I get to the loft ten minutes early and still feel late.
The stairwell smells like dust and old takeout, the concrete steps vibrating under my sneakers whenever a truck rolls past on the street below. Through the grimy window on the landing, the LA sky presses down in pale blue, bright and flat, nothing like the low, wet lid over that Pennsylvania river town I keep talking about into microphones.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with a new notification. I don’t look. I already know the last email in my inbox by heart: the PA returning my message, saying, She’s willing to talk. Off-set. Off-mic. She picked your place. Come alone.
My key sticks in the loft door like it always does; I shoulder it harder than necessary.
The inside air hits me in a wave—stale coffee, warm electronics, a faint tang of the cheap foam panels we tacked up for sound dampening. The AC grumbles in the corner, pushing tired cool air across the cables on the floor. Sunlight slices in through the big windows, catching dust and the edges of our corkboard, turning pinned stills and printouts into a wall-sized conspiracy.
And on my battered thrift-store couch, in the middle of all that mess, sits Nora Hayes.
For a second my brain refuses to place her, like I’m seeing some wax version. She stands when she hears the door, moving in one smooth line, the kind of economy that comes from years of blocking and marks. The sun catches on the glass of her phone and the glass of the windows behind her and the glass in the framed fan art Jazz hung as a joke. She is a mirror inside a mirror inside a fishbowl.
“Hi,” she says.
My throat tries to close. I take in all the details automatically: the soft gray sweater dress, the white sneakers that probably cost more than my laptop, the bare face that still looks ready for close-up. There’s a whiff of expensive something—citrus, clean wood—that cuts through the stale coffee smell.
“You’re early,” I blurt.
She huffs a short breath that isn’t quite a laugh. “I thought the line was ‘you’re in my house.’”
My gaze flicks to the corkboard. There’s a publicity shot of her from Second Chances pinned dead center, marker circles around the mill set in the background. Red string runs from that to a screenshot of her teen face in River’s Edge and a blurry fan photo outside the condemned factory.
“Right,” I say. “My house. Sorry, this—no one’s cleaned up the murder wall today.”
Nora’s eyes track the string, the handwritten notes, the arrows pointing from her to Lila and back again. Her shoulders sit high near her ears, her hands clasped so tight in front of her that her knuckles bleach.
“I’ve seen worse,” she says. “We have a room at Silverline that looks like this, except it’s all whiteboards and brand logos.”
Her attempt at a joke lands in the cramped space between us and stays there.
I kick the door shut behind me, the metal lock clacking. “I, uh, didn’t expect you. The message I got was from—”
“The PA,” she finishes. “Yeah. I got one too, through Elle. ‘Come alone,’ same as you. Stage directions and everything.”
The sound of Lila’s working name in her mouth pulls the air thinner.
“So you thought, ‘Cool, let me go to the place where the girl who ruined my career lives and record audio in her natural habitat’?” I ask.
The defensive edge in my voice surprises me. I clamp my teeth down on any apology.
Nora’s jaw tightens. “I thought, ‘Cool, I can sit in the space where the girl who ruined my carefully manufactured innocence works and ask her why she picked that title for the podcast episode that wrecked my mother.’”
My chest squeezes around the word mother. I remember the crackling phone call last week, her mom’s voice captured in that leaked voicemail fans passed around until it hit comment sections. The reminder lives on my corkboard too: printed local news headline about Hometown Hero or Hidden Villain? taped next to a photo of her town’s diner window fogged by breath and coffee steam.
“I didn’t leak that voicemail,” I say sharply. “I didn’t even play it. We summarized.”
“They summarized my mom’s sobbing,” she says. “Great distinction.”
A pulse crooks in my temple. I walk deeper into the loft because standing by the door feels like admitting I might bolt.
The familiar things ground me a little: Jazz’s multicolored mugs lined on the shelf, a faint ring of soy sauce dried on the counter, the hum of my desktop tower under the desk. I throw my bag onto the second couch and shrug off my backpack.
“Do you want water?” I ask, because I can’t think of anything else that isn’t a dissertation.
“Tap is fine,” she says.
I pour two glasses. My hand shakes, making small waves that slap the sides. When I hand one to her, our fingers brush. Her skin feels too warm.
She sits again, but not back in the same casual sprawl; she perches on the edge of the cushion, knees together, glass cradled in both hands. I stay standing, the coffee table and a tangle of XLR cables between us.
“This place is smaller than I pictured,” she says eventually, eyes circling the room. “Listening to you, I kept imagining some sleek studio with neon lights and a mini-bar.”
“We have a mini-fridge,” I say. “Does that count?”
“There’s a mill photo above it,” she says. “So, no.”
I follow her gaze. The photo she means is grainy, gray, shot from the riverbank—a rusted skeleton of brick and broken windows crouching over black water. Someone on the fan forum mailed us a 5x7 print. The cold metal tang of those stair rails lives in my head from the way everyone describes it.
