The silence in Bittersweet Court had texture. It was heavy, granular, and suffocating, like a wool blanket pulled over the head on a humid night.
It had been forty-eight hours since the raid on the empty house. Forty-eight hours since the police had swarmed the cul-de-sac, breaching the basement studio only to find it wiped clean of fingerprints and DNA. Forty-eight hours since Maya had read the script that promised her death by fire.
Since then: nothing.
No notifications. No gravelly voice narrating their doom. No emails from the Gables Ghost. The podcast feed remained static, the “Season Finale” placeholder image mocking them with a generic question mark.
Maya stood at the kitchen island, slicing the crusts off a peanut butter sandwich. The knife hit the cutting board with a rhythmic thud-thud-thud.
Thud. The police cruiser idling at the curb. Thud. The lock on the back gate. Thud. The hammer of a gun that hadn’t been fired yet.
“Mommy?”
Maya froze, the knife hovering over the bread. She turned to the breakfast nook where Leo sat, swinging his legs. He was wearing his favorite dinosaur pajamas, oblivious to the fact that it was 2:00 PM on a Thursday.
“Yes, baby?” Maya asked, forcing her voice into the upper register of maternal calm.
“The blue lights are still there,” Leo said, pointing a sticky finger at the front window.
Outside, the patrol car sat like a monolith. Officer Miller was inside, likely drinking his fourth coffee of the shift. The light bar wasn’t fully active—just the low-intensity cruise lights that pulsed a slow, hypnotic blue against the white siding of the house.
“I know,” Maya said. “They’re making sure we’re safe. Like superheroes.”
“Superheroes fly,” Leo corrected, unimpressed. “Ideally.”
Maya placed the plate in front of him. “ Ideally,” she agreed.
She watched him eat. The normalcy of it felt obscene. He chewed. He drank his milk. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Meanwhile, Maya’s internal organs felt like they were being compressed by a trash compactor.
Dan was upstairs in the guest room—now his “office”—on a conference call. He had returned from the hotel yesterday, emboldened by the police presence. He believed in the system. He believed that a squad car in the driveway was a magic talisman against evil.
Maya knew better. The police were reactive. The killer was creative.
She walked into the living room and parted the sheer curtains.
The cul-de-sac was a ghost town. The raid had spooked the neighbors. The Tuesday Toss had been canceled. No one was walking dogs. The only movement was the wind in the ornamental pear trees and the occasional rotation of Officer Miller’s head as he checked his mirrors.
It was a siege.
Maya looked across the street at Sarah’s house. The blinds were drawn tight. Sarah hadn’t left her bedroom in two days, paralyzed by the shame of Episode Four and the terror of the finale.
To the right, Chloe’s house was equally dark. Rick’s Escalade was gone—staying at a hotel, Chloe had said via text, probably meeting with divorce lawyers. Chloe was alone in her pink studio, monitoring the network traffic, waiting for a ping that never came.
And Elena… Elena was at the hospital, working a double shift because, as she put it, “Trauma bays make sense. This street doesn’t.”
Maya let the curtain fall.
The waiting was the torture. It was a specific kind of psychological flaying. Every hour of silence allowed the imagination to fill the void with worst-case scenarios. Was he building a bomb? Was he waiting for the police to get bored? Was he already inside?
She checked her phone.
Signal Strength: 5 Bars. Battery: 88%. Notifications: 0.
She opened the group chat.
Maya: Anything on the police scanner?
Chloe: Quiet. Miller ordered a turkey sub twenty minutes ago. That’s the biggest news of the day.
Maya: He’s waiting.
Chloe: Who? Miller?
Maya: The Producer. This silence isn’t an accident. It’s a dramatic pause.
Maya threw the phone onto the sofa cushions. She paced the length of the room. The hardwood floors, usually polished to a shine, were scuffed from the police boots that had stomped through two days ago during the initial sweep.
She found herself standing in front of the sunroom doors.
The glass box. The stage.
Since the fire threat in the script, Maya had kept the heavy thermal curtains drawn across the glass wall, plunging the room into perpetual twilight. She hadn’t stepped foot inside.
But now, drawn by a morbid gravity, she reached for the handle.
She slid the door open and stepped onto the slate tile. The air in the sunroom was stale, hot, and smelled of trapped dust.
She walked to the curtains. Her hand trembled as she gripped the fabric.
Don’t look, a voice in her head warned. If you look, you invite him in.
She pulled the curtain back six inches.
The Sinks lay beyond the glass, vast and indifferent. The wetlands were lush with summer growth, a wall of green reeds and tangled vines. The birdhouse receiver was gone—taken into evidence—but the tree remained, a scarred witness.
Maya scanned the tree line. Nothing moved. No glint of a lens. No flash of a blue suit.
But he was there. She could feel him.
Elias Thorne. Or whoever he really was. The man who had sat in the library as a decoy. The man who had written a script where she burned alive.
“Where are you?” she whispered to the glass. “Why are you waiting?”
The answer came to her, not from the woods, but from her own journalist’s instinct. The part of her that understood narrative structure.
He wasn’t waiting. He was producing.
