The email lands in my inbox at 7:42 a.m., while the coffee is still dripping through the cheap metal filter on our office kitchen counter.
I stand barefoot on the concrete, chilled from the morning fog that leaks in through the gaps in the loft windows. The kettle hisses where I forgot to move it, and my laptop hums on the big table by the recording booth, screen blinking with a new-message notification.
Subject line: Call sheet – do not ignore.
My stomach tightens. I carry my mug back to the table, sloshing hot coffee onto my wrist. The burn wakes me up better than the caffeine.
The sender field reads “anon_stagehand14@proton.” No name. No signature. Just a single attachment icon and two short lines of body text.
You’re not wrong about the pattern.
Start here.
My fingers leave a faint coffee ring on the trackpad when I click the attachment. A JPEG unfolds to fill the screen: grainy, slightly skewed, but sharp enough to make out the boxes and fonts I know too well.
SILVERLINE STUDIOS – “SECOND CHANCES” – DAY 47 CALL SHEET
Stage: 14.
Location: “Mill Interior Set – Fire Sequence / Platform Fall.”
Date: stamped three days before Rhea died.
I zoom in until pixelation fuzzes the lines. Rhea’s name sits beside mine in the cast list, her character’s designation just below my own. Below that, in the schedule grid, a block of text runs longer than the others, squeezing into the margin.
SC. 42–47B: Platform fall – stunt double (R. SANTOS) – 3:15 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
In the notes column: Due to revised exec schedule, stunt block compressed. All departments stand by. Minimal reset time.
My hand curls tight around the mug. Heat presses into my palm, pins and needles.
I scroll further. At the bottom of the page, in the revision history, a line in red.
REV. 3 – Move SC. 42–47B earlier to accommodate talent press commitment. Reduce rehearsal window.
Talent. I stare at the word until the letters blur. I know who that means. I replay the gossip items about Nora doing a last-minute late-night talk show that week, the hashtags praising her “resilience.”
“Jazz,” I call out, voice rough.
She appears from behind the curtain of the recording booth, blanket wrapped around her shoulders, hair sticking up in every direction. “Please tell me that smell is coffee and not the AC dying.”
“Both,” I say. The unit in the corner rattles, pushing cool air around the room with a faint chemical tang. “Come look at this.”
She pads over, eyes still half-closed, and leans down beside me. Her breath smells like toothpaste and the gummy vitamins she forgets to chew half the time.
“Is that…?” She squints. “Shit. That’s the day, isn’t it?”
I nod. “Someone sent it an hour ago.”
Jazz reads the red note, then straightens so fast the blanket slips off her shoulders. “They compressed a high-platform fall to make room for press?”
“That’s what it says.”
Her hands flatten on the table. “You have to blur the sender before you show this on socials. But you have to show it.”
I drag the image into a new folder, fingers moving on autopilot while my brain starts rearranging episode outlines. Paper rustles on the corkboard behind us where I tacked up the mill shooting schedule last month. Pennsylvania. Rhea died in LA, but the same obsession with timelines hums under both documents like a low-grade infection.
“Before I do anything,” I say, “I need context. If I misread this, I’ll get sued into the earth’s mantle.”
“Then call someone who knows,” Jazz says. “You still have Carla’s card, right? Stunt union?”
I picture the woman from the union hall, the one who cornered me after our last live show and thanked me for not treating stunt work like a fun trivia category. The one who said, If you ever want to talk about the invisible injuries, call me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
I pull my phone out of my pocket. The screen reflects my face back at me in miniature, framed by the loft windows and the gray wash of the morning sky.
Glass never looks away.
Carla meets me at a diner in Burbank that everyone pretends is quaint and ironic, even though the coffee is genuinely good and the pancakes are bigger than my laptop.
The place buzzes with low conversation, clinks of cutlery, the hiss of the griddle. The air smells like frying butter, maple syrup, and the faint metallic undertone of old coffee pots that have seen too many refills. At the next table, a crew of grips argues good-naturedly about playoff odds.
Carla sits across from me in a faded union T-shirt, denim jacket thrown over the booth seat. Her hair is braided back tight. Sunglasses rest on the table beside her phone.
“You recording?” she asks.
I hold up my small handheld mic, the one that fits in my palm. “Only if you say yes. We can do this off the record first.”
She snorts. “In my world, off the record means someone’s about to screw you harder. Hit record.”
I press the button. The little light glows red. I set the mic between us, next to the sweating glass of iced tea the waitress just dropped off.
“Okay,” I say. “For the tape, can you state your name and role?”
“Carla Ruiz,” she says. “Stunt coordinator on smaller shows, safety consultant sometimes, but I’m here today as a rep for Local 683.”
Her voice holds steady anger even before I slide the printed call sheet across the table.
“I received this from an anonymous source inside the ‘Second Chances’ production,” I say. “I verified the date matches the day of Rhea Santos’s fatal stunt, along with stage and scene numbers. I’ve blacked out some contact info. Can you walk me through what you see?”
Carla dries her fingers on a napkin and pulls the page closer. Her eyes skip down the grid. Her mouth tightens.
