The couch in Quinn’s loft tries to eat me alive.
The cushions sag in the middle, so my body keeps sliding toward a crater that smells faintly of old coffee and patchouli. The fabric scratches the backs of my thighs through my jeans, tiny fibers catching at my skin each time I shift. I lock my knees and plant my feet hard on the scuffed floorboards, clinging to the couch’s edge like it’s the only stable thing in the room.
“Okay,” Quinn says, bouncing to her feet with more energy than the space deserves. “You have to see this in person. The photos online don’t do it justice.”
She waves at The Board.
The corkboard eats the entire brick wall opposite the windows, an improvised crime scene in printer ink and red yarn. Stills from River’s Edge High sit next to grainy screencaps of fan uploads, screenshots of deleted forum posts, and a printout of the mill from local news coverage, its brick skeleton rising out of Pennsylvania fog. Red string connects years, faces, question marks. My teenage face appears three times that I can see from here, each circled in different neon highlighter.
The loft smells like over-extracted espresso and warm electronics. The hum of Quinn’s desktop tower blends with distant traffic and the occasional burst of laughter from the café downstairs. Outside the tall, dusty windows, late sun glances off downtown LA glass, turning each pane into a floating rectangle of white.
Two hours ago, I lay on my polished concrete floor in Laurel Canyon, forehead pressed to cool stone, listening to Part Two of “The Missing Girl” on my phone. Quinn’s voice threaded through my AirPods, uncomfortably gentle as she talked about “the unnamed lead actress” and “patterns of silence around accidents on prestige sets.” Each carefully chosen word rubbed against the Q&A sheet the studio lawyer handed me yesterday, the line about having “no knowledge of any serious on-set injuries” turning to ash in my mouth.
I DM’d her before I could talk myself out of it. I’d like to talk. Off-mic. About the mill.
Now I sit in her world, trying not to notice that my palm print smudges the glass of her coffee table where I set down my untouched drink.
“In real life it looks…” I search for something neutral. “…comprehensive.”
“You mean intense,” she says, grinning. She pushes a pair of big studio headphones aside on the table and beckons me closer. “Come on. You know how it is. This is just my version of a writers’ room whiteboard.”
I rise carefully, keeping one hand on the back of the couch. My heartbeat ticks in my throat. The tall windows throw a dull reflection of us onto the corkboard—two women ghosting behind yarn and rumors.
Quinn picks up a pushpin that’s fallen to the floor and slots it back above a screenshot of the mill staircase. “So this is Season Two, episode nine,” she explains, in the same cadence she uses on the podcast. “The last full shot we have where Lila is clearly visible and walking without a limp.”
Lila. Hearing the name from her mouth here, in this real air, tightens something behind my ribs. I wrap my arms around myself.
“After this,” Quinn continues, “we only get profile glimpses, background blurs, and then—poof. Missing episodes, continuity errors, publicity about ‘creative differences.’” She taps the string running from one corner to another. “And then the mill accident rumor. Your accident.”
I taste metal, like I licked the wet railing again. “Rumor,” I repeat.
Quinn glances over her shoulder at me. Her eyes are bright, eager in a way that would be flattering if I didn’t feel nailed like a butterfly to her board. “Hey, I’m being careful with my language,” she says. “Rumor until I have multiple corroborating sources. But the pattern is there.”
She points to a printed block of text from the anonymous tip line. I already know which one. Blood on the railing… they told us the girl fell, but she was pushed. I hear the tremor in that PA’s voice from her episode; I hear it again now, echoing off the brick.
“I’m not playing gotcha here, Nora,” Quinn adds. “You know that, right?”
I give her half a shrug. My jaw muscles quiver with the effort of keeping my mouth in a neutral line. “You invited millions of people to crowdsource my worst night,” I say. “Your definition of ‘gotcha’ might be a little different from mine.”
She winces, hand flattening momentarily over a photo. “Fair,” she says. “And also… I’m trying to tell a story that doesn’t just make you the villain of some clickbait narrative. I’m trying to show the system.”
“The system,” I echo. My voice comes out dry. The word floats between us, big and safe. So much easier to say than me.
I glance back at the couch. The indent where my body sat a minute ago still holds my shape.
“You said in your DM you wanted to talk about the mill,” Quinn says. Her tone softens, losing the podcast polish. “Off-mic. I really appreciate you trusting me with that, especially with all the noise right now.”
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I flex my fingers against my arms until my nails press half-moon marks into my skin.
This is the part where I tell her, I remind myself. This is the part where I stop letting kids in diners and middle-aged PAs carry my story for me.
“I listened to Part Two,” I say instead. “You’re… close.”
Her gaze sharpens. “Close how?”
“To what actually happened.” The words scrape on the way out. “You have pieces.”
