I sit at the kitchen island with every light off, letting Los Angeles do the work.
Through the glass walls, the hills glow soft and hazy, a web of headlights and porch bulbs and studio glare. My reflection hangs over it all—ghosted, doubled—face pale, hair scraped into a knot. The small black drive Lila left only an hour ago sits in front of me on the marble, a dark punctuation mark in the middle of all that reflected light.
The house hums around me: the low whirr of the built-in fridge, the steady exhale of the air conditioning, a distant tick from the pool heater outside. Chlorine clings to my skin from an earlier swim I barely remember. My fingers drum a restless beat next to the drive, then flatten, then drum again.
I open the Notes app on my phone and write three words: Tell the truth. Then I add another line beneath it: Or don’t.
I’m still staring at those two options when my screen flashes with a different set of words, bright against the darkness.
MOM CALLING.
The ringtone is an old one I never changed—some grainy recording of a church bell from back home that my sister sent me as a joke years ago. The echo of it fills my glass box, wrong and right at the same time, Pennsylvania cutting straight through Laurel Canyon.
I let it ring twice, three times, heart beating in that small space between each chime. Then I swipe.
“Hey,” I say, aiming for light. “You’re up late.”
There’s a wet inhale on the other end. “Nora.”
Just my name, but all the air in my chest tightens. I hear the background before I hear her properly: the low murmur of a TV, the clink of a mug on a table, distant traffic that doesn’t sound like LA’s constant rush but the occasional whoosh of a car passing the house on our old hill.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, softer. “What’s going on?”
“I heard it,” she blurts. “That—that radio thing. The show. The one talking about you.”
“Podcast,” I correct automatically, because I’m an idiot. “It’s—yeah. Second Take.”
She exclaims like I’ve just confirmed the existence of a monster. “They had your name in their mouths, baby. They were talking about that night. At the mill.” Her voice frays on the last word.
The word hits my ears and brings with it the cold metal tang of the stair rail, the mildew stink of the river fog that slid under the mill doors. I grip the edge of my counter until my knuckles ache.
“They don’t know everything,” I say. “They weren’t there.”
“I told Donna that,” she rushes on, ignoring me. “At the diner. She played it for me on her phone like it was some kind of treat, said, ‘Look, your Nora is famous again.’” The way she says again slices me. “I told her those girls don’t know you. I told her my daughter is a good girl, she always was.”
I close my eyes. I can picture it perfectly: my mother in that vinyl booth under fluorescent lights, steam from bottomless coffee curling up, sugar packets lined like soldiers, my face glowing from a cracked screen while the mill sits down the road like a rusted skeleton.
“You shouldn’t have to argue with people in diners,” I say. “Just turn it off.”
“How am I supposed to turn it off?” she snaps, then softens instantly. “Sorry. Sorry, honey. I know you hate that town. But they talk. You know they talk.”
“They always have,” I say. Grease on linoleum, rumors on tongues. “This isn’t new.”
“They said there was another girl,” she whispers. “That the show cut her out. That—that something happened on those stairs. They said you pushed her. And then they said maybe you didn’t, but you knew who did, and the studio made it all go away for you.”
“Mom,” I say warningly.
“I told them you never hurt nobody on purpose,” she presses on. “I told them my Nora was protecting everyone. That you were a kid, and kids have accidents, and the men in suits did what they had to so you could have a life. I told them—”
Her words tangle, catch. Tears leak into the connection, audible.
“Mom,” I say again, softer. “You don’t owe them any explanations.”
“But do I owe you any questions?” she asks.
The kitchen goes very quiet. Out past the glass, someone down the hill slams a car door, laughter flaring for a second before the night swallows it.
“What do you mean?” I ask, though I know.
Her breath shudders in my ear. “I’m your mother, Nora. I’m supposed to know my own child. When they started filming out there, and you came home with those checks and those fancy snacks from the craft table—”
“Craft service,” I correct, automatic again.