“First thing,” she says, tapping the stunt block, “they scheduled this fall late in the day instead of first up. That’s not illegal on its own, but it reduces the buffer for resets and adjustments. Then here’s the fun part—” her finger slides to the revision note “—they moved it earlier.”
“Which sounds safer, right?” I ask, playing devil’s advocate for the listeners I know will be in my DMs later.
“If they moved it to the top of the day with rehearsal and a full-spec safety meeting, sure,” she says. “That’s not what this says. This says they moved it earlier while also reducing rehearsal. That means departments scramble to catch up. Fewer run-throughs, more things that ‘have to’ go right on the first try.”
The waitress refills my coffee. The steam fogs my glasses for a second. When it clears, I notice Carla’s hand shaking slightly around the mug.
“And this note?” I ask. “‘To accommodate talent press commitment.’”
Carla exhales through her nose. “Translation: somebody higher up the call sheet had a talk show or photo shoot that couldn’t move. The rest of us get Tetris’d around that.”
“Nora,” I say quietly. The name tastes bitter in my mouth.
Carla lifts one shoulder. “Could be her. Could be an EP, a director, whoever. The point is, they built the day around a face, not a body hitting the ground.”
I take a breath. “I want to be careful not to imply Nora personally asked anyone to cut corners.”
“Good,” she says. “Because stunts don’t get rushed without sign-off from multiple departments. ADs, producers, sometimes the network. That’s the whole problem. Responsibility dissolves into the group.”
“But someone moved the block,” I say. “Someone wrote this red note.”
“And whoever leaked this is telling you they’re tired of pretending it was an unforeseeable tragedy,” Carla replies. She taps the call sheet again. “You don’t get a girl falling to her death out of nowhere. You get there through a thousand little decisions like this one. Everyone hoping they’ll be lucky. This time, they weren’t.”
A sizzle from the kitchen cuts through her words, fat hitting hot metal. I flash on Rhea’s body hitting the pad, the wrong sound under it, the way the crowd around Nora swallowed their gasps because cameras were still rolling.
“We’ve been talking on the show about patterns,” I say. “Missing episodes from ‘River’s Edge High,’ injuries at that old mill in Pennsylvania, now a death on Stage 14. To you, does this look like part of systemic pressure for dangerous work?”
Carla leans back, considering. The vinyl seat creaks.
“Hollywood lives on the illusion of safety,” she says. “NDAs, crisis PR, carefully worded apologies. Meanwhile, crew work eighteen-hour days under lights that fry your brain, with fake smoke in your lungs and sugar-glass cuts on your arms. People hear about the one big accident and call it cursed. I call it math. If you keep ignoring warnings, you don’t just hurt one Lila or one Rhea. You keep hurting people who don’t have Nora’s lawyer on speed dial.”
I swallow a mouthful of too-hot coffee to keep my voice steady. The metallic tang of the diner’s spoon presses against my tongue.
“What would justice look like to you?” I ask. “Beyond one lawsuit, one donation?”
Carla looks down at the call sheet, at the smudged edges where my printer stuttered.
“Transparency,” she says. “Real power for workers to halt unsafe shoots without killing their careers. Public records of safety violations. And stars using their leverage to demand that. Not just posting tributes after the funeral.”
Her eyes meet mine. “Including the ones who didn’t swing the wrench but benefited from the machine.”
I think of Nora, of my framed autograph from her early sitcom days under the loft’s windows, of her tight smile in recent paparazzi shots leaving the hospital, the memorial. The glass in those photos reflects camera flashes like tiny explosions.
“If I air this,” I say, “it puts pressure on everyone, not just the studio. She’ll get backlash too.”
“Maybe that’s her wake-up call,” Carla says. “Or maybe it crushes her. That’s not your part. Your part is telling the truth without inventing facts. You show the paper, you let people see the math.”
The recorder’s light blinks red between us, catching a glint in Carla’s eyes.
“You know they’ll come after you,” I say.
Her mouth quirks. “I’ve taken worse hits.”
I spend the afternoon under the loft’s humming AC, cutting Carla’s interview down to its sharpest edges.
The chemical smell from the unit blends with the burnt dust of overworked electronics and the sweet residue of the donut I stress-ate two hours ago. The city outside has shifted from gray to bright, light pouring through the high windows and bouncing off Jazz’s color-coded index cards on the wall.
I script my intro on my laptop, deleting every sentence that sounds like I’m chasing clout. My voice on the mic needs to walk a tightrope between anger and accuracy.
“Okay,” I say, testing levels. The headphones press my ears, muting the world to the soft hiss of the room. “This is Quinn Hart, and you’re listening to ‘Second Take.’ Today’s episode covers a death on a set many of you know from headlines and hashtags.”
I pause, listening back. My heartbeat thuds in the gap.
“Try that again,” Jazz calls from the couch, where she’s scrolling through a feed of stunt performers posting black squares with Rhea’s name in bold white font. “Less news anchor, more you.”
I roll my shoulders, blow out air.