“We built a whole career out of talking about other people’s haunted houses,” I say. “Turns out the rent on actual real estate is still brutal.”
The silence that follows this time feels less brittle, more like two people catching breath before the next round.
I check the time on my watch. Lila—Elle—told us four p.m. It’s four-oh-three.
“She’s late,” I say.
“She likes an entrance,” Nora murmurs.
The doorknob clicks.
My stomach clenches so fast I taste metal. Nora’s spine straightens. The AC unit chooses that exact second to grind louder.
The door opens, and Lila steps in.
She’s in work clothes: dark jeans, black crewneck, boots with scuffed toes. Her hair is pulled back in a no-nonsense tail. She carries no visible bag, only a slim hard case in one hand that could hold a tablet or a weaponized screenplay.
The smell of the hallway’s dust swirls in behind her for a second, then the loft’s coffee-and-electronics mix swallows it. She closes the door with a quiet finality and leans back against it, scanning the room in one clean sweep—corkboard, couches, microphones, our faces.
“Good,” she says. “You both showed up.”
Nora stands. I don’t remember deciding to stand too, but suddenly all three of us are vertical and wary, arranged in a jagged triangle around the coffee table.
“You sent two separate ‘come alone’ messages,” I say. “That usually means you don’t want your guests to bump into each other in the waiting room.”
“I wanted you both to walk through the door expecting intimacy and find complications instead,” Lila says. “Which is closer to the truth of this situation than any one-on-one conversation.”
Her voice carries the same measured calm it did in the safety meeting on Stage 14, back when I didn’t know who she was. There’s no tremor, no theatrics; the authority comes from the steadiness.
Nora crosses her arms over her chest, glass of water dangling from one hand. “You could have warned me,” she says.
“I did,” Lila replies. “The warning was the fact that I invited you anywhere off-studio grounds.”
A corner of Nora’s mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “That’s…not unfair.”
I clear my throat, feeling my role flapping loose. “So what is this, exactly?” I ask. “An ambush? A summit? A focus group for the best way to destroy a career?”
Lila’s gaze lands on me. There’s a weight to it I recognize now, the way she studies blocking, angles, routes to exits.
“You emailed asking how you could make sure your podcast didn’t hurt me more than it already has,” she says. “You used words like ‘off-mic’ and ‘collaborate’ and ‘what do you need from the story.’ So I’m giving you an answer. But the story isn’t just mine and Nora’s anymore. You’re inside it now, Quinn. So is everyone who listens to you. I don’t do half-measures.”
Heat climbs from my chest up my neck. I hear Jazz’s voice in my head saying, Who benefits? and fight the urge to glance at the download stats on my computer.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So what do you want?”
Lila shifts away from the door and walks toward the coffee table. She sets the hard case down, pops the latches, and opens it.
Inside is a compact audio recorder, the kind newsrooms use when they still bother to send people to actual locations. No flashy brand stickers, just matte black, a small screen, and a single red button. There are three simple lapel mics coiled beside it.
My fingers itch.
“I thought we’d record,” she says.
Nora recoils a half-step. “I thought you said this wasn’t a trap,” she says. “Microphones usually mean trap.”
“You live on a microphone,” Lila says. “So does Quinn. Consider this home field advantage.”
“You want to tape a confessional between the three of us?” I ask, brain racing ahead to episode structures and legal disclaimers before I stomp on that impulse. “No. No, wait. You said off-mic.”
“I said off your mic,” she corrects. “This is mine. No Wi-Fi, no cloud backup, no studio server. I want one clean document where we stop talking through published edits and PR statements and anonymous tips and just…say what happened. What we wanted. What we want now.”
The idea lodges in the room like a live wire.
Nora sets her water glass on the table with a soft tap. “Why?” she asks. “You already have enough evidence to bury me. You made sure of that.”
Lila’s jaw clenches, then loosens. She looks tired in a way that makeup can’t erase—in the corners of her eyes, in the set of her shoulders.
“I have enough evidence to sink the studio,” she says. “To damage you, yes, but also to scorch a lot of people who had more power than either of us ever did at seventeen. I’ve spent years collecting that. What I don’t have is a version of the night at the mill and everything after that isn’t filtered through someone else’s agenda. The studio’s. Your manager’s. Quinn’s audience’s.”
That lands like a slap on my ego. I wince internally.
“So this is…what?” I ask. “A primary source?”
“Call it a rehearsal,” Lila says. “Before the finale. Before any more stunts go wrong. Before the inevitable hearings and court dates and think pieces. I want the three of us to hear each other say the thing straight at least once, with no cameras, no PR teams, no edit notes. Just a recorder that doesn’t go anywhere unless we all say so.”
The humming of the AC deepens at that moment, filling the pause. Outside, a siren wails and fades.
Nora looks from Lila to me and back. “You trust her with that?” she asks Lila, jerking her chin at me.
“No,” Lila says. “Not yet.”
I flinch.
