I don’t wait for another anonymous email.
I wait for her.
The lower level of the studio lot smells like exhaust and reheated craft-service food, a stale mix of gasoline and sugar. My sneakers squeak faintly on concrete as I pace between two pillars painted with yellow safety stripes that haven’t kept anyone safe. Overhead, the fluorescents buzz, giving everything a greenish hospital tint.
Elle’s car is parked three spaces down from where Marcus stood in the video. Same level. Same echo chamber. The symmetry scratches at my nerves.
I check my phone for the hundredth time. The home screen stares back: my face from some old red carpet, all lacquered hair and careful smile. Headlines sit just a tap away, accusing and defending in equal measure. I lock the screen and stuff the phone into my pocket like I can shove the whole internet out of sight.
Footsteps approach, brisk and unhurried. I recognize the rhythm before I see her. On set she walks like someone who knows where the cables are; never a wasted step.
She rounds the corner, gym bag over one shoulder, clipboard tucked under her arm. Her hair is twisted into that tight knot at the base of her skull I’ve seen all season, not a strand escaping. Big utilitarian glasses sit on her nose, the kind executives forget to look past.
“Elle,” I call.
My voice bounces off the concrete harder than I intend. She stops, eyes flicking to my face, to my posture, to the fact that I’m blocking what used to be her clean path to the car.
“Nora,” she says. “You’re still here late.”
“We need to talk.”
“We’ve had several safety meetings already,” she says lightly. “I can put anything else in my report.”
“I’m not talking about safety meetings,” I say. “I’m talking about the garage.”
Her gaze slides to my pocket. The silence stretches just long enough to confirm what I already know.
“Marcus sends you security footage now?” she asks.
“He doesn’t know I have it,” I say. “You sent it.”
“That’s a lot of assumptions,” she says, echoing herself from the video.
Heat climbs the back of my neck. “He threatened you in my name. You think I don’t get a say in that?”
“Marcus Hale threatened me for Marcus Hale’s reasons,” she says. “You’re just the asset he’s protecting.”
“I’m not an asset, I’m—” I shut my mouth. I don’t even know what word I was going to pick. Victim? Perpetrator? Product?
Her eyes soften for a microsecond, then smooth again. “You’re angry,” she says. “That’s good. Anger’s a beginning.”
“I watched him offer you hush money,” I say. My fingers tighten around my phone until the edges bite my palm. “I watched him tell you my truth would kill me. I watched you say my name to him like—like a weapon. So yeah, I’m angry.”
“At him?” she asks. “Or at me?”
“At this,” I snap, gesturing uselessly around the garage. “At… at accidents that aren’t accidents. At podcasts dissecting a night none of you were there for. At anonymous emails. At the fact that people keep getting hurt around me and you’re right there every time with your clipboard and your calm face.”
Her jaw ticks once. “And you think I’m doing that,” she says.
“I think you know more than you admit,” I say. “And I think you are very deliberately poking at a wound I’m already bleeding out of in public. So I’m asking you, professionally, personally, whatever you want to call it—what do you want from me?”
The question hangs between us, louder than my voice.
A car engine turns over somewhere above, muffled. Off in the distance, the hum of Stage Fourteen’s air conditioning leaks out of a door propped on a wedge, carrying the faint chemical tang of fake smoke. I smell it and my stomach clenches, remembering flames that went too high.
Elle shifts the gym bag off her shoulder and sets it on the ground. The gesture is precise, unhurried. She takes off the clipboard, rests it on the hood of her car, smoothing a corner.
“Are we doing this here?” she asks.
“We’re already doing it,” I say.
She studies my face for a long beat, then exhales through her nose like she’s bracing for impact.
“Fine,” she says. “Then you should actually see me.”
She reaches up and slides her glasses off.
My breath stops. Without the frames, her eyes look larger, younger. The high fluorescent light catches the faint, silvery notch at the edge of her right eyebrow. I know that notch; my hand put it there when I shoved her into a rusted rail.
She pulls a few pins from her knot and her hair spills down around her shoulders in a dark, heavy curtain. On set she always keeps it tucked away, professional, forgettable. Loose, it frames her cheekbones differently, changes the line of her jaw.
And suddenly I’m seventeen again, soaked in fog on the mill staircase, arguing with a girl whose face wouldn’t leave my nightmares.
“No,” I say, but it comes out air.
She tilts her head, gives a small, humorless smile that lives in only one corner of her mouth.
“Hi, Nora,” she says softly. “It’s been a long time.”
The garage tilts under me.
I grab the nearest concrete pillar to steady myself, the rough paint scraping my fingertips. Cold shoots up through my palm, metal under Pennsylvania fog layered over rebar under Los Angeles concrete.
