Lila doesn’t wait for either of us to answer. She just stands, stretches the stiffness from her legs, and crosses to my whiteboard like she already owns the space.
The marker squeaks when she uncaps it. That tiny, ugly sound makes my shoulders jump harder than any stunt explosion I’ve watched from the safety of my couch.
“We have three levers,” she says. “Visibility, evidence, and narrative.”
Nora lets out a low, humorless breath. “That’s one way to summarize three ruined lives,” she mutters.
I drag my desk chair a little closer, the metal legs scraping the concrete. Sweat prickles under my headphones, plastic pressing warm against my ears. The recorder’s red light keeps burning between us on the table, catching every inhale.
Lila draws three horizontal lines on the whiteboard, one above the other, then labels them: set, cloud, podcast.
“Top line,” she says, tapping set. “Finale shoot on Stage 14. Call time five a.m., but the live behind-the-scenes special goes out during the last block of shooting, in the evening. Studio loves synergy. Live look at the burning mill, nostalgic clips from River’s Edge, Nora reflecting on trauma and growth. They get their glossy redemption arc in real time.”
Hearing it framed that cleanly makes my stomach lurch. I’d already pictured the cameras gliding through the refrigerated air on Stage 14, skimming past union grips and ring-lighted influencers in borrowed hard hats. I’d smelled the chemical sweetness of fake smoke, the stale sugar of craft-service donuts melting under key lights. Now the whole thing rearranges in my head into a trap.
“Middle line,” Lila continues, tapping cloud. “My dead-man switch. Right now it’s set to trigger if I don’t check in by a certain time for several days. It pushes everything in the metal box plus encrypted backups to Quinn here, plus a few outlets who don’t owe the studio any favors.”
My throat goes dry at hearing my name in the list with “a few outlets.” I picture the files she showed Nora: scans of medical records stamped with Pennsylvania hospital logos, grainy mill photos, legal memos written in bloodless corporate jargon.
“And the bottom line?” I ask, nodding toward podcast.
“You,” Lila says. “Your episode schedule. Your reach. Your choice to either reinforce the studio’s spin or blow a hole in it.”
Nora’s head snaps toward me like I’ve just pulled a knife instead of a microphone.
“She already blew a hole in it,” Nora says. “My mother can’t go to the grocery store without hearing about it. Sponsors pulled out. Some kid at a coffee shop asked for a selfie and then asked me if I ‘forgave myself yet.’”
Her fingers grip the edge of the couch, knuckles blanching. I catch a faint whiff of her perfume under the loft’s stew of coffee, dust, and dying electronics—something citrusy and expensive that doesn’t belong in this room with its chipped mugs and thrift-store cushions.
“And yet the system is still standing,” Lila says. “You’re still shooting the finale. The same executives still sign everyone’s checks. They absorbed the hit and turned it into more buzz.”
She turns back to the board and draws a fat circle on the set line. “What I’m proposing is that we stop hitting from the side and go through the center. We use the live special as the delivery system. You”—she points the marker at Nora—“tell the truth on camera. Full truth. Shove, cover-up, NDAs, names.”
Nora’s head jerks back like the marker is a weapon.
“You want me to confess to a violent crime on a corporate livestream,” she says. Her voice sits on the edge of laughter and a scream.
“Yes,” Lila says simply. “While I trigger the evidence drop.” She taps the cloud line directly under the circle. “The second you speak, the files flood the internet. No one can claim you’re inventing stories or defaming the poor fragile studio. Receipts hit timelines at the same time as your face hits the feed.”
I hear Stage 14 in my head while she talks: the constant AC roar, the dull clank of metal rigging, grips calling warnings over the din. I picture the recreated Pennsylvania mill standing in the middle of all that artifice, wet stair rails painted with water that still manages to smell like rust on my last visit. A rusted skeleton built from foam and steel, waiting to burn for prestige content.
“What about me?” I ask, because my stomach already knows the answer, and I need to hear my own doom spoken out loud.
Lila underlines podcast. “You air the private recording,” she says. “Not immediately. You’ll need a minute to cut and frame it. But you prepare an emergency episode that drops right after the live special, or as close as you can. Context. Nuance. The things corporate media will strip out.”