“Yeah, that,” she says. “They said they had donuts all day. You used to bring me one back, remember? I worked nights and you’d put it on the table with a little note.” Her voice wobbles. “Then that night you didn’t bring anything back. You came home soaked through from that damn river fog, shaking, and that man with the tie came to our house the next day and sat at this kitchen table, and he told me everything would be fine if we just didn’t ask questions.”
My stomach clenches. I can almost smell the cheap coffee he insisted on making in our chipped drip machine, the way the steam tried and failed to cover the scent of his cologne and the stale cigarette smoke in his suit.
“He said kids fight,” she continues. “He said there was a ‘misunderstanding’ on set, that people would say nasty things because they’re jealous. He talked about sealed records and not feeding gossip. He made it sound like a gift.” I hear her swipe at her nose. “But you wouldn’t look me in the eye for a month.”
I open my eyes and stare at my own reflection in the window, my face fractured by the faint grid in the glass.
“Mom…” I begin.
“I don’t want details,” she cuts in quickly, then backtracks. “No, that’s a lie. I want to know everything and I don’t want to know a damn thing. I hear that girl’s name on that show and I think of her mother. I think, what did they tell her in her kitchen? Did they tell her my kid slipped? Did they tell her it was an accident, too?”
I press my fingers to my eyelids until color blooms. “They told her something,” I say. “I don’t know what. They didn’t let me anywhere near her.”
“But you knew more than you told me,” she says quietly.
My hand drops. “Yes.”
The word hangs there, bare and heavy. Outside, a helicopter thuds by, light sweeping over the canyon rooflines, here and gone.
“So those girls on the radio aren’t just making it up,” she says. “Something did happen.”
My throat feels raw. “Something happened,” I say. I choose each word like I’m stepping on stones across a river. “I hurt someone, and then other people hurt her more. And other people cleaned it up.”
“But you didn’t….”
She can’t finish it. I hear the question anyway. Did you shove her. Did you mean it. Did you let her fall.
Lila’s voice flashes through my head: You were furious. There’s a difference.
“I don’t have a version of that night that makes us both innocent,” I say. “I wish I did.”
There’s a shaky inhale on the line. For a second, I think she’s going to hang up.
“You’re my baby,” she says finally, in a small, fierce voice. “I know you. I know you had a temper. Remember when you threw that plate at the wall because I wouldn’t let you stay out past midnight? You always came in hot, but you never walked past someone bleeding on the floor. You’re not one of those…Hollywood monsters.”
The word Hollywood comes out like something sour she can’t quite spit out. I look around at the flawless stone, the stainless steel, the unobstructed view. The glass turns all of it into a reflection, a curated loop.
“I’m not a monster,” I say. “I’m also not—” I stop. Not innocent. Not clean. Not safe. “I’m trying to figure out what to do now.”
“Do?” Panic spikes in her tone. “What do you mean do? You’re not thinking of talking to them, are you? They already twisted it up. You hear the way they edit, baby? They play that creepy little music under your name like you’re some boogeyman.”
“Boogeywoman,” I say weakly.
“This isn’t funny,” she snaps. “You worked your whole life to get out of here. You bought this house, you paid off my mortgage, you put your sister through school. You got us away from that damn mill. You’re not going to throw all that away because some girls on the internet want a better story.”
The list of things I paid for lands one by one, each item a weight on a different part of my body. Mom’s house. Grace’s degree. The new roof. The car that actually starts in winter.
“It’s not just ‘some girls,’ Mom,” I say. “There’s more. There’s…” My eyes flick to the drive on the counter, to my reflection hovering over it. “There’s evidence.”
“Evidence,” she repeats, like it’s a foreign word. “They got their papers and their gossip. You got lawyers. You got that manager man.”
“Marcus,” I say.
“Yeah, Marcus. Mr ‘Everything’s Fine,’” she mutters. “You let him handle it. That’s what you always did, right?”
