I stare at the blinking cursor until my eyes sting.
The document on my laptop is already a graveyard of deleted intros. The Google Docs version history could be its own episode: a tangled archive of half-confessions, legal hedges, and three separate attempts at making a joke about red string that I keep killing in cold blood.
Jazz’s old diner mug sweats beside the keyboard, the coffee inside long gone bitter and lukewarm. The loft smells like burnt beans, dust, and the faint citrus of the cheap cleaning spray we use when guests come over. Outside, downtown traffic hums, a lower, more human cousin to the air-conditioning unit rattling in the window, fighting the LA heat.
On the corkboard in front of me, the story looks clean. The printout of the mill squats in the center: red-brick shell, river fog curling around it, windows punched out like missing teeth. Above it, the PA’s anonymized statement. To the left, a blurry still of teenage Lila leaning on a rusted stair rail. To the right, a press photo of Nora under flawless studio lighting, green juice in hand, smile calibrated to look uncalibrated.
On my screen, nothing is clean.
At the top of the doc, I’ve typed, deleted, and retyped the first sentence six times.
“This is not an exposé of Nora Hayes.” Delete.
“Today I want to talk about a girl Hollywood forgot.” Delete.
“What happens when a missing extra collides with America’s sweetheart?” Hard delete, empty trash, salt the earth.
I chew the inside of my cheek, tasting iron.
“Just say her name,” I mutter.
My own voice sounds too loud in the loft. Jazz left an hour ago with a “Text me when you either publish or chicken out,” leaving me alone with the high ceilings, the sagging couch, and the quiet throb of our ancient fridge.
I scroll down to the outline. I’ve color-coded it in a panic: blue for Lila, yellow for Nora, gray for “system.” Gray dominates the page. On the corkboard, too, the gray stuff takes up the most space: production schedules, budget notes, safety memos, screenshots of network statements.
Lila gets one grainy headshot and a hospital intake form with most of the details blacked out.
Nora gets entire shelves of the internet.
I rub my eyes, then force my hands back to the keys.
“Okay,” I say. “Begin at the beginning.”
My fingers move.
When I first talked about the missing girl from ‘River’s Edge High,’ I promised you I wasn’t interested in a witch hunt. I’m still not.
I stop, breathe, then keep going, chasing the rhythm I know my listeners recognize.
If you’re here for a clean story with a perfect villain and a perfect victim, today’s episode is going to disappoint you.
Under that, I start listing what we’ve done: the anonymous PA at the roadside café who stared at their hands while describing blood on a railing, the diner in Nora’s hometown where the gossip came refilled with every cup of bottomless coffee, the fans who sent old convention photos labeled “Lila Park” before her name vanished from credits. The mill itself, the way the fog clung to the river and turned the factory into a ghost leaning over the water.
My hands remember the chill from that trip, even in this sticky LA heat. The way the air in the river town tasted like wet metal and fried onions, so different from the clean chemical tang of fake fog on a soundstage.
I type:
We verified an unreported on-set injury at a riverside textile mill in Pennsylvania. We matched that to a pattern of unsafe working conditions and rushed schedules that echo what we’ve seen more recently on the set of ‘Second Chances.’
I pause, the letters swimming.
The next line is where the yellow and blue threads meet.
I rest my fingers over N.
“You don’t have to,” I hear Jazz’s voice in my head, from earlier. “You could just… leave her name out. People will connect the dots.”
“That’s worse,” I’d told her. “Then she can say it’s a blind item. Or I’m talking about someone else. Or I’m hiding behind a wink.”
“You sure you’re not hiding behind the law?” she’d asked.
I’d laughed, sharp. “My lawyer brain is a rotting degree under a pile of student loan bills. I’m not clever enough to hide behind it.”
“Then be clear and be fair,” she’d said. “And be ready.”
Now, alone, I breathe in the smell of coffee and old cables and force my fingers down.
Multiple sources, including a former production assistant who was present that night, identified the actress arguing with Lila Park on the staircase just before the fall as Nora Elise Hayes.
The sentence glows on the screen, too bright.
I read it three times, listening for imbalance. I add qualifiers like sandbags: allegedly, reportedly, according to. I take half of them out again; they start to sound like excuses.
Next, I type the caveats, the parts my therapist would call “context” and my journalism professor would call “due diligence.”
