I invite Lila to my house in the most professional way I can manage: a three-line email drafted, deleted, then rewritten from my kitchen island while my smoothie melts into a purple puddle.
I’d like to discuss the statement in more detail, I type. Some things are negotiable if we approach them strategically. My place is private. Tonight?
I stare at the words “negotiable” and “strategically” until they blur into one long excuse. Then I hit send before I can swap them for “begging” and “desperate.”
Her reply comes in under five minutes. Text me the address. No emojis. No questions. No threats. I send the gate code from muscle memory, the same way I feed it to Uber drivers and Postmates couriers who bring me green juice and gluten-free donuts and the illusion that I’m not still that girl in the mill.
By the time her car headlights sweep across my driveway, the sun is gone. Laurel Canyon is a dark bowl cupping the city’s glow. Through the glass, downtown looks like a low-burning fire.
The security panel chirps when the gate opens. A moment later, knuckles rap three crisp times on the front door. I skip the intercom and open it myself.
Lila stands there in black jeans and a faded crew sweatshirt with some stunt team logo. A small, battered metal case dangles from her hand. The handle digs into her fingers hard enough to whiten the knuckles.
“That’s… not an overnight bag,” I say.
“Hi to you, too,” she says. Her gaze flicks over my shoulder, taking in the glass walls, the clean lines, the city glitter. “Nice terrarium.”
“Come in,” I answer, stepping back.
She walks past me, trailing the smell of the lot on her clothes—the faint chemical bite of fake smoke, a whisper of sawdust, a ghost of craft-service sugar. My house smells like eucalyptus cleaner and overpriced candles and, under all that, chlorine from the pool. The two worlds crash into each other in my nose.
“Kitchen? Living room?” I ask. “Or do we pretend this is a normal meeting and go to the office?”
“Table’s fine,” she says. She nods toward the long glass dining table that faces the city. “More surface.”
More surface for what, my brain asks, but my mouth already knows. “Okay.”
We sit opposite each other. She sets the metal case on the glass with a thunk that vibrates through my forearms. Up close, I see the scratches scoring the sides, a couple of old airline stickers half-peeled off. The lock is combination, the metal dulled from use.
“I thought we were talking about your terms,” I say. “I read the whole thing. Twice.” My voice sounds thin against the hum of the air conditioning.
“We are,” she says. “This is the part you can’t negotiate.”
My laugh comes out sharper than I intend. “You printed a contract for my confession and now you brought show-and-tell?”
“Evidence,” she says. “You’ve spent most of your life performing whatever version of the truth they handed you. I want you to see what’s under the script.”
Her fingers move with unhurried precision on the lock. Three clicks, a pause, one more. She flips the latch. The lid lifts with a small sigh and a puff of cold, metal-smelling air.
For a second I picture the mill’s basement, the wet concrete chill that soaked through my sneakers when we shot down there. The cold metal tang of the railing under my hands. The sound it made when her body hit.
Inside the case, everything is rectangular. Stacks of paper in binder clips. Manila folders with color-coded tabs. A row of USB drives in a foam slit. Two small portable hard drives, labeled in neat black marker. No loose scraps, no chaos. It looks like a portable archive.
She starts laying things out on the glass. Paper whispers against glass, against more paper. The city lights shine through, turning the white sheets into a patchwork of reflected glare and shadow.
“Medical records,” she says, tapping one stack. “Imaging, surgical notes, PT evaluations. Mine, obviously. With names redacted where they don’t need to be dragged into this.”
The top page shows a grainy image of a spine, vertebrae annotated in a doctor’s looping scrawl. Below it: Patient: Lila Park. My throat tightens around the name.
“Incident reports,” she continues, laying out another set. “The ones the studio filed. The ones they decided not to. Copies of emails about changing the terminology from ‘fall’ to ‘misstep’ to ‘momentary loss of balance.’”
I flinch. I remember sitting in that conference room in the damp Pennsylvania river town, the mill still leaking river fog into my hair, while a lawyer explained how words mattered. How saying “accident” kept everyone safe.
“You could have told Quinn about all this already,” I say. I hear the edge in my own voice, the attempt to sound more annoyed than afraid. “You didn’t need to play Final Destination on my set.”
“I’m not playing,” she answers. She doesn’t raise her voice; she doesn’t have to. “And I didn’t show Quinn because I wanted you to see it first. Without a mic. Without Marcus whispering in your ear.”
She drops another folder in front of me. The tab reads: HAYES, NORA – STATEMENTS.
My fingers won’t move. They sit on my lap, gripping the fabric of my pants until my nails bite skin.
“Those are copies,” Lila says. “Redacted of minor names. I’m not here to re-traumatize every terrified seventeen-year-old who did what they were told.”
“You included me,” I say, my voice low.
“You weren’t terrified,” she says. “You were furious. There’s a difference.”
