I wake to Harbor Glen’s hospital on the TV, its glass facade glittering above the peninsula like a ship that never docks. The morning news anchor chirps about the upcoming Mercer gala, about “Light the Harbor” and the boat parade that will line the Sound with charity and champagne. The camera pans over the donor wall in the foundation lobby, Mercer crest repeating in glass and brass.
I mute it and stare at the frozen image of Evelyn’s name.
Riley’s texts glow above the silent anchor: photos of the note on Mercer hospital paper, of her righted picture frames, of the map someone rearranged to put Harbor Glen at the center of the web. Underneath she’s typed: They came to my door. We still go to theirs.
I text back: Heading up to the hill today. Will listen for the script.
The estate smells harsher than I remember when I walk in a few hours later, like lemon polish over cold stone and trapped salt air. Staff weave around me with boxes of centerpieces and racks of tuxedos, heads down. Outside the tall windows, the Long Island Sound is a dull pewter sheet, the peninsula knifing out into it, cliffside mansions perched above everything like they’re exempt from gravity.
“Mrs. Mercer,” one of the housekeepers says, then corrects herself. “Hannah. Mrs. Evelyn asked that I tell you she’ll be in the study all afternoon, working on her speech. She said you’re welcome to rest in your room.”
My throat goes dry.
“Thanks,” I say. “I just need to grab a few things from upstairs.”
I take the back stairs, the ones staff favor to avoid crossing the manicured center of the house. The air there always smells different—more like wood and laundry than cedar candles. At the top, I cut across the landing toward the guest wing, past the hallway that leads to the study.
I hear her before I see the door.
“…I want to ground it in our work with families,” Evelyn says, her voice smoother than any broadcast. “Healing, second chances, continuity.”
A man answers her, a crisp baritone with the practiced patience of someone who bills by the hour.
“That’s strong,” he says. “But we also need a frame for the noise. Donors are reading online chatter already. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.”
I slow mid-step. The runner under my boots is so thick it swallows the sound.
The study door is pulled almost shut, not latched. A triangle of lamplight spills onto the polished floor. I can smell coffee and ink and the faint tang of printer toner, layered over the citrus cleaner the staff uses on the wood.
I glance behind me. The hallway is empty, the portraits of Mercers past watching with painted patience.
My heart kicks harder.
I slip into the shallow alcove across from the door, where a decorative console table holds a bowl of sea glass and a silver frame displaying the Mercer crest. I slide my back down the wall until I’m crouched in shadow. My knees complain, but adrenaline sizzles through my arms, steadying my hands.
I pull my phone from my pocket. The case feels warm against my palm. With my thumb, I wake the screen and tap the voice recorder app. The red circle pulses at me.
I hit record and lay the phone flat on the carpet, screen down, angle aimed at the sliver of open door.
“…the dangers of misinformation in the digital age,” Evelyn is saying.
I look toward the gap, but all I can see is the edge of the Persian rug and the corner of a leather armchair.
“Say more,” the man prompts. “You care about accuracy. Let’s make that explicit.”
Papers rustle.
“In an age where rumors sprint across the internet before the truth has laced its shoes,” she begins, “we all need places we can trust. Harbor Glen Memorial, and the Mercer Foundation that sustains it, have been that place for decades.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. Rumors. Truth. Shoes. She’s already dressing the battlefield.
“Good image,” the consultant says. “Maybe shorten the sentence. And stay positive at the start. Save the negatives for the transition into ‘attacks.’ Can we get ‘healing’ in earlier?”
Evelyn repeats the line, trimming and swapping words, her voice shifting by degrees like a camera adjusting focus. Each revision sounds more natural, less like she’s reading and more like she’s confiding.
“When families walk through our doors,” she says, “they aren’t worried about online conspiracies. They are worried about their child’s heartbeat, their mother’s lab results, their own future. They need us to be steady when the digital world is noisy.”
My stomach turns. I can see those doors in my mind: automatic glass, the smell of tangy disinfectant rushing out to meet the salt air. The same crest above them that hovered in the corner of Riley’s threatening note.
“And then you pivot,” the man coaches. “Gently. Acknowledge there have been… distractions. But don’t dignify specifics. Specifics are our enemy here.”