This is not a criminal conviction. Juvenile records are sealed, and powerful people have done their best to blur this story into oblivion. But the pattern is important: when a young actress suffered a serious injury amid safety concerns, the production closed ranks, and the show went on without her. That’s the story, more than one name.
My stomach tightens. I reread the paragraph, then scroll to the top and add a new line to the intro.
Before we begin: please remember there are real people behind these headlines, including those who may have caused harm and are now hearing their own names out loud for the first time in years. Protect your empathy as fiercely as you protect your outrage.
I’m not sure who I’m talking to—my listeners, or myself.
I copy the doc into our episode notes template, smoothing out transitions, cutting any sentence that smells like a punchline. When I get to the section about Nora’s early career, I strip out all mention of crushes, posters, parasocial teenage me.
This isn’t about what she meant to me anymore.
This is about what she did to someone else.
The AC coughs and then settles into a deeper hum. The loft’s one small window reflects my hunched shape back at me in the dark glass, laptop glow turning me into a ghost above the street.
“Okay,” I say to my reflection. “Time to stop hiding behind drafts.”
I pick up my notebook, scribble the timecode outline on the first page, and head for the tiny recording booth in the corner.
Inside the booth, the air is warmer, heavy with the layered breath of a hundred past sessions.
Foam panels line the walls, gray and egg-carton ugly, swallowing sound. The smell in here is its own ecosystem: hot dust from the old lamp, synthetic leather from the chair, the faint sweetness of the donut Jazz ate earlier, still lingering in the trash beneath the desk.
I sit, adjust the mic arm until the pop filter hovers a few inches from my mouth, and put on my headphones. The world shrinks to the tight circle of light around my script and the low hiss of the preamp.
“New session,” I murmur, watching the waveform window spring open on the screen. I name the file before I can overthink it: Missing Girl Part Three – Naming Names.
My finger hovers over the spacebar.
“You can still decide not to do this,” I whisper.
My hand presses down anyway.
The red light blinks on.
For a moment, all I hear is the wet click of my own swallow.
“Hey everyone,” I start, voice thinner than usual. I stop, cough, clear my throat, and try again. “Hey everyone, it’s Quinn. Before we get into today’s episode, I want you to take a breath with me.”
I inhale, audible in the headphones, and hold it for three seconds, then let it out. A practiced yoga teacher tone tries to elbow its way in; I push it back and let the exhale come out shaky.
“Okay,” I say. “This one’s heavy.”
I move through the intro the way I wrote it twenty minutes ago, each sentence a stone I laid for myself. I talk about patterns in the industry: the way sets run on invisible labor, from PAs to stunt doubles, the way safety becomes a line item instead of a non-negotiable. I invoke Rhea’s fall, the taped-over emergency stop, the way the river town mill was treated like just another moody location instead of a building with a history of near-misses.
I read the anonymized PA’s quote, voice softening around each word.
“I heard a shove,” I quote. “Then I heard a body hit metal, and then… I heard everyone agree it was a slip.”
My hand curls into a fist on my thigh.
I glance at the doc, at the line where blue and yellow meet.
“We verified that statement with multiple sources in Nora Hayes’s hometown,” I say, pulse drumming in my ears. “People who remember the night the mill set went dark and a young actress left town in an ambulance, not a limo. And here’s where we have to talk about names.”
My tongue goes dry.
I pause, lean back, and take a sip from the water bottle I dragged in, the plastic crinkling in my grip. The water tastes faintly metallic, picking up something from the cheap bottle.
“There is a young woman at the center of this story,” I say, putting the bottle down carefully. “Her name is Lila Park. She’s the one whose body hit those stairs. She’s the one who lived with the aftermath, while the show recast, rewrote, and moved on.”
I let that sit for a beat, listening to the sound of my own breathing in the headphones.
“And,” I say, “there is another young woman whose name has been attached to this story in whispers for years, but never out loud.”
I can hear my heart on the recording now, knocking away inside my ribs.
“According to multiple independent sources,” I say slowly, “the actress arguing with Lila on that staircase—minutes before the fall—was Nora Elise Hayes, then sixteen and already the breakout face of ‘River’s Edge High.’”
The name lands in the air like a dropped plate.
I keep going, before I can flinch.
