit the drainage ditch at that angle… if you had hit the tree…”
“I know,” Maya said. She tried to sit up, but a spike of pain slammed her back down against the pillows. “I saw the tree.”
Dan was standing at the foot of the bed. He hadn’t spoken yet. He looked ten years older than he had at breakfast yesterday. His shirt was wrinkled, and there was a smear of grease on his cheek, likely from pacing the waiting room and rubbing his face.
“We’re done,” Dan said. His voice was flat, final.
Maya looked at him. “Dan…”
“No,” he interrupted, his hands gripping the plastic footboard until his knuckles turned white. “I let you play this game, Maya. I let you dig up the past because I thought it was just… boredom. I thought you needed a project. But this?” He gestured to her broken body. “This isn’t a project. This is a hit.”
“It proves we’re close,” Maya said.
“It proves he’s crazy!” Chloe burst out, standing up. “Maya, he cut your brake lines. In broad daylight. At the grocery store. He doesn’t care who sees. He doesn’t care if he kills you.”
“He didn’t want to kill me,” Maya argued, fighting the fog of the painkillers. “If he wanted me dead, he would have rigged the car to explode. Or he would have cut the lines when I was on the highway. He did it in the neighborhood. He wanted a crash. He wanted a spectacle.”
“He almost got a corpse,” Elena said sharply. “Trauma is unpredictable, Maya. You could have had an aortic dissection. You could have had a brain bleed. Don’t give him credit for precision.”
“We have to stop,” Sarah said, stepping into the light. Her face was pale, her eyes red-rimmed. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sleep. Every time I hear a noise outside, I think it’s him. I think he’s coming to finish what he started in 1994.”
“If we stop,” Maya said, forcing herself to sit up despite the agony, “he wins. He releases the episodes. He ruins our lives. He destroys you, Sarah. He destroys Chloe.”
“Let him!” Chloe cried. “Let him release it! I don’t care about the debt anymore. I don’t care about the followers. I just want to be alive. I want my kids to have a mother.”
“He won’t stop just because we quit,” Maya said. She looked at each of them, trying to inject her own resolve into their veins. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t a negotiation. It’s a hunt. If we stop running, he just catches us faster.”
“We move,” Dan said.
Maya looked at her husband. “What?”
“We sell the house,” Dan said. “Market be damned. We take the loss. We pack up Leo, we go to my parents in Ohio, and we never set foot in The Gables again.”
“And go where?” Maya asked. “He knows who we are, Dan. He has our digital footprints. He has the recordings from the nursery. Do you think a change of address stops a stalker who has access to the police database?”
“We get restraining orders,” Dan said, though he sounded desperate, unconvinced.
“Against who?” Maya shot back. “We still don’t know his name. We chased Elias, and it was a dead end. We chased the Gardener, and he gave us history, not a suspect. If we leave now, we leave with a target on our backs for the rest of our lives.”
She pointed to her cast with her good hand.
“Look at this,” she demanded. “This isn’t a warning. This is a receipt. I paid for this information with my own blood. I am not walking away without the merchandise.”
“You’re obsessed,” Dan whispered. He looked at her like she was a stranger. “You’re not doing this for safety. You’re doing this for the story. You’re doing this because you miss the newsroom.”
The accusation hung in the air, heavy and toxic. It was the same argument they had the night she came home from Chicago, broken and fired.
“I am doing this,” Maya said, her voice trembling, “because a woman died in my house, and nobody cared. And now he’s trying to kill me in the same way. It’s not a story, Dan. It’s survival.”
“It’s suicide,” Sarah said softly.
The door to the room opened. A nurse bustled in, checking the IV drip. The tension in the room was palpable, thick enough to choke on.
“Visiting hours are over in ten minutes,” the nurse said cheerfully, oblivious to the fact that she had walked into a marital demolition. “She needs rest. Concussions need darkness.”
“We’re leaving,” Dan said. He looked at Maya. “I’m taking Leo to the hotel. I’m calling a realtor in the morning.”
“Dan, don’t,” Maya pleaded.
“I love you, Maya,” he said, tears standing in his eyes. “But I love our son more. And I won’t let you turn him into an orphan because you have a hero complex.”