“I’m Quinn,” I say into the mic. “You already know I grew up loving shows like ‘River’s Edge High’ and building my personality around fictional teens surviving impossible situations. Today, I need to talk about a real person who didn’t survive a situation that should have been possible to make safe.”
Better. My throat tightens in a useful way.
I weave the narrative: a brief recap of the mill, Lila’s vanished episodes, the anonymous PA who talked about a shove and blood on a railing. Then I bring in the call sheet.
“An anonymous crew member from the ‘Second Chances’ set sent me this document,” I say. My finger traces the printed page on the table, even though listeners can’t see it. “It’s the call sheet from the day stunt performer Rhea Santos died on Stage 14. This isn’t gossip. This is the schedule they were given, with the stunt block for her fatal fall compressed to less than an hour, moved to make room for a ‘talent press commitment.’”
Carla’s voice follows, explaining the red flags. I let the silence sit after her last line about math and luck.
“We’re not saying one actor dictated these choices,” I say, careful. “We are saying that a system built to protect stars and profits created conditions where the people who take the hits could not safely push back. And that system has been touching Nora Hayes’s life since she was a teenager in a damp Pennsylvania mill that never left the rumor mill.”
I wince at my own wordplay and keep it anyway. People remember lines when they have teeth.
We close the episode with a call to action: links to stunt safety funds, union resources, a request for more anonymous tips from anyone who worked at the mill or on Stage 14. I stop short of naming Nora as anything more than the most visible face connecting these sets, but the implication hangs in the air like studio fog.
When I finish editing, the sun has dropped low enough that the LA hills are washed in gold through the windows. Car windshields glint on the freeway far below, a slow-moving river of light.
“You ready?” Jazz asks, hovering her finger over the “Publish” button on our hosting dashboard.
My stomach flips. I remember Nora on my couch, feet tucked under her, eyes flicking from my board of red string to my mic. The way she hedged when I mentioned going on the record. The way she looked at the photo of Lila at the mill and went quiet.
“We can’t not run it,” I say. “Rhea deserves more than a press release.”
“Then we run it,” Jazz replies.
She taps the trackpad. The episode goes from draft to live in less than a second.
The first push notifications hit before I can refill my coffee.
Our podcast app pings: 10,000 downloads in the first ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty. Twitter—sorry, X, though I refuse to call it that out loud—lights up with mentions.
I sit on the thrifted couch by the window, laptop balanced on my knees, the fabric scratchy against my bare calves. The city outside has turned into a scatter of lights on glass towers, each one a tiny promise of someone else’s story.
On screen, a wave of new hashtags climbs my feed.
#JusticeForRhea
#ProtectStuntWorkers
#MillToStage14
#WhoHurtLila
Clips from earlier episodes circulate again, listeners overlaying my audio about the abandoned mill onto stills from Nora’s new show. Someone edits together three images: teenage Lila on the rusted Pennsylvania staircase, a recent paparazzi shot of Nora leaving the memorial, and a stunt still of Rhea mid-fall, all separated by vertical glass cracks.
The caption reads: Same story, new bodies.
“Jesus,” Jazz murmurs from her own corner of the couch, scrolling on her phone. “They’re fast.”
A notification pops up from a fan account that has been following our series since the start.
@RiverEdgeTruthers: If studio buried what happened to Lila, what else did they bury? Whoever hurt Lila is still hurting people. #JusticeForRhea #NoraHayes
My chest tightens. I rub at the knot between my eyes. The loft feels smaller, wires and foam panels closing in.
I type a reply, then delete it.
“They’re making her the villain,” I say.
“She benefits from the system,” Jazz answers. “People are allowed to notice patterns.”
“Not the same as knowing what actually happened that night,” I say. “I keep thinking about the girl who wrote me fan mail from a dorm room because Nora’s old show got her through high school. I’m talking about a structure, and the internet hears ‘witch hunt.’”
Another notification: a DM request from an account with no avatar, just a default gray silhouette.
You’re getting warmer. Check who approved the call sheet changes at the mill, too. The names repeat.
The message sends a little electric shiver through my fingers. The mill again. Always the mill.
“You okay?” Jazz asks.
I scroll back to the tweet that started my pulse racing. Whoever hurt Lila is still hurting people. The words sit on my screen, superimposed over Nora’s face in someone’s fan edit.
“I don’t know,” I say.
In the glass of the loft window, my reflection floats over the twinkling city—headphones still around my neck, laptop glow ghosting my features. Behind me, the corkboard holds the mill photo, the call sheet, Nora’s press shots, all bound together in red string.
I lean my forehead against the cool pane, watching my breath fog a small circle.
I wanted transparency. Now the whole world is pressing its face against the glass of Nora’s life, breath clouding the view, fingers tapping for cracks.
My phone buzzes in my hand.
It’s Nora’s name on the screen.
I stare at it while the call rings through, the episode still autoplaying in the background, my own voice asking where accountability ends and exploitation begins.
I let it go to voicemail, my thumb hovering over the screen, and wonder who I’ll be to her the next time I pick up.