“We do not know exactly what happened between those two girls in those seconds,” I say. “We know there was an argument about safety and lines and power. We know one girl ended up on the ground. We know the official story framed it as a tragic accident. And we know that the actress whose body broke that day disappeared from credits, while the one who walked away became the woman on your screens now, starring in ‘Second Chances.’”
My voice steadies as I move into analysis, the muscle memory of interviews and media criticism kicking in. I talk about systems: fixers, NDAs, the way glass-and-steel offices in Los Angeles make phone calls that ripple back to damp river towns, rewriting what happened on those wet metal stairs.
I remind listeners that loving someone’s work doesn’t mean ignoring who was hurt to create it. I caution against dogpiling, against harassment, against painting Nora as a cartoon villain.
“If you’re looking for a pitchfork,” I say, “this podcast is the wrong place. I’m not asking you to cancel Nora Hayes. I’m asking you to widen the frame. When you watch her, remember the girl the credits forgot.”
I describe Lila’s attempts, according to the PA and our diner sources, to speak up before the fall: asking for harnesses, questioning overtime, threatening to talk to a local reporter. I describe how quickly those concerns evaporated from the narrative once she left.
“The story we’re telling today isn’t about whether one teenager pushed another,” I say, even as every part of the story is precisely that. “It’s about what an entire industry does when something breaks—and who they decide is worth patching.”
By the time I reach the outro, my mouth tastes like cotton and regret.
“If you have information about what happened at that mill or on the set of ‘Second Chances,’” I say, reading the familiar line, “our anonymous tip line is still open. Links in the show notes.”
I sit very still for three full seconds before hitting spacebar.
The red light dies.
The room expands again, letting in the hum of the AC, a siren wailing three blocks over, the faint bass of someone’s car rolling past. My hands shake when I remove the headphones. Sweat has pooled under the band, dampening my hairline.
“You did it,” I whisper to the empty booth.
And then, quieter: “What did you just do.”
The export wheel spins on my laptop, a small blue halo of doom.
Jazz reappears from the kitchen, chewing the last bite of a donut. Powdered sugar dusts the corner of her mouth.
“How’d it go?” she asks, voice gentle in a way that makes my chest tighten.
“I didn’t puke,” I say. “So, you know. Success.”
“You said it?” she asks. “Her name?”
I nod. “In full. With the middle name and everything. In the boring responsible way, not the exposé trailer way.”
“Can I hear?” she asks.
I slide the laptop toward her, hit play, and watch her face instead of the waveform. At the moment I say “Nora Elise Hayes,” her eyes flick up to mine, searching. She doesn’t stop the playback.
When the outro fades, she presses spacebar.
“You were careful,” she says. “You anchored it in Lila. You named systems. You didn’t speculate about anything you don’t have.”
“Did I ruin her life?” I ask, throat tight.
“I think her life was already… complicated,” she says. “You shone a light on part of why. That’s not the same as pushing her off a staircase.”
The word pushing pricks the air.
I open the publishing dashboard before I can spiral. Our hosting platform greets me with familiar boxes: title, description, tags. I paste in my copy, fingers moving on autopilot. For the episode art, I choose the anonymous shot of the mill against the river, fog curling at its feet. No faces.
The cursor hovers over “publish.”
“Once I click this,” I say, “there’s no… un-click.”
“You can schedule it,” Jazz suggests. “Give Future You the honor.”
I glance at the system clock. It’s late afternoon; LA sunlight slants through the loft window, turning floating dust into glitter. On the other side of that glass, billboards for Nora’s show stare down from buildings, her face thirty feet high, backlit against a digitally perfected sky.
“We always drop on Tuesdays,” I say. “They’ll notice if we skip.”
Jazz squeezes my shoulder. “Then drop on Tuesday,” she says. “And be ready for Wednesday.”
My finger presses the trackpad.
Episode will publish in 00:05:00.
The countdown clock starts.
We watch it tick in silence, the number shrinking by seconds that feel both cheap and terrifyingly expensive.
At zero, the page refreshes. Live.
My phone buzzes before I can pocket it. First, a push from our own app: “The Missing Girl, Part 3 – Naming Names” is now available. Then, a DM from a long-time listener: “You dropped early???”
Jazz grins, nervous. “Here we go.”
The first half hour is the usual rush: tweets, quote-tweets, a Discord channel lighting up with theories and appreciation. People latch onto the nuance, the context. Someone posts a thread about stunt safety standards with links, bless them.
