The loft smells like burnt espresso and dust-warmed electronics.
I cradle my chipped mug in one hand and tap the gain knob with the other, watching the tiny green LED blink on the audio interface. The fan in my laptop whirs, a constant little hurricane under the desk. Beyond the windows, the LA hills glow a soft orange, like the whole city has sunk into golden-hour filter and never climbed out.
“Okay,” I say into the mic. “We’re doing this.”
My own voice booms back through the headphones, too loud, too present. I dial my monitor level down until it feels tolerable, then check the notes in front of me. Bullet points in blue ink: anonymous tip line, no names on air without consent, resources, no conspiracy tourists. Jazz would have doodled stars all over this page; I’ve only managed crooked boxes.
I clear my throat.
“This is Second Take,” I say, hitting record with my thumb. “And I’m Quinn Hart, talking to you from our dangerously over-caffeinated loft, with a quick message before we get into today’s episode.”
I pause, listening for traffic or sirens. The building hums quietly: fridge cycling on in the kitchenette, neighbor’s bass leaking through the floor in a soft thump-thump heartbeat.
“Over the last few weeks,” I continue, “a lot of you have reached out about ‘River’s Edge High’—about Lila Park, about missing episodes, about that grainy mill staircase still that keeps getting reposted. Some of you watched it as teens like I did. Some of you worked on it.”
My tongue sticks slightly to the roof of my mouth. The coffee has gone tepid, leaving a bitter film on my teeth.
“So here’s what I’m doing,” I say. “If you were part of that production—cast, crew, background, craft services, the person who refilled the fake blood squibs—I’ve set up an anonymous tip line. You can call in, tell me what you remember, what you were told, what never stopped bothering you.”
I keep my sentences short, the way I’ve learned to when I want people to really hear me. No tangents, no nervous laughter.
“I promise a few things,” I say. “One: I won’t put your voice on the show without your explicit okay. Two: I won’t share your real name or any identifying details without your consent. And three: I will treat whatever you share not as gossip, but as part of a bigger pattern we’re trying to understand.”
My fingers tighten around the mug. The ceramic edge presses into my palm. I imagine some exhausted forty-five-year-old former PA, listening on cheap earbuds while restocking shelves in a grocery store, deciding whether to dial a stranger.
“I know a lot of you signed NDAs,” I add. “I know coming forward has real risks in an industry that depends on keeping quiet. I also know some of you haven’t slept right in twenty years.”
My throat thickens. I swallow, forcing words around the knot.
“If you want to talk,” I say softly, leaning closer to the mic, “call the number in the show notes. I’m here. And I’m listening.”
I hit stop. The waveform freezes on the screen, a dense little mountain range of my voice.
I play it back once, eyes closed, listening for any hint of exploitation in my tone. The AC unit above the recording booth hums on a low setting, battling the late-afternoon warmth that seeps through the brick. Outside, a siren wails somewhere down the hill, then fades.
“Too earnest?” I mutter.
The room does not answer. Jazz is at her day job tonight, wrangling a panel for a streaming platform that keeps rebranding the same content as “new.” I’m alone with the cables and my conscience.
I trim a breath here, a stray um there, then drop the segment into the episode timeline. The rest of the track is already edited: my voice and Jazz’s weaving through clips of “River’s Edge,” joking about fashion and then pivoting, like we always do, into who got written out and why.
My cursor hovers over the Publish button.
“You’ve done this before,” I tell myself. “You’ve asked for sources. This is just… more specific.”
I click. The episode queues. A progress bar crawls across the screen. Outside the window, the hills darken by increments, individual houses switching their lights on, tiny squares of glass winking alive.
I refresh the hosting dashboard twice, even though I know it won’t show downloads yet. Old habits from my days chasing traffic for a pop culture site cling like bad perfume. Finally, I push back from the desk and stretch until my spine crackles.
“Okay,” I say to the empty loft. “Door’s open.”
