No one talks at first.
The loft crackles with small sounds instead: fabric brushing couch cushions, the low hum of the AC digging at the back of my ears, a car horn floating up from the street. The red light on the recorder burns steady, catching every useless swallow.
“Bodies before brains,” I repeat quietly. “First flash, no edits.”
Nora’s eyes fix on some point just over my shoulder, near the corkboard. Her throat moves; the mic pinned to her dress collar catches the tiny rasp. For a second, I think she’ll deflect with a joke about Method podcasting.
“My hand,” she says.
The words scrape out of her like they’re too big for her throat.
“Describe it,” Lila says. Her voice stays flat, but her gaze sharpens, hard as the glass in the windows behind us.
Nora’s fingers twitch on the rim of her water glass. A ring clicks against the cheap IKEA glass, a soft, repetitive tick.
“My hand on your arm,” she says. “Hot. Slippery. I remember my palm sliding because we were both sweating. It was August, the air in that mill was soup, and they’d turned off the fans for sound.”
She swallows. The room shrinks around the fragile thread of her voice.
“Where?” I ask. “Exactly.”
“Midway up the metal stairs,” she says. “Right side, facing the river. We’d blocked that argument scene so many times I could walk it in my sleep. I did walk it in my sleep for months after. Two steps below you. You kept jumping the cue.”
Lila exhales through her nose, almost a laugh with the joy scooped out. “I kept jumping the cue because the dialogue was garbage,” she says. “They rewrote it to make my character hysterical and jealous, remember?”
Nora flinches. “Yeah,” she says. “I remember. I remember thinking you were trying to steal every frame. I remember being exhausted and starving and all those grown men laughing about ‘catfight energy’ and—”
Her voice splinters. She clamps her lips, jaw jerking.
Lila doesn’t move. Her eyes stay on Nora, bright and flat at the same time. I can’t read anything there, and that scares me more than shouting would.
“Keep going,” Lila says.
Nora nods, a sharp little jerk. She lifts her free hand, looks at it like it belongs to someone else, then curls it into a fist.
“I grabbed your forearm,” she says. “We were nose to nose. You told me you were going to the local paper. You said you’d take the call sheet, the safety complaints, everything. You said you’d drag the studio until they fixed it or burned it down.”
There’s a flicker of something proud in Lila’s face at that, so quick I almost miss it.
“And?” I prompt.
Nora stares at her knuckles. “And I heard myself say, ‘You’re not blowing this for me.’ I’d never said that out loud before. Just in my head. Over and over. You’re not taking this from me, you’re not taking my escape.”
The word escape lands oddly heavy in the loft. I think of her glass house in the hills, all that sunlight and sky, bought with the story they told after that night.
“What does your body do in that moment?” I ask, because it’s easier than saying what does your body do to hers.
Nora’s shoulders curl inward. “I tighten my grip,” she says. “I shove. I don’t tap. I don’t nudge. I shove you backward. Hard. I want to knock you down a notch. Literally.”
The word hangs between down and dead.
“I used to tell myself I just…lunged and you stepped wrong,” she adds in a rush. “For years. I edited it. I made it clumsier. But I shoved you. I put force into it. I felt your weight go up and away from me.”
Her voice cracks on that last line, splitting right down the middle.
The recorder hums softly, swallowing the break.
Lila’s fingers dig into her own knees. “That’s new,” she says. “The shove. You never said that in any of the follow-up calls. Or in that fake ‘we’re sisters forever’ reunion interview.”
“I didn’t want it to be true,” Nora whispers. “If I didn’t say it, maybe it belonged to some other timeline.”
I study her, the way her mascara’s given up at the edges, the tight little tremor fighting through her carefully trained stillness. It’s the first time I’ve watched her cry for something that wasn’t in front of an audience.
“What’s the next body memory?” I ask.
Nora’s eyes glaze, focusing somewhere about a decade away.
“Sound,” she says. “Your scream and the clang. Metal on metal. My wrist burning because I tried to grab the railing and missed. My teeth slamming together. The smell—”
She cuts off, gagging once.
Lila steps in, voice low. “Oil and river,” she says. “Rust and algae. That staircase always smelled like that. Like the mill was rotting back into the water.”
Hearing her finish the sentence steadies Nora enough to nod.
“I hear your body hit the landing,” Nora says. “Then I hear nothing. No groaning. Nothing. I run down two steps and my sneakers skid on the wet metal. I remember thinking, I killed you. Not you fell or this is bad. Just…that.”
The word killed doesn’t echo. It drops like a stone.
My hands are clenched around my notebook so hard my nails dig crescent moons into the cardboard.
“Okay,” I say softly. “So that’s the staircase. That’s impact. Lila, where does your body start its version?”
Her gaze flicks to me, then back to Nora. She inhales, chest expanding against the black cotton of her sweatshirt.