I inhale through my nose, slow. The eucalyptus candle on the sideboard throws out a sweet, sharp scent that makes my eyes sting. I reach for the folder.
The first page is a statement on firm letterhead. The logo isn’t the studio’s; it’s the crisis firm Marcus hired back then, the one he still sends Christmas baskets to. My name sits below the header: Nora Elise Hayes – Witness Account.
The language is simple, almost childlike. Lila lost her footing. Lila tripped. Lila slipped on the wet stair. Each sentence is a neat little brick laid over the truth.
At the bottom, my signature curls in blue ink. Sixteen-year-old me practiced that signature for months on notebooks and napkins, learning to make it legible and cute for fans. Seeing it here, under this lie, knocks the air out of me.
My hand lifts to my throat. My fingers find the old scar under my jaw from a River’s Edge stunt gone wrong, a cut from broken glass that they wrote into the show. They made it storyline; they turned my blood into content. With Lila, they did the opposite. They made the injury vanish.
“Marcus said these files were sealed,” I say. My eyes track the bits of black marker obscuring other names. “He said the court records were… buried.”
“Court records are one thing,” Lila says. “Internal records are another. People forget how many copies get made. How many assistants hit ‘save as’ before they’re told to purge a drive.”
She slides another page on top. It’s a memo, bullet points and bolded phrases. Key Message: Nora Hayes was nowhere near the top landing when the fall occurred. My stomach flips. A margin note in some junior publicist’s handwriting reads: She tried to help! Emphasize empathy.
I recognize those talking points. They were fed to me years later for a late-night interview, rebranded as “youthful rumors.” I delivered them with a teary laugh, and the audience applauded my growth.
My fingers leave little damp crescents on the edge of the paper.
“You’ve been doing rewrites on that night for a long time,” Lila says. “Every time you turned down a question or reshaped a story, they added another layer. I scraped the layers back.”
“This doesn’t have to go public,” I say quickly. The old instinct kicks in, the one that counts headlines and brand deals like beats in a scene. “Not like this. We can take this to the DA quietly, to some independent—”
“And let them decide nothing happened.” Her jaw tightens. “They had their chance when I was seventeen, when my mother sat in a fluorescent hallway in a cheap suit we couldn’t afford while that fixer explained how we’d be sued into ashes if we pushed.”
“Things are different now,” I say. My voice sounds weak even to me. “There’s MeToo, there’s—”
“There’s still NDAs and hush money and publicists who know how to turn a confession into a comeback tour,” she cuts in. “I’m not handing them my life so they can spin it into a limited series without me.”
Her hand reaches into the case again. She pulls out a small black drive and sets it gently on the table between us.
Written on the label in her neat handwriting: Hale_Garage.MP4.
My chest constricts.
“You sent me that anonymously,” I say. “From a burner.”
“That was a copy,” she says. “This is another. There are more.”
My mind jumps to the footage: Marcus in the concrete half-light of the parking garage, his voice dripping reason and threat, offering her money to “make this go away.” The way he stepped closer, the way she kept filming, her breath steady. I remember pausing on his face, on the way his mouth curled around the phrase in everyone’s best interest.
Lila taps the drive. “Your manager tried to buy my silence,” she says. “On camera. He did it in your name. That goes in the box with your statements and my scars. You don’t get to pretend you didn’t know how this machine worked anymore.”
My knee starts bouncing under the table. I press my palms against it, trying to pin it down.
“If I sign your terms,” I say, “if I stand up on finale day and say everything—why do you need all this? Why hold a gun to everyone’s head while you ask me to jump?”
Her eyes flick to the city beyond the glass, then back. “Because I’ve watched this industry turn confessions into content,” she says. “Because without leverage, they’ll gut the story and leave the skin. ‘Tragic accident, lessons learned,’ and back to work. This box means they don’t get to control the edit.”
“You could just… release it,” I say. “Drop it all now. Burn me and Marcus and the studio to the ground. Why give me a deadline at all?”
“Because I don’t just want you ruined,” she says. “I want you responsible. There’s a difference.”
The words land between us like another heavy object. The air conditioning hums louder, or maybe my ears are ringing.
“What happens if Marcus finds out about this?” I ask. “He’ll go nuclear. Hire people. Hackers, whatever. He’ll come for you.”
“He already came for me,” she says. “In that garage. With that offer. He lost his chance to pretend he’s just protecting you.”
She reaches back into the case and pulls out a small folded document. It’s printed from some interface, lines of text and checkboxes.
“This is the part I invited myself for,” she says. “The insurance speech.”
“You think I’m not terrified enough?” I ask.
“I think you’re still clinging to the fantasy that this can be managed,” she replies. “That Marcus can buy the right server admin, or your lawyer can get an injunction, or you can bargain me down to naming only dead executives and faceless entities.”