Quinn moves to the low shelf under the board and pulls out a legal pad, flipping to a clean page. Her pen is already in her hand. “I should say this so we’re clear,” she says. “If we’re doing this as an interview, I need to know what’s on and off the record for you.”
The phrase drops into the room like a stone into shallow water.
On the record.
I picture the studio lawyer’s manicured finger tapping the Q&A sheet. I picture Marcus whispering about defamation, liability, lost contracts. I picture the wording of the NDA the fixer slid across the table all those years ago in a freezing conference room near the mill, my mother’s hand shaking as she signed where they highlighted.
“Interview?” I repeat. My stomach contracts.
“Sorry, bad habit.” Quinn gives a small, apologetic smile and drops the pen halfway, then lifts it again. “You reached out. That makes you a source, not a subject. But I’m also not just your friend from Tumblr, you know? I have to be able to say where information comes from, even if I protect identities.”
“Protect,” I say, tasting the word. “Like you’re protecting me now by not saying my name?”
“Like I’m protecting everyone involved,” she replies. “Including the person who got hurt. Including the PA who’s terrified of being sued. Including myself. My lawyer friend would love me to say nothing until I have at least two named sources and documentation.” She raises the pen again. “Which is why I need to be specific with you. If you tell me something, and later you’re okay with it being on the record, that changes what I can publish.”
My lungs forget how to draw a full breath. In her mouth, “on the record” doesn’t sound like justice; it sounds like sworn testimony. It sounds like the opposite of all the ways Marcus taught me to speak: suggestive but deniable, heartfelt but vague, honest in tone and evasive in content.
The confession I rehearsed on the drive here curls up like burned paper at the edge of my mind.
Quinn misreads my silence as hesitation about trust. She sets the pad down on the coffee table between us, carefully, like she’s defusing something. “We can start off the record,” she offers. “We can just talk. If there are things you don’t want in the podcast, you say so. I’m not going to trick you.”
“You’re literally recording people’s worst days for a living,” I say, more sharply than I intend.
Her face tightens. She drops onto the couch opposite me, springs squeaking. “I’m recording stories people choose to share,” she says. “That’s the whole point of consent in storytelling. And I’m trying to center the girl who vanished from your show, not blow up your comeback just for drama.”
The phrase hits a bruise. Your comeback. The thing I begged the universe for every night while pretending the mill was a bad dream. The thing holding my mom’s mortgage, my sister’s tuition, half a dozen crew members’ jobs.
“If I talk,” I say slowly, “my entire life evaporates.”
“If you don’t talk, hers already has,” Quinn says, very quietly.
Lila’s Polaroid face flashes in my mind from the wardrobe trailer, eyes locked on mine through old emulsion. My hands start to tremble. I tuck them under my thighs.
“You know it’s me,” I say, before I can stop myself. The words land between us like broken glass. “You came this far without saying my name, but you know.”
Quinn’s eyes flick to the board, then back. “I have a timeline,” she says carefully. “I have your call sheets, early season schedules, clips, fan reports, one anonymous crew member who says they saw a shove. I’m one detailed firsthand account away from being able to say ‘a lead actress on the show’ with enough certainty that every outlet will fill in the blank themselves.”
My chest hollows out. That anonymous PA from the café near the mill, with their shaky voice, leans into the room in my memory.
“I don’t want to do that without your voice,” Quinn adds. “Not because you deserve special treatment, but because context matters. People need to understand how this machine works.”
“You need me to narrate my own trial,” I say.
“I need the truth,” she replies. “And I need it in words I can stand behind when your studio’s lawyers come for me.”
There it is, naked on the table: lawyers, studio, me on one side, Quinn and a girl with a shattered career on the other. The line I pretend doesn’t exist suddenly glows white-hot.
My throat tightens. I swallow hard, counting three heartbeats before I let myself speak again.
“Fine,” I say. “You want truth? The set was a mess. We shot long hours in a condemned building in a river town that didn’t have the infrastructure to support that kind of production. People slipped, they got hurt, they were ignored. The adults in charge cared more about getting the shot than about our bodies.”
Quinn’s pen is back in her fingers, hovering but not moving yet. She watches my face, not the page. “Were you one of the people who got hurt?” she asks.
I let out a short breath that’s almost a laugh, but it sticks halfway out. “Define hurt.”
“Were you on the staircase when Lila fell?” she says, voice soft but steady.
The directness of the question rings in the exposed rafters. For a split second, I’m back there: the cold metal under my hand, the river air wet in my lungs, Lila’s voice slicing into me, my arm moving before my brain.
My instinct is to say yes.
My training is to never say anything that locks me into a frame I can’t spin.
“We were all on that staircase at different points,” I say instead. I hear Marcus in my mouth, and I want to bite my own tongue. “It was practically a character in the show. The mill was a character. You know that.”
Quinn’s jaw shifts. She writes one small word on the pad. I can’t see which.