“Baseless accusations,” Evelyn says. “Opportunistic attacks.”
The words roll out with a faint click of her tongue, like she’s tasting them.
“Yes,” he says. “But also frame it as a tragedy for the community. Not just for you. This isn’t about your reputation; it’s about the hospital being able to do its work.”
“Of course,” she says. “Because it is.”
My jaw tightens until my teeth ache.
“Try a full run,” he says. “From the top of that section.”
Papers whisper. I hear the clink of porcelain on a saucer—she’s taking a sip of coffee, resting her voice like a seasoned performer.
“There will always be those who, for personal gain or unresolved pain, lash out at the institutions that held them,” Evelyn says, tone velvet. “They spin stories out of shadows, they twist coincidences into conspiracies, and they weaponize the infinite echo chamber of the digital age.”
She doesn’t say Riley’s name. She doesn’t have to.
“But while they chase clicks and sympathy, we are here, day after day, doing the unglamorous work of healing. We do not answer to smear campaigns. We answer to our patients, our staff, and our God.”
My fingernails dig crescents into my palms. Somewhere downstairs, someone wheels a cart across the marble, the distant rattle punctuating every word.
“Pause there,” the consultant says. “Strong. We’ll finesse ‘unresolved pain’ so it doesn’t sound judgmental. We want to acknowledge hurt without validating the narrative.”
He lowers his voice, but the hall carries sound too well in this house.
“And when you say ‘God,’ soften your jaw,” he adds. “Less televangelist, more grieving mother.”
Grieving mother.
My skin goes cold.
“You want Lydia,” Evelyn says. There’s steel under the polished syllables.
“We need Lydia,” he replies. “Lightly, on your terms. Your audience knows your story. They remember the accident, the tree on the cliffs. They already feel for you. We direct that feeling before anyone else does.”
Air sticks in my chest. For a moment I’m back out on the cliff path, the memorial tree leaning toward the water, Evelyn’s hand a vise on my arm.
“I don’t want her name in the mouths of gossips,” Evelyn says. “They have taken enough.”
“You’re not giving her to them,” he says. “You’re anchoring this whole narrative in your lived loss. People will think, ‘A woman who buried a child and still built a children’s hospital? She’s not stealing babies, she’s saving them.’ It inoculates you.”
They want to use Lydia like a vaccine.
The silence that follows is longer. I imagine Evelyn weighing the optics against whatever is left of her private grief.
“One line,” he says eventually. “Two at most. No details that can be fact-checked or twisted. Just a reminder.”
“Fine,” she says. The word is flat, scraped clean of anything soft. “Show me where.”
Papers shift again. The lamp hums. I press my spine harder into the wall, carving the moment into memory.
“After ‘God,’” he says. “Take a breath. Let your voice catch a little.”
He clears his throat and pitches his voice in a faint imitation of hers.
“‘I know what it is to lose a child,’” he offers. “‘I know what it is to have your family story ripped apart by a single bad day.’ Then you pivot: ‘But I refused to let that loss define us. I chose to build…’ and so on.”
“No,” she cuts in. “Not ‘bad day.’ That’s trite. And grief doesn’t ‘define’ us; we steward it.”
There’s that word again, the one she loves for money and people alike.
“Try your own version,” he says.
The pause stretches, then breaks.
“I know what it is to stand on the edge of a cliff and think your life is over,” Evelyn says quietly. “To believe that everything good you have ever built has been swallowed by the sea.”
The hairs on my arms stand up. I picture Daniel’s face when he talks about Lydia’s accident, the way his voice thins.
“But grief did not get the last word in my family,” she continues. “We chose to turn our pain into purpose. We chose to make sure no other parent would stand where I stood, untreated, unheard, alone.”
Her consultant exhales. It sounds like relief and admiration.
“That,” he says, “is why I earn less than you do.”
She laughs, a quick, pleased sound.
“So then,” he goes on, “when you mention ‘baseless accusations’ later, those words don’t just come from a CEO protecting her brand. They come from a mother who has already lost everything once. People attack reputations every day. They don’t attack bereaved mothers without thinking twice.”
He doesn’t say that they already have a bereaved daughter who is ready to speak. The room hums with the unspoken.
“Do I name them?” Evelyn asks. “The… ‘critics.’”