I’ve just invited anyone who lived through that mill to walk through my headphones and into my life.
The email arrives nine hours later, at 3:13 a.m.
I’m awake anyway, back at the desk in an oversized hoodie, blue light painting the underside of my cheekbones. The city outside has thinned to distant traffic and the occasional shout drifting up from the street. My mug has upgraded from coffee to peppermint tea, lukewarm, a ghost of steam rising.
The laptop dings: a bright, cheerful notification sound that feels wrong in the quiet.
NEW VOICEMAIL FROM: +1 (UNKNOWN), the subject line reads.
My skin pulls tight across my arms. I set the mug down too abruptly; liquid sloshes over my fingers, hot enough to sting. I wipe my hand on my thigh and click.
The voicemail lives inside a little gray player on my screen, one simple play button in the middle. No name. No transcription, just a single line: 02:47.
Two minutes, forty-seven seconds.
My heart picks up, syncing with the subtle bump of the bass from the downstairs neighbor. I catch myself holding my breath and exhale, long and controlled, the way my old therapist taught me when my chest used to lock up before meetings.
“Okay,” I whisper. “You asked for this.”
I put my headphones on and press play.
Static crackles in my ears, then a click, then a breath. The caller doesn’t speak right away. I hear air, faint room tone—maybe a fridge hum, maybe a highway off in the distance. The acoustics sound like a kitchen, not a car.
Then a voice, low and hoarse.
“Um… hi,” they say. “I don’t want… I’m not giving you my name.”
Their words drag slightly, like each one has weight.
“I was a PA,” they continue. “On ‘River’s Edge.’ Season one. Night shoots at the mill.”
My pen is in my hand before I register grabbing it. I flip to a clean page in my notebook and start writing: PA, season one, night shoots, mill.
“You asked if anybody remembers,” the voice says. “I remember blood.”
The word jolts through me, nearly physical. My fingers cramp on the pen.
“We were on the staircase,” they say. “There was… there was this metal railing. It was always wet, from the river air or whatever. Slick. I used to joke we were all gonna catch something from it.”
I hear a short, humorless laugh, cut off almost instantly.
“That night, it wasn’t wet from the river,” they say. “There was blood on the railing. On the steps. It dripped down my hands when I grabbed it to lean over.”
The room around me narrows to the space between my ears and the screen. I picture the mill from Nora’s show, and from the photos I’ve studied: rusted iron, cracked concrete, fluorescent work lights throwing hard shadows. I picture someone’s fingers slipping in a dark smear along cold metal.
“They told us it was a fall,” the caller says.
I pause the message, lungs tight. The wave form stops mid-peak.
I know what’s coming next. My body knows before my brain does; goosebumps run over my forearms, and I rub at them uselessly through the cotton hoodie.
“Keep going,” I whisper, and hit play again.
“They told us the girl fell,” the caller says, more clearly now, as if reading back a line from a script. “They said the stairs were damp, and she missed a step, and everybody had to stick to that story.”
Paper rustles near their mouth, the sound scratching the inside of my skull.
“We all signed things,” they go on. “NDA. Safety release. Whatever they called it. Legal words. We were kids sitting in folding chairs in a conference room, hands still smelling like fake smoke and donuts, and they slid those papers in front of us.”
The sensory detail knocks into the ones I already carry: the chemical tang of stage smoke, the sticky sweetness from craft services. I write them down anyway, as if the act of documenting can anchor the caller to something solid, keep them from vanishing once the audio ends.
“But that’s not what I saw,” the voice says, quieter.
My pulse roars in my ears.
“I was on the landing below,” they say. “I was taping down a cable. I heard them arguing. I heard her say, ‘You can’t—’ and then there was this… this thud. Not like a stunt mat. Like meat. Then screaming.”
The caller draws in a shaking breath. I mirror it without meaning to, chest rising.
“I looked up,” they say. “And she wasn’t just… she didn’t just slip. Her body—it went out. Like somebody’s hand was involved. I know what a trip looks like. This looked like a shove.”