He turned and walked out. He didn’t kiss her goodbye.
The silence he left behind was deafening.
Chloe sniffled, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “He’s right, Maya. Maybe we should just… maybe we should just go.”
Maya looked at her friends. They were broken. The crash had done exactly what the Podcaster wanted. It had shattered their alliance. It had introduced the one thing stronger than their collective anger: mortal terror.
“You can go,” Maya said. She leaned back against the pillows, exhaustion washing over her like a tide. “I won’t blame you. I won’t stop you.”
She looked at the ceiling tiles again.
“But I’m staying.”
Elena sighed. She walked over and adjusted Maya’s blanket. “You can’t even walk to the bathroom, Maya. How are you going to catch a killer?”
“I have a phone,” Maya said. “And I have a brain. And unlike him, I have nothing left to lose. Dan is walking out. My career is dead. My house is a wiretap.”
She looked at Sarah.
“He thinks he broke me,” Maya said. “But he just stripped away the parts of me that were afraid.”
Sarah looked at the floor. “I wish I was like you. I wish I was brave.”
“You are brave,” Maya said. “You kept a secret for thirty years to protect your family. Now, you just need to tell the truth to save them.”
Maya reached for her phone on the bedside table. The screen was cracked, a spiderweb of glass over the black LCD.
“Is the new episode out?” she asked.
“What?” Chloe asked, horrified. “You want to listen to it?”
“No,” Maya said. “I want to record one.”
The three women stared at her.
“He controls the narrative because he has the microphone,” Maya said. “He edits the tapes. He chooses the music. He makes us look like victims or villains. It’s time we took the mic back.”
“You want to start a podcast?” Elena asked, incredulous.
“I want to release a statement,” Maya said. “A live broadcast. From this bed. I want to tell the neighborhood exactly what happened to my car. I want to tell them about the bugs in the nursery. I want to tell them about the red dress.”
“He’ll retaliate,” Sarah warned.
“He already retaliated!” Maya shouted, then winced as her ribs protested. “He cut my brakes! The gloves are off, Sarah. We stop playing by his rules.”
She looked at Chloe.
“You have the platform,” Maya said. “You have fifty thousand followers. Even if half of them are bots, that’s twenty-five thousand witnesses. If we go live… if we put this on Instagram… we take away his shadows. We drag him into the light.”
Chloe looked at her phone. She looked at Maya’s broken body. She looked at the door where Dan had just exited.
“Rick told me if I posted one more thing, he’d smash my phone,” Chloe whispered.
“Rick is scared,” Maya said. “Because Rick has secrets too. But this isn’t about Rick. It’s about us.”
Chloe took a deep breath. She reached into her purse and pulled out her phone. She didn’t set up a ring light. She didn’t check her angles. She just held it up.
“Okay,” Chloe said. “Live in three. Two.”
She hit the button.
“We’re live.”
Maya looked into the tiny camera lens. She didn’t try to hide the bruises. She didn’t try to hide the hospital gown. She looked straight into the digital void, imagining the killer sitting in his dark room, watching.
“My name is Maya Lin-Baker,” she said, her voice gaining strength with every word. “I live at 4 Bittersweet Court. And yesterday, someone tried to murder me.”
Sarah gasped softly, but she didn’t leave the frame. She stepped closer, her hand resting on the bed rail. Elena moved to the other side, crossing her arms like a sentinel.
“You’ve heard the stories,” Maya continued. “You’ve heard The Gables Ghost. You think it’s entertainment. You think it’s a mystery. But it’s not. It’s a confession.”
She leaned forward, the pain in her chest a sharp, clarifying fire.
“To the person listening,” Maya said, her eyes hard. “To the neighbor who cut my lines. You missed. And now, the whole world is watching you.”
She nodded at Chloe. Chloe ended the stream.
The room was silent.
“Well,” Elena said, a rare, dark smile touching her lips. “I guess we’re not quitting.”
“No,” Maya said, sinking back into the pillows. “We’re just getting started.”
Outside, the sun began to set, casting long shadows across the hospital parking lot. But inside room 304, the light was on. And it was burning brighter than ever.