“I’m not asking about ‘we,’” she says. “I’m asking about you.”
The air feels thicker. My skin prickles under my shirt. I remember Elle’s warning in the wardrobe trailer: if I tell Marcus about the Polaroids without a plan, he’ll spin it into “actress has panic episode.” I imagine headlines: NORA HAYES ADMITS TO PUSHING CO-STAR. I see Rhea’s bewildered face, some future stunt double whose job depends on me staying bankable.
“What are you going to do with my answer?” I ask. “Hypothetically.”
“If you tell me, on the record, that you were on that staircase when a minor co-star fell and the studio covered it up?” Quinn hesitates, then continues. “I would confirm with the PA, talk to your hometown folks, make sure the story aligns, and then… yeah. I’d probably publish. Because that’s the story.”
Every word lands like a small hammer blow. I picture my mother’s hands wringing a dish towel in our Pennsylvania kitchen, my sister scrolling her phone on campus, the security gate at Silverline refusing my entry.
“I can’t do that,” I whisper.
“You can’t tell me,” she says, “or you can’t admit it to yourself?”
I flinch. The question digs under my sternum.
“This isn’t about my self-actualization, Quinn,” I say, voice rising. “This is about me getting sued into a crater while the men who built that deathtrap of a set retire to their houses in Malibu.”
“I’m not saying you should be the only one held accountable,” she says. The pen trembles slightly between her fingers. “I’m saying your silence keeps them safe, too.”
I look up at the tall windows. The glass reflects my face back at me overlaid with the board: my adult features floating over teen stills, over the mill, over the word MISSING printed in fat red ink. I don’t recognize myself in any of them.
“What if,” I say slowly, “instead of me giving you some soundbite confession, I use my platform to support safer sets? I can talk broadly about how toxic that environment was, how we didn’t have the protections kids have now. I can push the studio to fund a safety initiative, donate to unions. I can say, ‘Believe victims,’ on every late-night couch they sit me on.”
Quinn studies me. “Without naming the victim you were closest to,” she says, not quite a question.
Heat crawls up my neck. “I’m trying to do something good without nuking every life connected to this,” I say. “Including hers. Have you thought about what happens to Lila if this becomes a feeding frenzy? If people dig into her trauma for fun? She didn’t consent to that.”
“She didn’t consent to falling off a staircase either,” Quinn replies, voice low. “Nora, I hear you trying to thread a needle here. I really do. But vague statements about toxic sets let everyone feel bad and no one feel responsible.”
“So you won’t take them?” I ask. “You won’t use anything I say unless I hand you my head on a platter?”
“That’s not what I said,” she protests. “If you want to publicly advocate for safer sets, I’ll boost it. I’d love that. I just… I can’t pretend it answers the question I’m investigating. And I can’t promise my listeners won’t connect the dots anyway.”
The loft feels smaller now, like the wardrobe trailer with better lighting. The hum of the computer grows louder. Somebody down on the street leans on their horn; the sound knifes up through the open window.
I stand, too fast. My knees bump the coffee table, rattling the mugs. Coffee sloshes onto a coaster, forming a dark halo.
“I should go,” I say. My own voice sounds far away in my ears. “Call time’s early tomorrow. Big stunt day.”
“Nora.” Quinn rises with me. She doesn’t reach out. “I’m not your enemy.”
“You’re not my friend, either,” I say, before I can soften it. “You’re… a mirror with a microphone.”
Her flinch this time is smaller, more contained. “Then look at what I’m showing you,” she says. “Look at the pattern. Another set, another ‘accident.’ How many times does this have to happen before you decide which side you’re on?”
Her question lands on top of Elle’s warning, on top of the studio lawyer’s script, on top of the PA’s shaking voice. The stack of them tilts in my chest.
“I’ll let you know when I decide,” I manage.
Quinn presses her lips together, then nods once. “If you ever want to talk off-mic, no notes, no publishing,” she says, “I’m still here. Not everything has to be content.”
I don’t trust myself to answer, so I just incline my head and reach for my bag. The leather feels too smooth under my fingers, too expensive for this space of chipped mugs and secondhand furniture.
At the door, I glance back once. The late light throws our reflections against the board again. In the glass of the window, my ghost faces the mill still, tethered by red thread I pretend isn’t there.
On the sidewalk outside, the air smells like exhaust and stale fry oil from the restaurant on the corner. My phone buzzes as I step into the brightness. I check the screen automatically.
It’s tomorrow’s call sheet, pushed by production: SCENE 47 – PLATFORM FALL, STUNT DOUBLE ONLY – STAGE 14. Underneath, Marcus’s text pops up: Big day. Don’t overthink. We’ve got you.
I stare at the words until they blur. Quinn’s question from upstairs chases me down the block, sticky as the mill fog in my lungs.
When the next body hits the floor, I think, nobody will believe I didn’t already have my story straight.