“I don’t get much of the fall,” she says. “I get one clear frame of your hand on my arm. Too tight. Nails digging in. Then I’m weightless, and my stomach goes out through my spine. There’s a flash of the railing at the wrong angle, my shoulder slamming into it, and then…black.”
Her fingers trace along her clavicle, where the collar of her shirt hides surgical scars I’ve only ever seen hinted at in court redactions.
“Next thing my body remembers is cold,” she says. “But not river cold. Fluorescent cold.”
She leans back slightly, eyes on the ceiling now, as if she’s seeing white panels instead of exposed pipes.
“Hospital?” I ask.
“ICU,” she says. “I wake up angry at the smell. Antiseptic and plastic. My mouth tastes like metal and cotton, my tongue’s thick. There’s a tube down my throat. My left leg feels like it’s full of broken glass. I can’t move my right arm. There’s a beeping that won’t shut up, and someone keeps saying my name wrong.”
She switches briefly into a nasal imitation of a nurse stretching “Lila” into “Leela,” and the dryness in it makes my stomach lurch.
“Do you remember Nora?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Not at first. I remember my mom. Her coat still smells like that diner back home—burned coffee and grease. She’s crying quietly, trying not to fog up the glass on the door. Then there’s a man in a suit I’ve never met before standing where she should be. And the first complete sentence my brain files away is him saying, ‘We’re going to take care of you.’”
Nora shifts on the couch like she’s sitting on live wires. “Marcus,” she says.
Lila’s mouth twists. “Marcus and a lawyer from the network,” she says. “They rotate. Morning, afternoon, night. They bring better coffee than the hospital. They talk softly. They keep telling my mom how lucky I am, that the fall could have been so much worse, that my career isn’t over, that the fans love me.”
Her lip curls slightly on that last line.
“When do they start coaching?” I ask.
“Immediately,” she says. “They don’t call it that. They call it ‘aligning accounts.’ They say there’s confusion about whether the staircase was properly secured, whether I was in a restricted area, whether crew had finished the safety checks. They say the town’s gossiping already. They keep using phrases like ‘muddy waters’ and ‘optics.’”
Outside, a siren wails past, warped by the closed windows. The LA light has shifted toward late afternoon, hitting the glass at an angle that paints faint reflections of us over the mill photo on the corkboard. Three ghosts hovering over a rusted skeleton.
“They ask me what I remember,” Lila continues. “I say, ‘Nora.’ Just that. No details. I can’t get the rest yet. I just know there was heat and metal and Nora’s face. The lawyer stiffens. Marcus smiles like I’ve told a cute story. He says, ‘That’s right. Nora was right there. She tried to grab you. She nearly went over with you, you know. She saved your life.’”
Nora’s hand flies to her mouth. “He said that?” she whispers.
Lila nods. “He repeats it. They both do. They lay it out like a script. I slipped. The stairs were wet from condensation. I was running lines in my head instead of watching my step. You grabbed me, tried to pull me back. That’s the only reason I didn’t crack my skull open on the concrete. It becomes this heroic little beat in the middle of an ‘unfortunate accident.’”
She turns her head and looks at Nora fully for the first time since she started talking.
“They keep telling me you’re devastated,” she says. “That you’ve been crying in your trailer, that you can’t sleep. That you’re begging them to make sure I’m okay.”
Nora’s shoulders hike, then sag. “I was begging them,” she says hoarsely. “But not like that. I was begging them to make sure you were alive. And then…I was begging them to tell me what to say so I didn’t destroy my family.”
I feel the world of the mill collapse into the world of this loft, into the world of every frantic email I’ve sent trying to verify a rumor without getting sued.
“Do you remember signing anything?” I ask Lila.
She nods slowly. “Later. After surgery. They give my mom and me a stack of papers. Hospital forms, releases, something about workers’ comp. Buried in there is the NDA and the settlement. They highlight a line about ‘no admission of wrongdoing.’ They say the studio will cover all my bills, that they’ll make sure I get a graceful exit from the show, maybe spin it as a storyline. They hint at a spinoff years down the line. Then they say, very gently, that if we decide to ‘pursue other avenues,’ they’ll have to freeze support while the matter’s in dispute. Which could take years.”
Her hand drifts unconsciously to her leg.
“And?” I ask, even though I know the ending.
“We sign,” she says. “My mom’s hand shakes the whole time. She smells like Pennsylvania rain and coffee and fear. I tell myself I grabbed the railing wrong. I tell myself if I’d been more careful, they couldn’t threaten us. I tell myself they need Nora as their star and me as their cautionary tale. I swallow the story until it calcifies in my bones.”
The room feels airless. The AC suddenly throws a colder draft, raising goosebumps down my arms.
“So when you say I grabbed the railing wrong,” Nora says softly, “you’re not…absolving me.”
“No,” Lila says. “You shoved me. I misjudged. The rail was slick because they didn’t fix the leak or add grip tape even after complaints. The safety meeting that week was a joke because they were rushing to make their streaming launch date. A fixer stepped in and turned all of that into a clean tumbler of ‘accident’ for public consumption. Multiple things are true.”