The word private cuts through me. I picture my listeners in their cars, on their commutes, earbuds in as they wash dishes. I picture them hearing Nora’s voice crack on “I shoved you,” hearing Lila recount being fed that heroic script in the hospital. I picture them hearing my questions and realizing I’m not neutral in this story at all.
Nora shakes her head, curls brushing her cheekbones. “No,” she says. “I can’t. I’ll be sued into dust before I even get off the soundstage. They’ll say I’m breaching NDAs, slandering the network, violating every morals clause in my contracts. I could lose everything. The house, my residuals, my mom’s health insurance, my sister’s tuition. I could go to jail, Lila.”
The word jail lands dull and heavy in the room.
Lila doesn’t flinch. “You already breach the spirit of those NDAs every time you breathe,” she says. “They bought your silence to erase what happened to me, to that PA, to Rhea. How many more accidents have they budgeted for because the last three didn’t blow up their stock price?”
Rhea’s name pulls the air tighter. In my mind I see the call sheet I leaked, the times circled in red, the tiny typed note about “mandatory safety briefing—15 min.” Fifteen minutes to reassure everyone that the burning set swallowing their workday is under control.
“Silence hasn’t kept anyone safe,” Lila adds. “You know that. Your body knows that every time you walk those stairs on the set. You’re scared of lawsuits. I’m scared of more funerals.”
Nora’s eyes shine in the low loft light. She doesn’t wipe them. Her hands tremble in her lap instead, rings clicking a jittery rhythm.
“You’re asking me to pick legal death over physical death,” she says. “You make it sound noble. It’s still death.”
I clear my throat, voice coming out thinner than I expect. “Or you pick another kind of survival,” I say. “A smaller one. One that doesn’t depend on everyone agreeing you’re the victim and never the one who did harm.”
Nora looks at me like I’ve slapped her, then lets out a long, ragged breath. “You’re really good at turning my life into metaphors,” she says. There’s no heat in it, just tired acknowledgment.
Lila snaps the cap back onto the marker, then clicks it off again, restless. “This isn’t just about you,” she says. “I know it feels that way. You’re the face. They made you the glossy poster girl for second chances. But there are crew members on that set right now who need the truth more than you need another brand partnership.”
She tilts her head toward me. “Tell her what you heard from the stunt performers you interviewed off the record.”
My throat tightens, but I nod. “I talked to three people from different shows,” I say. “None of them wanted to be on mic. One talked about being told to ‘take one for the team’ when a rig failed. One described a near-fall on an untested staircase that could’ve turned into another mill. And one said, word for word, ‘We all know someone has to bleed before they’ll add a handrail.’”
Nora squeezes her eyes shut. “I was the one at the top of the stairs when you bled,” she says to Lila. “I shoved you. And then I let everyone treat it like an offering.”
“So stop offering other people,” Lila replies. Her tone softens by a fraction. “Use the one thing only you have. Use your voice where they can’t edit you out.”
A siren keens faintly outside, sliding past the building and away. We sit in its wake, listening to the ghost of the sound.
“Okay,” I say, my own voice sounding distant in my ears. “Logistics. If we’re really talking about this, I need specifics. Timing. Redundancies. What happens if the studio cuts the feed the second Nora goes off script.”
That shifts something in Nora’s posture. Her eyes fly open, focusing on me up by the whiteboard, and I watch the decision flicker behind them: the move from impossible to terrible but technically feasible.
“They will cut the feed,” she says. “The instant they realize I’m not telling the story they rehearsed. They’ll frame it as a technical glitch, go to pre-taped content.”
“Fine,” Lila says. “We use their paranoia as our clock. You start with names they can’t spin: executives who signed off on safety violations, the fixer who came to my hospital room, the lawyer who prepped talking points. You don’t lead with ‘I shoved Lila’; you build the frame. By the time they pull you, the context is out.”
“That feels a lot like strategy,” I say. “Like we’re staging narrative beats for a twist.”
“We are,” Lila says. “The difference is we’re not cutting out the gore this time. We’re putting it where people can actually see it without falling down the stairs.”
Nora huffs a short, broken laugh. “Of course my confession has to be blocked like a scene,” she says. “Old habits die, what, litigated?”