“Say it,” she prompts.
My throat feels full of ground glass.
“Lila,” I whisper.
The name tastes like rust and river water.
She nods once. “There you go,” she says. “You do remember.”
My chest squeezes so tight I can’t tell if I’m breathing. “You—you died,” I say. “They told me you left. That you faked—no, that’s wrong, that’s the fandom theory, they said you—”
The memories I’ve edited for a decade crash into each other. Contracts in manila envelopes. Marcus’s careful phrases. “Creative differences.” “Family reasons.” “She needed a break.”
“They said a lot of things,” she says. “Most of them to you. None of them to me.”
“You were in the hospital,” I blurt. “I just—then you were gone and they told me I couldn’t—” I clamp my teeth shut before I confess how readily I let them redirect me to work.
Her gaze doesn’t waver. “You’re not the only one who got a rewrite,” she says.
I swallow hard and the air tastes like exhaust. “How—how are you here?” I ask. “How are you—on my set, in my life, calling yourself Elle—”
“Elle is my legal name now,” she says. “Park stayed convenient. There are a lot of Parks in the system. Lila was the one who wouldn’t behave. So she had to go.”
The way she says it makes my skin crawl.
“After the fall,” she continues, “they took me to a hospital two towns over so the local papers wouldn’t connect it to the mill. I woke up with my jaw wired shut and a metal plate in my back. My mother had to sign paperwork she couldn’t read without a translator, because the studio lawyer didn’t want to pay for one.”
She pauses, letting the images build instead of speeding through them. I picture a fluorescent-lit room like this one, but with beeping machines and white sheets instead of car oil and yellow lines.
“Three surgeries over two years,” she says. “Physical therapy in a strip mall next to a nail salon. Every time the weather changed, my spine lit up like someone stuck a knife in a socket. Casting directors really love that sort of medical history on a teen actress.”
“Stop,” I say. The word scrapes.
“You asked,” she says.
I did. I’m the one who cornered her.
“They sent a man who looked a lot like Marcus,” she goes on. “Different suit, different haircut. Same job. He explained how delicate the situation was. The show was new. Investors were nervous. They could help with bills, he said, as long as my mother agreed that what happened was an accident. No negligence. No unsafe conditions. No mention of the girl who pushed me on a staircase with a broken railing.”
My hand tightens on the pillar until I can’t feel my fingers.
“He used the phrase ‘misstep,’” she adds. “I remember that. He said we all had to move forward. So we moved. Out of town, because the crew gossip made it to my father’s plant and he lost his job over the distraction. My brother dropped out of school to work nights. I learned to walk without looking like I hurt so casting rooms wouldn’t smell weakness.”
“They didn’t tell me any of that,” I say. My voice sounds small in the concrete echo.
“They told you enough,” she says. “They told you the story that would keep you working. You understood the rest.”
She isn’t wrong. I remember the way I swallowed my questions because questions sounded like guilt.
“So you changed your name,” I say. “You came back as—”
“As someone whose pain could be useful,” she says. “I went into stunts and intimacy coordination because no one protected me. I became the person little versions of us should have had on that set.”
I think of her on Stage Fourteen, standing between a director and a nervous extra, insisting on rehearsals, on crash pads, on safe words. I thought it was professionalism. It was also a haunting.
“And the accidents?” I ask. I force myself to meet her eyes. “The sandbag, the fire drill, the taped emergency stop—Rhea—”
Her jaw tightens. For the first time since I stopped her, her composure cracks enough for something hot to flicker through.
“I flagged every hazard those people ignored,” she says. “The difference is, this time when they waved me off, I didn’t just file it away and pray. I nudged.”
“You cut that rope, didn’t you,” I say.
She doesn’t flinch. “I knew they wouldn’t have signed off on that rig if it couldn’t take a failure,” she says. “I wanted them scared, not dead. I wanted you back on a staircase with your heart in your throat, remembering what a body looks like when it falls.”
“That extra went to the hospital,” I say.
“And got better compensation than I ever did,” she replies.
The words land like a slap. She doesn’t smile when she says it.
“The fire?” I ask. “The emergency stop taped over?”
“I taped it,” she says. “After I told them the system needed another inspection. I watched the AD roll his eyes. I knew they’d run it hot. I also knew there was a manual override.”
“People could have died,” I say.
“People did die,” she shoots back. “Just not on their watch, not on camera. You forget that part because they let you.”
“Rhea,” I say, voice breaking on the name. “What about Rhea?”
Silence drops between us heavier than the concrete.
She looks down at her hands, flexes her fingers like she’s testing the strength in them.