For a moment, I let myself believe the glass can hold. That we threaded the needle.
Then my phone buzzes with a different vibration: news alert.
I swipe it open.
STREAMLINE: Did Nora Hayes Push Her Co-Star Down the Stairs? A New Podcast Says Maybe.
The thumbnail is a still of Nora laughing on that talk show, couch body language open, green juice joke mid-sip. Underneath, in smaller font, our show’s cover art.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I breathe.
Jazz leans in. “That was fast.”
Another notification arrives from a gossip aggregator with a pastel palette: “Podcast Host Hints Beloved Actress Hid ‘Violent Incident’ in Teen Years 👀” The caption under the embedded player reads: “TW: assault?” with a question mark like a shrug.
I click through in a reflex I’ll regret.
The article has pulled exactly two quotes from the forty-eight-minute episode: “Nora Elise Hayes” and “one teenager pushed another,” snipped from different paragraphs and Frankensteined into a sentence I never said.
My own carefully worded caveats are nowhere to be seen.
“They’re not wrong that you said her name,” Jazz points out quietly. “They’re just… rearranging.”
The refresh spiral begins. Every time I blink, a new headline pops up.
“Did Nora Hayes Push Lila Park?”
“River’s Edge ‘Missing Girl’ Finally Identified—And Fans Are Shook.”
“Five Times Nora Hinted At A Dark Past In Interviews 👇🏼”
The last one stitches together out-of-context clips: Nora joking about being a “menace” as a teen, Nora teasing a “mysterious incident” she’d “take to the grave.” Each video loops with ominous music layered underneath.
My chest tightens. The loft feels smaller, the foam walls of the booth leaking into the main space.
Comments start flooding our mentions.
“Quinn you just ended a woman’s career, hope you’re happy.”
“Thank you for finally saying what everyone knew.”
“This is going to get you sued lol.”
One DM catches my eye before I can look away.
I hope your address is protected, bitch.
My fingers go cold around the phone.
Jazz sees my face and reaches for the device. “Report and block,” she says. “That’s what the buttons are for.”
I nod, muscle memory taking over for the motions: tap, select, submit. The platform thanks me for keeping the community safe with a cheerful animation.
Across the room, the window reflects my hunched figure and the bright little screens multiplying Nora’s name in ten different fonts, over ten different images of glass awards, red carpets, and the river-town mill.
“I didn’t want it to be about her,” I say, voice thin. “I wanted it to be about the girl on the stairs. About… the pattern.”
“It is,” Jazz says. “To the people who actually listen.”
“And to everyone else?” I ask.
We both look at my phone as another headline pops up, this one from a business site: “Streaming Darling Faces New Allegations—What It Means For Silverline’s Stock.”
The loft’s AC groans, struggling to keep up with the heat. My skin feels both chilled and sticky, goosebumps rising under the cotton of my shirt.
“I just turned her into content,” I say, thinking of Lila, of the river fog, of the cold metal tang that crept into my mouth when I stood where she fell. “Both of them.”
Jazz doesn’t answer right away. She walks to the corkboard, studies the overlapping photos, then turns back.
“You amplified someone who wasn’t supposed to exist,” she says. “That doesn’t erase the harm. But it’s not nothing.”
The words land and slide around, refusing to settle.
My phone buzzes again, more insistently.
This time it’s an email notification from a brand rep: subject line “Episode 3 Concerns—Need To Chat.” Right under it, a text from an unknown LA number.
Quinn Hart, this is Marcus Hale. We need to talk about your latest episode.
My stomach drops. The loft suddenly feels made of glass: thin walls, big windows, everything on display.
For a second, I picture Nora on some glossy set, bathed in artificial light, phone in hand, watching the same headlines stack up. I wonder whose voices she’s hearing in her head—mine, Lila’s, or the lawyers’.
Jazz touches my elbow.
“You don’t have to answer right away,” she says. “You can breathe first.”
I grip the edge of the desk, knuckles whitening against the wood.
My episode asked listeners to widen the frame. The media just snapped it back to a single question.
I stare at Marcus’s text, at the subject line blinking in my inbox, and at my own face reflected in the dark window above my laptop.
The next move is mine.
And for the first time since I hit publish, I don’t know whether pressing “record” again will fix anything—or just add another pane of glass for the world to throw stones at.