The radiator in the corner clicks, expanding with heat. My toes curl inside my socks.
“They told us the girl fell,” the caller repeats. “But she was pushed.”
The words land clean, no static, no hesitation. On my screen, the wave form shows a neat, even rise and fall, the confession etched in blue.
“I’ve had that sentence in my head for twenty years,” they whisper. “Had to say it somewhere.”
There’s a tiny scrape, then a muffled sound that might be a sob or a cough.
“Don’t call back,” they add quickly. “I… I can’t—just don’t. I’ve got kids now. A mortgage. I shouldn’t even be—”
The voicemail cuts off. The player snaps back to the beginning, the play button waiting, blank and innocuous.
I slowly remove my headphones. My ears ring. The loft feels colder, the exposed brick leaching warmth from the air. I tug the sleeves of my hoodie down over my hands and flex my fingers, like I’m trying to get blood flowing back into them.
On the other side of the city, Nora Hayes is probably sleeping in her glass house, the walls catching a different piece of sky. I picture her reflection in those windows, doubled, tripled, merged with the city lights. I have no idea what she remembers when she looks at herself.
I hit play again.
“They told us the girl fell,” the voice says.
I stop, rewind five seconds, play it again.
“They told us the girl fell.”
Again.
The repetition shifts the sentence from description to evidence, a phrase worn down by too many rehearsals. My brain wraps it in mental quotation marks. Somebody cooked that line in a conference room, probably with a lawyer present, tested it for liability and optics and how easily it would roll off tongues during depositions.
I reach for a sticky note and write the sentence in block letters: THEY TOLD US THE GIRL FELL.
I stick it to the corkboard under a still of the mill staircase, right between Nora’s blurred teenage profile and the half-cropped image of Lila. Red string already stretches between photos, between air dates and pulled episodes. I add a fresh line from the sticky note to a printout of a local news article from back then: TEEN ACTRESS LEAVES SERIES DUE TO “CREATIVE DIFFERENCES.”
My hand shakes just enough that the pushpin goes in crooked.
I sit back on my heels, looking at the wall.
“They told us the girl fell, but she was pushed,” I say out loud.
The words taste like copper on my tongue.
For a long minute, I just sit there, knees pressed into the worn rug, listening to the AC rattle and the faint whoosh of traffic far below. The loft’s big windows throw back my reflection, faint over the dark city: headphones slung around my neck, hair in a messy knot, eyes too wide. Glass reflecting glass.
I’m not just cataloguing fandom mysteries anymore. I’m holding the first concrete allegation that what happened on that staircase wasn’t an accident.
I stand up too fast and have to catch myself on the edge of the desk. My tea has gone cold; I drink it anyway, swallowing around the chill.
Jazz will tell me to breathe, to slow down, to talk to a media lawyer before I even think about putting this on air. She won’t be wrong. NDAs, defamation, retaliation—these aren’t theoretical. I’ve watched colleagues burn out or get blacklisted for far less.
I open a new document on my laptop and type: WORKING TITLE: THE MISSING GIRL – PART TWO: THEY TOLD US SHE FELL.
My cursor blinks at the end of the line, impatient.
“We could get sued for this,” I murmur.
The loft is quiet, but the recording gear around me might as well be an audience, every black eye of every lens and mic pointed at my face. I tuck my legs under the chair and pull myself close to the desk, like I’m taking cover behind the screen.
I replay the last ten seconds of the voicemail one more time, isolating the words, letting them sink into my bones.
“They told us the girl fell,” the caller says. “But she was pushed.”
I export the audio clip into a folder I label EVIDENCE, my fingers hovering for a second before I hit save. My legal risk just spiked. So did my moral one.
Then I pull my notebook toward me and write a new question at the top of the page, in letters so large they take up half the sheet:
If she was pushed, who put their hands on her—and what do they do when they realize I know that now?