“Rhea was supposed to be another near miss,” she says quietly. “A failed check that woke everyone up. I triple-checked the harness myself. I signed off because I trusted redundancies that weren’t there anymore. They cut corners I didn’t see. They moved the schedule up without telling me. That’s on them. But the fact that I was playing with fault lines at all? That part is on me.”
Her voice thins. “I live with that every time I walk past her photo by the stage door.”
My back hits the pillar. I don’t remember deciding to lean. Concrete digs into my shoulder blades.
“So what, this is justice?” I ask. “Killing people to make a point?”
Her head snaps up. “I’m not trying to kill anyone,” she says. “I’m trying to make it statistically impossible for them to ignore the risk they built their fortunes on. You tiptoe around the truth in interviews. The studio buries evidence. Marcus bribes. Quinn drops episodes and prays nuance will hold. None of that has stopped blood from hitting concrete.”
She takes a step toward me. Her eyes are very bright in the sickly light.
“I’m out of polite options,” she says. “So I’m using the tools you taught me mattered: spectacle, story, fear.”
“By orchestrating accidents,” I say.
“By forcing a choice,” she says. “Yours.”
The garage feels ten degrees colder. “What choice,” I manage.
“You can keep letting Marcus script your survival,” she says. “You stick to ‘I don’t remember.’ You point to your charity work. You let them spin you as the real victim of a witch hunt. And I keep pushing. There will be more near misses. Maybe more funerals. Maybe not by my hand next time. Because once a system learns it can digest a girl like me and spit her out, it doesn’t stop. It just changes flavors.”
Images flash behind my eyes: the mill staircase, the leaking sprinkler pipes on Stage Fourteen, Rhea’s memorial photo under bad fluorescent light. All of it stacked on top of one decision I made at sixteen.
“Or?” I whisper.
“Or you tell the truth,” she says. “On record. On camera. In words no lawyer wrote for you. You say ‘I shoved Lila Park on a staircase and the studio covered it up.’ You say names—producers, fixers, lawyers. You help dismantle the scaffolding that held you up while it buried me.”
My heart hammers. “That would end my career,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe it gives you a smaller one that’s honest. Maybe the industry chews you up and spits you out. Either way, at least the math changes. At least the next girl on a staircase knows there’s precedent for telling the truth and being believed.”
“You think anyone’s going to focus on structural anything?” I ask. “They’ll make it another morality play. An evil actress. A tragic survivor. They’ll turn you into content again.”
“They already have,” she says. “The difference is, this time I’m directing.”
The word makes my skin prickle.
“I’m not ready,” I say. The admission slips out raw. “I don’t even know where to start. A podcast has already made me into a question mark, and you want me to turn myself into a headline.”
“Headlines are already happening,” she says. “The only thing you control now is whether they’re based on your full sentence or everyone else’s edits.”
I look at her—the girl I shoved, the woman who’s been orchestrating this haunted house around me—and try to imagine a version of my life where I stand in front of a camera and say the words she just did.
My chest tightens until I can taste metal.
“Why should I trust you?” I ask. “You admit to cutting ropes and taping safety switches. You admit your plan helped kill Rhea. Why would I walk into any version of your script?”
“Because I’m the only one in this story who doesn’t need you to stay shiny to get paid,” she says. “Marcus needs your market value. The studio needs your ratings. Even Quinn needs your scandals to keep her downloads up, no matter how carefully she frames accountability. I need one thing: for what happened in that mill and what’s happening on these sets to stop being rumors and start being record.”
She steps back, giving me space again. It feels less like kindness and more like drawing a line.
“I’m going to formalize this,” she says. “Put it in writing. Terms, names, commitments. You’ll get it soon. Think of it as the opposite of an NDA.”
My stomach lurches. I picture a document sliding across a table, except this time the ink leads toward exposure instead of silence.
“And if I don’t sign your little manifest?” I ask, clutching sarcasm like a shield.
“Then you’ll know when the next accident hits,” she says quietly. “Because it won’t bypass you this time. And you won’t be able to say you didn’t see it coming.”
She picks up her glasses, slides them back on. The transformation reverses: Lila dissolves into Elle, into a woman any executive would walk past without seeing.
“Drive safe, Nora,” she says, opening her car door.
The interior light flares, throwing our reflections into the side window. For a moment I see us doubled in the glass—the girl I was, the girl I broke, the woman I perform, the woman who refuses to disappear.
Then the door shuts, the engine turns over, and she backs out into the dark ramp leading up to the sunlit studios.
I stand rooted beside the pillar, fingers dug into peeling paint, replaying her ultimatum in my head.
Confess and burn everything down.
Or wait for the next fall and know the blood is on my hands before it ever hits the concrete.