A show doesn’t go from the climax of Episode Four straight to the finale. It needs a breath. It needs the audience to lean in. It needs the tension to stretch so tight that when it snaps, the relief is indistinguishable from pain.
He was giving them a lull. He was letting them feel safe.
Because safety makes the violation sweeter.
“Mommy?”
Maya spun around. Leo was standing in the doorway of the sunroom, holding his stuffed triceratops by the tail.
“I don’t like this room,” he said. “It’s too hot.”
“I know, baby,” Maya said, letting the curtain fall back into place, blotting out the woods. “We’re not staying in here.”
She walked over and picked him up. He was heavy, solid. A real thing in a world of ghosts.
“Can we go outside?” Leo asked. “I want to ride my bike.”
Maya looked at the front door. The police car was right there. Officer Miller was armed. It was the middle of the day.
“No,” she said instinctively.
“Why?”
“Because…”
Because there is a man writing a story about us, and I don’t want you to be a plot point.
“Because it’s going to rain,” she lied. The sky was grey, but it wasn’t threatening rain. It was just oppressive.
“It’s not raining,” Leo argued.
“It might,” Maya said, carrying him back to the living room. “Let’s build a fort. In the basement. Where it’s quiet.”
“The basement is scary,” Leo said.
“Not with a fort,” Maya insisted. “We’ll bring the iPad. We’ll bring snacks.”
She wanted him underground. She wanted him behind concrete, not glass.
As she settled Leo in the basement playroom—a space she had swept for bugs three times this morning—she heard the front door open upstairs.
She froze.
“Maya?” Dan’s voice called down the stairs. “Officer Miller is knocking. He wants a word.”
Maya hurried up the stairs, smoothing her hair.
Dan stood in the foyer, the door open. Officer Miller was on the porch, looking apologetic. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a face that hadn’t seen enough of the world to be this tired.
“Everything okay?” Maya asked, moving to stand beside Dan.
“Just checking in, Mrs. Lin-Baker,” Miller said. “Shift change is coming up in twenty minutes. Officer Hernandez will be taking over. Just wanted to let you know there will be a brief gap while we swap cars.”
“A gap?” Maya asked sharply. “How long?”
“Five minutes,” Miller assured her. “Ten max. We have to log the vehicle exchange at the station. Protocol.”
“Can’t Hernandez come here before you leave?” Maya asked.
“We only have the one roving unit for this sector,” Miller explained. “Budget cuts. Don’t worry. I’ll do a full perimeter sweep before I roll out. You won’t even notice I’m gone.”
Maya noticed everything. She noticed that Miller’s holster was unsnapped. She noticed that Dan looked relieved to have a “man in charge” talking to him.
“Five minutes,” Maya repeated.
“It’s broad daylight,” Dan said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll be fine, May. Don’t be hysterical.”
He didn’t use the word hysterical, but the tone was there. Don’t be difficult. Don’t be the crazy wife.
“Okay,” Maya said. “Thank you, Officer.”
Miller tipped his cap and walked back to the cruiser.
Maya watched him go. She watched him get in the car. She watched him begin his perimeter sweep, driving slowly around the circle.
Five minutes.
It wasn’t a long time. It was a commercial break.
But in a live broadcast, a commercial break was when the sets were changed. When the actors moved to their marks.
Maya locked the door. She engaged the deadbolt. She engaged the chain.
“I’m going to check the back door,” she told Dan.
“I already checked it,” Dan said, heading back to the stairs. “I have another call.”
Maya ignored him. She walked to the kitchen. She checked the sliding door. Locked. She checked the windows. Locked.
She stood in the center of the kitchen, listening. The house breathed around her. The refrigerator hummed. The floorboards settled.
It was too quiet.
The silence wasn’t a comfort. It was a vacuum. And nature abhorred a vacuum. Something was going to rush in to fill it.
She looked at the clock on the oven.
2:15 PM.
Officer Miller’s car pulled away from the curb. The engine noise faded.
The gap had begun.
Maya gripped the countertop. She counted the seconds. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.
She waited for the sound of the next engine. The relief vehicle. Officer Hernandez.
Ten Mississippi.
Nothing.
Thirty Mississippi.
Still nothing.
Just the wind. Just the birds. Just the crushing weight of the lull.
Maya walked to the front window. The spot where the cruiser had been was empty. A patch of dry asphalt in a sea of damp grey.
It looked wrong. It looked exposed.
She pulled her phone out to text Chloe.
Miller is gone. We have a gap.
As she hit send, a noise cut through the silence.
It wasn’t a siren. It wasn’t a scream.
It was a notification chime.
But it didn’t come from her phone. It came from the living room speakers—the Sonos system connected to the house Wi-Fi. The system she thought she had disconnected.
Ding.
Then, the voice. Not gravelly this time. Clear. Prerecorded.
“And now, a word from our sponsors.”
Maya’s blood turned to ice.
“Today’s episode is brought to you by the Gables Police Department. Protecting and serving… until the shift change.”
The audio cut out.
Maya stood frozen. He wasn’t waiting. He wasn’t resting.
He was timing it.
He knew the shift change schedule. He knew about the gap.
And he was inside the speakers.
“Dan!” she screamed, turning toward the stairs.
But before she could take a step, the power went out.