That’s exactly what I always did. Handed it to Marcus, let him tuck it into a folder and slide it under some executive’s door with a smile and a thinly veiled threat.
“I don’t know if he can handle this one,” I say. The truth of that crawls up my spine.
“Then you pray it away,” she says quickly. “You keep your head down, do your job, let it blow over. These people always move on to the next thing.”
The next thing. The next accident. The next hurt kid whose story gets cut for time.
Before I can respond, there’s a muffled sound—scrape of chair, a voice overlapping.
“Who are you talking to?” my sister’s voice pipes in, sharper and younger than I remember.
“Your sister,” my mom says, hand clearly over the receiver, but I still hear her. “She’s on the TV again.”
“Give me that,” Grace says. There’s a shuffle, a tiny thud like the phone bumping the table, and then my mother’s breath fades and my sister’s takes its place.
“Nora?” Grace’s voice crackles into my ear. “What the hell are you doing?”
I wince. “Hi, Gracie. Nice to hear you too.”
“Don’t,” she snaps. “Don’t do the cute thing. Do you have any idea what my day was like?”
I picture her in Mom’s kitchen, bare feet on the faded linoleum, half-drunk cup of coffee going cold. She still lives there, in that damp river town that never quite woke up. I moved the money; she never moved her body.
“I’m guessing not great,” I say.
“Not great,” she repeats, with a bitter laugh. “The clinic had the podcast on in the break room. Sandy from reception kept saying, ‘Isn’t that your sister? Oh my God, that’s your sister.’ And then Dr. Patel asked if I was okay in that weird way that means ‘Are you about to sue me or the hospital?’”
“You can quit if it’s too much,” I say. “I told you, you don’t have to keep working there. I can—”
“You can what?” she cuts in. “You can keep paying my loans? You can keep sending money for Mom’s pills and the heating bill and the new car we just co-signed last month? You can keep doing that if this blows up and they stop hiring you?”
The word if hits harder than blows up.
“We have savings,” I say defensively. “I planned for—”
“For what? A dry spell between rom-coms?” Her voice edges toward a shout. “Did you plan for ‘America’s sweetheart pushed a girl down the stairs and lied about it’ trending for three days straight?”
I flinch, gripping the phone so hard my fingers ache. “That’s not the headline.”
“It might as well be,” she says. “Do you know what it’s like watching strangers dissect our lives while I’m trying to draw someone’s blood without shaking?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. The words feel useless. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”
“No, but you built your whole life on top of it,” she fires back. “Do you remember when I was twelve and the girls at school made a list of who was going to ‘get out’ of town? They wrote your name. They wrote ‘Nora’ with little hearts over the i because you were on TV and you got to drink Starbucks in between takes. They wrote ‘Grace’ with a question mark.”
My chest tightens. “I took you out of there,” I say. “I paid for your tuition. I gave you options we never had.”
“Yeah, and I’m grateful,” she says. “I’m also pissed, in case that wasn’t clear.”
“You can be both,” I say, my voice going thin. “I am.”
She snorts. “Of course you are. You always were good at holding two things at once, weren’t you? Two stories. The one for us and the one for them.”
The accusation lands right in the softest part of me. The mill airs jumps to mind: what I told Mom, what I told Marcus, what I told myself.
“So what do you want from me?” I ask. “Do you want me to deny it? To call them liars? To sue a podcast for breathing near my past?”
“I want you to fix it,” she says, raw. “I want you to make it stop before they cancel your show, before they cut you out of those movies, before the checks stop coming and we’re back to coupon-clipping and space heaters. I don’t care how. Call your manager, call your lawyer, call whoever told you not to talk about it last time and do that again.”
Lila’s case flashes in my memory—documents, drives, scheduled emails like ticking bombs. The old tactics feel like trying to put out a studio fire with a paper cup.
“There isn’t a ‘do that again’ button,” I say. “Things are different now.”
“No, you’re different now,” she shoots back. “You bought a glass house and started doing Serious TV about trauma, and now you think you’re too good for the lie that got you here.”