“No,” he says quickly. “Acknowledging specifics invites details into the room. We want abstraction. ‘There are whispers,’ ‘there are those who.’ You could say, ‘There are people who would rather tear down than build up, who would rather exploit their connection to us than seek healing.’ That hints at opportunism without giving them a platform.”
Exploit their connection.
I think of Riley’s letter to the family lawyers folded in Riley’s drawer, of my own marriage license, of the NDA Evelyn tried to slide across a hotel bar.
“Try it,” he says.
Evelyn takes a breath.
“There will always be people who would rather tear down than build up,” she recites. “People who would rather exploit their connection to us than seek healing through the institutions that are here for them. That breaks my heart, not because of what it might mean for my name, but because of what it does to trust in this town.”
I press my tongue hard against my back teeth to keep from making a sound.
“Beautiful,” he says. “We’ll polish a few phrases, but the spine is there. Healing, second chances, digital misinformation, unnamed attacks, your grief. By the time you finish, anyone who comes at you looks like they’re kicking over a memorial tree.”
He chuckles at his own line.
“I still don’t understand why I have to spend half my time addressing ghosts,” Evelyn says. “We save lives. That should be enough.”
“It is,” he says. “For rational people. But narrative is reality now. Harbor Glen is a peninsula; stories bounce off the water and echo back louder. You don’t ignore echoes. You shape them.”
I look past the console table to the window at the end of the hall. The Sound sprawls gray and cold beyond the cliffs. Somewhere down there, staff are planning where the Light the Harbor boats will line up, whose children will sit at the front of which yacht, whose names will glow on the side of the hospital during the parade. The town’s social census, rendered in LED.
Our story is already the wrong kind for those lights.
“Let’s run the whole speech from the top,” the consultant says. “I want to hear how the transitions land.”
“Again?” Evelyn protests lightly. “You’re worse than my piano teacher.”
“Repetition is mercy to your future self,” he replies. “Trust me.”
Pages flip. The leather chair creaks as she straightens. The cadence of her words shifts into full performance mode, the way I’ve heard on stages and at podiums: warm opening, gratitude, anecdotes about donors and staff, then the turn toward suffering and resilience.
I let the words wash over me, recording every beat. “At-risk children.” “Broken families we helped mend.” “Second chances no algorithm can quantify.” “The hazard of believing every headline you scroll past in the dead of night.”
And then Lydia. That cliff, that tree, her “choice” to build a hospital instead of collapsing. Her voice catches perfectly on cue. The consultant murmurs a satisfied “Good” at the right places, like a metronome of approval.
My disgust burns clean now, like high-proof alcohol. It doesn’t wobble into tears. It hardens into angles.
I reach down and stop the recording, save the file, and start a second one, in case anything later is even worse. My thumb moves with deliberate care over the screen, cataloging this in a different kind of chain of custody.
When she reaches the line about “those who would exploit their connection to us,” my resolve locks into place.
If she gets to write the prologue, we have to deliver the appendix so loud it blows the binding apart.
“We’re close,” the consultant says when she trails off. “One more run tomorrow, then you’ll be bulletproof. Within reason.”
Bulletproof.
My phone screen reflects a tiny, warped version of my face: familiar eyes, unfamiliar hardness.
Downstairs, the front door opens, letting in a draft that smells like salt and woodsmoke and the faint distant antiseptic from the hospital on the hill. The three scents knot in my throat.
I gather my phone, stand slowly, and smooth my coat. My knees crack in protest.
As I step away from the alcove, my mind starts sorting what I just heard into usable pieces: sound bites, phrases Riley’s journalist can quote against Evelyn’s own emails and server logs. The line about “digital misinformation” paired with the logs of her deleting records. The grief story framed beside kids whose stories disappeared in her hospital’s paperwork.
I pause once more by the study door, far enough that my shadow doesn’t cross the light.
Inside, Evelyn is laughing at something the consultant said, a bright, practiced sound full of gratitude and charm.
I touch the phone in my pocket, feeling the solid rectangle against my palm.
I have her rehearsal now.
The question that follows me down the back stairs like a second heartbeat is whether anyone outside this house will care about what’s true when the woman on the hill steps into the spotlight and cries for her dead daughter in front of all of Harbor Glen.