“But I trust the fact that she’s already implicated herself by caring this much,” Lila continues. “Quinn knows if she betrays this, she becomes the thing her co-host warned her about. And I trust that you are out of ways to outrun this without more people getting hurt, Nora. Which means our incentives overlap more than they used to.”
The room tightens. She’s right; that’s the worst part. Nora’s brand is bleeding sponsors and goodwill. My credibility is on the line every time I push publish. Lila has dead-man switches and lockboxes and nothing left to lose but her own sense that this can still be about repair.
“Say we do this,” I say. “What are the rules?”
Lila nods, pleased by the question. “Rule one: nothing we say here gets aired, quoted, or handed to lawyers without written consent from all three of us. Including me. Including you, Nora. Rule two: we speak for ourselves, not for other people. You can talk about what your manager advised, Nora, but not invent thoughts in his head. You can talk about what sources told you, Quinn, but you don’t get to hide behind ‘many people say’ in this room. Rule three: if at any point one of us calls time, we stop. No argument.”
“And rule four?” Nora asks.
“Rule four,” Lila says, “is that we don’t use the tape as a weapon against each other. It’s a blueprint. If we decide later to build something public from it—a statement, an episode, testimony—we design that together.”
Nora snorts a small, disbelieving sound. “You’re talking about collaboration.”
“I’m talking about harm reduction,” Lila says. “You think I want more people dead because the studio panics? You think I want you to spiral so hard you go back to pretending none of this happened? I want accountability. I also want to live with myself afterward.”
The honesty in that last sentence threads cold through my ribs.
My journalist brain lights up at the idea of a private, unvarnished recording. My stomach flips at the idea of not airing it, of leaving such potent audio in figurative and literal darkness. Jazz’s voice cuts through again: Maybe being ethical means accepting some of this story isn’t ours to narrate.
“I’ll agree,” I say slowly, “on one condition.”
Lila’s brows rise. Nora’s too.
“We add rule five,” I say. “No one walks out of this room thinking they’re the only protagonist. We are three unreliable narrators, trying to triangulate. If we hear something that doesn’t match our memory, we say so in the moment. No polite nodding and then subtweeting each other later.”
Lila’s mouth curves—not quite a smile, but recognition. Nora’s lips press together; then she exhales.
“Fine,” Nora says. “Rule five. I don’t want to end up in another script where I’m a cartoon villain with great cheekbones.”
“You do have great cheekbones,” I say before I can stop myself.
She gives me a look that could cut glass, then softens it by a millimeter. “That’s not the point.”
“I know,” I say.
Lila uncoils the lapel mics and hands them out. Mine feels light and ridiculous in my palm, like I’m about to interview myself. The metal clip is cool against my fingers. I attach it to the neckline of my sweatshirt, watching Nora do the same, fumbling for once with the small hardware.
Lila sits in the armchair opposite the couch, recorder on the table between us. Nora settles back onto the cushion, still upright, ankles crossed tightly. I sink into my usual groove on the other couch, back of my knees hitting the torn upholstery, laptop abandoned on the floor beside me.
The three thin cables from our mics meet at the recorder like tributaries feeding a very small, very intense river.
“For the record that will never leave this room unless we all agree,” Lila says, fingers hovering over the red button, “I’ll say it once more: this is not for release. Not to your feed, Quinn. Not to any outlet. Not to any lawyer. This is ours.”
“You have my word,” I say, and I hear how formal it sounds, how much weight I’m putting on a phrase grown flimsy in a world of NDAs and branded apologies.
Nora hesitates, then nods. “Mine too,” she says. “Though my lawyer would have a stroke if he heard me.”
“He’s had strokes about worse,” Lila says.
Nora jolts, color rising in her cheeks, and for a beat I see the history between them, heavy and sharp.
“Ready?” Lila asks.
No one says yes out loud, but we all breathe in at the same time.
She presses the red button.
A small light flares to life, steady and accusing. The recorder emits a low beep, barely audible over the AC’s drone. Through our headphones—reflex made me grab mine—I hear the faint hiss of the room, the tiny sounds of fabric shifting, glasses clinking softly as Nora’s knee bumps the table.
“This is Lila Park,” she says into the air. “Recording for myself, for Nora Elise Hayes, and for Quinn Hart. Date, time, location. Off the books.”
Hearing her full name spoken like that sends a shiver through me. It hangs over the center of the room, heavier than any headline.
She nods toward me. “You start, Quinn,” she says. “You’re the one who built a career on questions. Use that for something other than content.”
My mouth dries instantly. Language has never felt so dangerous.
I lean in, lips close to the mic, and watch Nora’s eyes, Lila’s steady stare, the red light that records every syllable.
“Okay,” I say. “Then my first question is simple.”
I let the silence stretch half a beat longer, giving the recorder more empty space to swallow.
“When you picture the night at the mill,” I say, “what’s the very first thing your bodies remember before your brains start editing?”
The words hang there, fragile and sharp.
No one answers yet.
The recorder keeps going, red light burning, waiting to catch whatever comes next.