Multiple things are true. My journalist brain latches onto that like a lifeline.
“Okay,” I say, exhaling slowly. “Now I want to zoom out.”
They both look at me, and for a second I want to shrink into the couch.
I flip open my notebook instead, letting the familiar scratch of pen against paper ground me. “What you’re describing,” I say, “matches every structure I’ve been mapping on that wall. I keep seeing the same beats: dangerous conditions passed off as normal, young workers taught to be grateful, someone gets hurt, then the machine kicks in. Lawyers show up with euphemisms and checks. NDAs frame silence as professional maturity. The person with the least power is told their future depends on protecting the person with the most.”
Lila’s gaze flicks to the corkboard, where Rhea’s photo sits near the mill still. “Rhea,” she says.
“Rhea,” I echo. “The compressed call sheet, the taped-over emergency stop, the rushed safety briefings. Then the language in the studio’s statement—‘tragic accident,’ ‘unforeseeable,’ ‘family’s privacy.’ The same words they used for you, Lila, in the local paper. I pulled the clippings. I read them over bottomless coffee in that diner where half the town alternated between calling Nora a savior and a homewrecker.”
Nora lets out a short, humorless breath. “Try being both at once,” she says. “It’s a fun party trick.”
I lean forward, elbows on my knees. The headphones hug my ears, hot and plasticky; every breath in the room sounds too loud.
“The thing is,” I say, “my work barely touches the structural part. I talk about it, sure, but listeners latch onto the character. The villain. The hero. The comeback. Even when I try to center systems, they quote the messiest line about Nora instead. They ship you two as twisted soulmates or they write essays about female jealousy. It all collapses back into individuals because that’s easier to process than a whole industry built on scrubbing blood off the rails.”
Lila watches me, something considering in her eyes. Nora stares at the recorder like it might grow teeth.
“You’re saying you helped re-inscribe the script they wrote at the hospital,” Lila says.
The truth of that sits like a stone in my gut. “Yes,” I say. “I tried to be different. I still fed the same hunger. The difference is I didn’t get paid studio money for it.”
Nora’s head lifts. “So where does that leave us?” she asks. “We can’t unshove. We can’t unfall. We can’t unbury the NDAs. Even this recording lives in a limbo where it’s too dangerous to release and too heavy to pretend we never said it.”
The way she says limbo makes me think of her glass house again, all those transparent walls suspended above the LA sprawl. She’s been living in a display case with a trapdoor no one could see.
“It leaves us with more truth than any of your public narratives,” I say. “Yours as America’s sweetheart who made one ‘mistake.’ Yours as the vengeful ghost haunting Hollywood. Mine as the crusading podcaster exposing it all from a safe distance. All of those are partial. This is messier. And now that we’ve spoken it, we don’t get to pretend we don’t know better.”
Lila’s fingers drum once on the arm of her chair, then go still. “Knowledge is leverage,” she says. “And responsibility.”
Nora lets her head tip back against the couch, eyes closing for a moment. Her voice, when it comes, sounds sanded down.
“I kept telling myself confessing would just feed the machine,” she says. “Turn my guilt into another redemption arc. But hearing you talk about the structure makes me realize staying quiet does the same thing in reverse. The system still wins. It just keeps casting me as the redeemed survivor instead of the harmful one.”
The AC hiccups and then settles into a lower hum. Outside the windows, the sun crawls toward the line of hills, turning the sky over Laurel Canyon into a pale, hazy gold. Somewhere up there, Nora’s glass house is catching that light, a glittering box on a ridge.
“For what it’s worth,” I say quietly, “hearing you both say out loud that the fall was you and the stairs and the schedule and the lawyers—not just ‘Did Nora push Lila?’—changes the way I think about every episode I’ve ever made. I don’t know yet what I do with that. But I know I can’t go back to simplifying it for a pithy closing monologue.”
Lila leans forward, elbows on her knees. The recorder sits between us like a fourth presence.
“Good,” she says. “Because I’m tired of being either a ghost or a plot device.”
Nora opens her eyes, meets Lila’s gaze, doesn’t look away. “And I’m tired of being a brand.”
The three of us sit there in the hum and the fading light, the smell of old coffee and warm electronics thick in the air, listening to our own breath feed the red-glowing box.
Exhaustion drapes over my shoulders like a weight vest, but underneath it there’s a thin, strange lightness—like someone opened a window in a room I didn’t know was locked.
“So,” I say. “We’ve got a fuller version of what really happened than anyone else on earth. We have receipts, memories, structures. What we don’t have is a plan.”
Lila’s mouth curves into the barest suggestion of a smile, humor edged with something sharp.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she says.
Her fingers hover over the recorder, not to stop it, but to emphasize its presence.
“Now that we finally agree on the story,” she adds, eyes flicking between Nora and me, “I’m going to ask you both to help me do something with it that the studio can’t control.”
The red light keeps burning, catching the moment before any of us answer.