Heat pricks behind my eyes. My fingers curl into fists on the table.
“You’re wrong,” I say. “I know it’s bad. I know we’re past NDAs and spin.”
“Then listen,” she says.
She lays the printed page flat and turns it so it faces me. At the top: Scheduled Messages – Active. Underneath, a list of email subjects, dates, recipients. I recognize Quinn’s podcast email, a couple of journalists I’ve side-eyed for years, a generic address at a major paper, some encrypted-looking string of characters with “backup node” in the name.
“These are scheduled sends?” I ask. My voice comes out hoarse.
“Dead-man switches,” she says. “If I don’t log in and reset the timer every few days, they fire. If my phone doesn’t ping a simple check-in app at certain times, more fire. If finale day goes sideways in any number of ways I can think of, they go early.”
She taps one line with her finger. SUBJECT: River’s Edge – Missing Girl Evidence Packet. SEND: Finale Day + 3 hours (if not canceled). Recipient: Quinn Hart.
My pulse stutters. “You put Quinn at the center of this,” I whisper.
“She put herself in it,” Lila says. “She’s the only one who’s actually tried to tell the whole story instead of just your half. If something happens to me, she’s my executor.”
The word makes my skin crawl.
“You’re making yourself unkillable,” I say. It comes out half accusation, half awe. “Digitally, anyway.”
“No one is unkillable,” she says. “But my story is. That’s the point. I spent a decade erased. I’m not going back into the edit bay.”
I stare at the list. Each subject line is a trigger in waiting: Medical Records. Legal Memos. Hale_Garage – Full Video & Transcript. Dates and times march down the page, indifferent to my panic.
The glass table reflects my face back at me, warped by papers and drives. For so long, my glass-world life felt protective—clear boundaries, curated views. Now it feels brittle. One good hit and everything shatters.
“So I don’t have a choice,” I say quietly. “Whether I confess or not, this all comes out.”
“You have a choice,” she says. “You just finally have the same one I did on that staircase: do you grab for something real, or do you let the current drag everyone else under first?”
My laugh cracks in the middle. “That’s not a choice, that’s an execution date with flexible lighting.”
“It’s the only honest choice you’ve had in a long time,” she replies.
I look at my teenage signature on the statement, the blue ink small and looping beside the lie. I think about the diner in my hometown, the bottomless coffee and the way they whisper stories into the steam. I think about Rhea’s partner at the memorial, asking if the shot was worth it. I think about Quinn sitting in her loft surrounded by corkboards, not knowing her name is on a countdown clock.
“If I confess,” I ask, my voice barely carrying over the AC, “if I stand there and say it without spin—do you stop the timers?”
Lila watches me for a long moment. The city lights flicker across her pupils, tiny distant fires.
“I change what they send,” she says. “Not whether they exist. The world still needs to know what they did. What you did. But I can add your confession to the package instead of your denial.”
The words lodge in my chest. It’s not mercy; it’s a different kind of sentence.
She starts gathering the papers, stacking them back into their meticulous order. Pages slide against each other, a soft, relentless sound. The drives go back in their foam slots. The garage video drive, though, she leaves on the table between us.
“That one’s for you,” she says. “In case you ever decide you’re done letting Marcus be the only narrator in your head.”
“You trust me with it?” I ask.
“I don’t have to trust you,” she says. “It’s already backed up six ways from hell. That’s just a mirror you can hold up to yourself when you’re tempted to call this unfair.”
She closes the case. The latch snaps shut with a final, metallic click. The sound actually hurts.
“Finale day,” she reminds me, standing. The chair legs scrape softly on the polished floor. “That’s when you get to decide whether you walk into the fire on your own feet or get dragged in by the ankles.”
I stand too, though my legs feel like they belong to someone else. “And if I run,” I say, the thought spilling out before I can stop it, “if I pack a bag and disappear into some foggy river town where no one knows my face—”
“Then your old town will recognize you,” she says. “And Quinn will get an email titled ‘The Actress Who Ran.’”
A humorless smile tugs at her mouth. “You’re not the only one who can rewrite a story, Nora.”
She lifts the case by its handle. For a second I imagine grabbing it, wrestling it away, hurling it through the glass so it explodes down the hillside in a shower of metal and paper.
Instead I stay where I am and watch her walk to the door.
At the threshold, she pauses. “You wanted privacy to heal,” she says, not turning around. “I wanted daylight to live. Finale day, you decide which one you’re willing to share.”
The door closes behind her with a soft seal. The house is suddenly too quiet. The city flickers on beyond the windows, a thousand tiny lenses pointed my way.
I look down at the small black drive on the glass between my hands, at my distorted reflection in its plastic sheen, and realize there is no version of this where the story doesn’t come out.
The only question left is what words I put in my own mouth before everyone else starts quoting me.