The attempt at humor hangs there, wobbly and brave.
“And the evidence?” I ask. “How precise can we make the drop?”
Lila nods toward her bag. “I adjust my triggers,” she says. “Right now, if someone kills me or I disappear, the files go wide after a delay. I set a parallel condition keyed to a phrase Nora uses on the live stream. Something innocuous enough not to tip them off, specific enough for the system to detect in the transcripts.”
I blink. “You can do that?”
“I can pay people who can,” she says. “I’ve had years to plan. I just didn’t have a willing protagonist yet.”
Nora exhales through her nose, not quite a snort. “I liked being the protagonist more when it involved better lighting and fake crying,” she says. “But okay. Say I agree. Say I stand on that soundstage with the fake mill burning behind me, with the air conditioning roaring and the fake smoke stinging my throat, and I start saying the words you want. Lawsuits are still coming. Arrest is still on the table. My family still resents me. Why isn’t this just martyrdom that leaves the system intact after I get ground up?”
I realize she isn’t asking Lila. She’s asking me.
“Because it changes where the glass is,” I say slowly. “Right now, you’re in the glass house in the hills and everyone else is outside, throwing opinions at it. The crew, the fans, the people hurt by this industry—they’re pressed up against a window they can’t see through. If you tell the truth on their camera, at their most controlled moment, you crack the glass from the inside. You show people the rigging. Maybe they keep filming. Maybe they rebuild. But they can’t pretend they don’t know where the blood came from.”
The words leave a metallic taste in my mouth, like I’ve licked the mill’s cold stair rail.
Nora studies me, shoulders still tight but eyes clearing. “And you?” she says. “Where do you stand when the glass shatters?”
“Next to you,” I say. The answer terrifies me enough that I know it’s the only honest one. “On the record. I’ll introduce the context episode by name. I’ll say I was part of amplifying the spectacle and that this is me trying to do something closer to justice. I’ll probably lose access to half my future guests. Sponsors will run. But I can’t live in my own glass booth anymore either.”
Lila watches us quietly, hands folded around the marker, grip leaving faint smudges of ink on her fingers. “You both speak like people who finally understand that safety and secrecy aren’t synonyms,” she says.
Nora laughs softly, a sound with edges. “No,” she says. “I speak like someone who finally understands there is no pain-free option left. It’s all variations on loss.”
She looks up at the whiteboard again, at the three lines and the circled finale.
“I’ll need to write it,” she adds. “The confession. I can’t improvise this. I’ll spiral. But I can’t let Marcus or PR see a draft.”
“Write it in longhand,” I suggest. “On paper. No digital trail. Bring it here. We’ll work through it together. Off mic until you decide otherwise.”
The idea of sitting at my reclaimed-wood table with Nora Hayes and Lila Park, redrafting a confession in ballpoint pen, feels absurd and holy.
Lila nods. “And I’ll finalize the dead-man switch conditions,” she says. “Plus a secondary dump if they cut your mic early. I want them guessing which fuse to stamp out.”
The hum of the loft’s old fridge buzzes through the wall, louder than before. Outside, the sky over LA slides toward purple, the same color the river back home turns when the mill reflects sunset in oil-slick fragments.
“So we’re doing this,” I say, hearing the wobble in my own voice. “We’re turning the finale into a live trial the studio didn’t schedule. I’ll prep a special feed, labeled something dull so my hosting platform doesn’t flag it. Once you start talking, Nora, I hit publish as soon as I can finish an intro.”
“Say it,” Lila says. She looks at me, not unkind, but unblinking. “Say you’re in.”
My hand finds the recorder on the table. The red light stares back, patient and merciless. Under my palm, the plastic feels warm, almost alive with everything it already holds.
“I’m in,” I say.
Nora exhales like she’s been holding her breath since the mill. “Then I guess I am too,” she whispers. “Because I’m out of exits.”
Lila caps the marker with a final click and sets it on the ledge of the board. “Good,” she says. “Then the only question left is how many people try to stop us before we get to the fire.”
The whiteboard stares back at us, lines and arrows and that fat circle around FINAL SHOOT. I watch it like it might rearrange itself into a safer shape.
It doesn’t.