Heat rises under my skin, a mix of shame and anger. “That ‘lie’ almost killed someone,” I say. “It might have helped kill someone else. How many people am I supposed to stack on that pile before it’s enough?”
There’s a beat of silence. Then, quietly, “Do you want us on there too?”
The question punches the breath out of me.
“Of course not,” I say. “You’re not on any pile. I did what I did so we wouldn’t end up…like Mom. Working nights forever, worrying about every bill.”
“Newsflash, Nora: we’re still worrying,” she says. “We just do it in a nicer house with central air.”
The central air hums obediently above me, pushing cool, tasteless air into my lungs.
“What if telling the truth is the only way to keep something like this from happening again?” I ask. “To some other girl on some other staircase?”
She exhale-laughs, a sound I barely recognize. “Then I guess you get a medal and we get foreclosure notices,” she says. “Congrats.”
“That’s not fair,” I say.
“Neither is any of this,” she snaps.
In the background I hear our mother’s voice, anxious. “Grace, don’t yell at her. She’s still your sister.”
Grace half covers the speaker. “Well she should start acting like it,” she mutters, then comes back clear. “Look, I know something bad happened. I’m not stupid. Mom’s not either. You think we didn’t notice the lawyer visits and the way the scripts with that girl just…stopped?”
The words thud through me. “You never said anything,” I whisper.
“We figured the less we knew, the safer we were,” she says. “Now that safety’s gone either way, isn’t it? If they find out you lied, they hate you. If you say you lied, they hate you. The only difference is whether Mom can afford her meds while they’re hating you.”
My eyes sting. I blink hard, but tears spill anyway, hot on my cheeks. Salt hits my tongue when I lick my lips. The city outside goes soft, lights blurring into streaks.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” I admit. “There isn’t a version where everyone comes out okay.”
“Then pick the version where the people who’ve been with you since before the glass house don’t get crushed first,” she says. “Please.”
The please lands differently than all the shouting.
I rest my forehead against my free hand, elbow on the cool marble. The small black drive sits an inch from my fingers like a third party in the conversation, silent and damning.
“I love you,” I say. “Both of you. That’s the only thing I’m sure of right now.”
“Then love us enough not to light our lives on fire to make up for something you did as a kid,” she says.
In the background, Mom calls, “Grace, let me talk to her again,” voice small and strained.
“I have to go,” Grace says. “I need to calm her down before she takes another pill.” A pause. “Promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid before we talk again.”
Confessing feels, in this moment, like both the stupidest and the least cruel thing I could do.
“I promise I’ll think,” I say, which is not what she asked.
“Nora,” she warns.
“I hear you,” I say. “I do.”
She huffs, frustrated. “That’s not the same as listening.” Then, softer, “Don’t let them take everything, okay?”
The line goes muffled as she passes the phone. Mom’s voice comes back, thick. “Baby?”
“I’m here,” I answer.
“You know we love you,” she says. “No matter what those people say, you hear me? You’re my girl.”
The words wrap around me and pinch at the same time.
“I know,” I say.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.” Then, almost inaudible, “Please don’t make us pay again.”
Before I can respond, the line clicks dead.
The kitchen is suddenly enormous and empty, the hum of the appliances too loud. I pull the phone away and stare at the dark screen. My reflection looks back—eyes red, hair a mess, Lila’s drive just visible at the bottom of the frame like a shadow.
In my mind, I stand on two sets of stairs at once: the damp metal steps of the mill, smelling of rust and river water, and the sleek floating staircase in this house, all wood and glass. At the bottom of one, a girl lies broken and forgotten. At the bottom of the other, my mother and sister stand holding bills I pay with money built over that fall.
Whatever step I take next, someone I love goes down.
I set the phone next to the drive on the cold marble, my hand resting between them, and realize there isn’t a right choice left—just the question of whose safety I’m willing to sacrifice to finally stop pretending this isn’t my fault.