I tell myself I’m just writing lines.
That lie works for about three minutes.
I sit at the long, pale desk in my office, the glass wall behind my monitor showing Los Angeles spread out like a circuit board. The city hums under the dark, the air outside muddied by light pollution; inside, the AC whispers steady and cold. My fingers hover above the keyboard. The cursor blinks in a blank document, a tiny metronome counting down to something I can’t rehearse.
I type: “My name is Nora Elise Hayes, and I shoved Lila Park on the mill staircase.”
I read it once, twice. The words look fake, like someone fan-ficced my life and got indulgent. I backspace all of it until the page is empty again.
“Okay,” I say out loud, voice too bright in the quiet room. “Try again.”
Second attempt: “Before anyone else can frame this, I need to tell you what I did as a teenager on a show called ‘River’s Edge High.’ A girl was hurt. I hurt her.”
I feel my jaw clench. The word hurt feels evasive, a cushion over a blade. I add: “I shoved her.” Then I delete that sentence. Then I retype it. The keystrokes sound louder each time, plastic snaps under my fingertips.
Down in the kitchen, the fridge cycles with a low groan; the house holds its breath with me.
Third attempt: “This isn’t a redemption story. This is a confession and a record.” I like that one. I highlight it and paste it to the top of the page. Under it, I try to explain the mill, the fixer, Marcus, the way my career grew in the spaces their silence opened.
“At sixteen, I learned that if the right people decide your harm is profitable, they will bury the body and hand you a new script.”
I pause and picture Standards & Practices underlining bury the body in red. I leave it in anyway. I owe the truth a spine, not another layer of bubble wrap.
My phone buzzes against the desk, screen lighting up with three push alerts about tomorrow’s behind-the-scenes special. Hashtags trail under my name in autoplay headlines. I flip the phone face-down without checking which side of the internet currently owns me.
I keep typing.
“I shoved Lila Park during a fight about lines, and she fell down a rusted staircase in an abandoned mill where we never should have been shooting without proper safety protocols.”
I add: “She grabbed a wet rail that shouldn’t have been there without a grip checking it. We both made choices. Only one of us got a fix.”
I pull my hands back and stare at that last line. A fix. Marcus’s word, back then. The fixer’s title. The studio’s habit. My life.
I hit print before I can talk myself out of it.
The printer in the corner wakes up with a series of clicks and whirs. The sound rakes across my nerves. The machine spits out my confession in stiff white sheets. An award I won at twenty-three catches the printer’s light and throws it back as a warped gold streak on the wall.
I take the pages and read them standing up. Ink smell mixes with the faint citrus cleaner the housekeepers use. My eyes catch on phrases that feel too pat, too self-aware. I grab a pen and circle them: “not an excuse,” “bigger than me,” “systemic failure.” Little PR ghosts clinging to each sentence.
I scrawl messy replacements in the margins. I benefited. I let it happen. I let it keep happening. The pen digs hard enough to indent the paper.
When I’m done but not satisfied, I fold the stack in thirds, then in half again, until the pages are soft at the creases. I slide the bundle into the inside pocket of the beat-up canvas bag I use on set, behind my marked-up script and a half-empty packet of breath mints.
If I freeze tomorrow, I tell myself, I can pull this out and read it. If I die tomorrow, someone can find it when they go through my things.
The thought lands in my chest with surprising calm. Then my phone buzzes again.
Lila this time.
Lila: Check your email. Subject line is a date you know.
I open my laptop’s mail app, breath hitching when I see it: 09-14-2011. The night at the mill. There’s a link to a secure drive folder and a one-sentence note.
Watch the video all the way through before you decide anything about tomorrow.
My finger trembles on the trackpad as I click.
The video opens on darkness. A few seconds in, the picture sharpens: night-vision grain over a familiar outline. The mill. Not the fake one we built on Stage 14, but the real Pennsylvania brick skeleton, its broken windows gaping, its metal stairs just visible under a low fog. Lila’s phone camera catches the river’s dull shine beyond, black water moving under sodium-orange streetlights.
I hear her breath first—close to the mic, controlled but uneven.
“Okay,” she says on the recording. Her voice sounds smaller without the clipped authority she wears on set. “Documentation. For whoever ends up watching this. I’m at the old mill.”
She turns the camera on herself. Her face fills my screen: older than the girl in my flashbacks, hair tucked under a beanie, jaw hardened by time and surgeries and too much grit. A faint scar cuts across one eyebrow, catching the light.
“I had an offer today,” she says. “A way to walk away. Again.” Her mouth twists. “Funny how those keep showing up, like coupons.”
She looks past the camera toward the building. The image swings with her; my stomach lurches with the motion, memory fighting pixels.
“I came here first,” she says. “Because I don’t trust myself not to rewrite history if I only sit in my apartment with a laptop and a vengeance PowerPoint.”
She steps closer to the river. The audio picks up the low rush of water against the embankment, a sound I used to hear through my bedroom window on humid nights. I grip the edge of my desk, knuckles blanching.
“This is what’s left,” she says, lifting her hand into frame.
In her palm sits something small and dark, edges catching light: a bent metal bracket, no bigger than a matchbox, flecks of rust clinging to it. The sight makes my tongue taste iron. I remember gripping that same shape during a blocking rehearsal, years ago, whining about the cold seeping into my fingers.
“A PA kept this,” Lila says. “Souvenir from the night no one officially remembers. They mailed it to me when your show got renewed. With a Post-it that said, ‘Thought you should have this.’”
She breathes out through her nose, a humorless huff.
“I’ve been carrying it like a cursed worry stone,” she says. “Checking it before every big move, like it can tell me whether I’m still that girl on the stairs. I’m not.”
She curls her fingers around the bracket.
“So I’m throwing this in the river,” she says. “Not because I forgive you. Or them. But because I’m done building my future on a piece of rust that almost killed me.”
She looks dead into the camera—into me.
“Tomorrow isn’t about this anymore,” she says. “It’s about what everyone did with the silence. Including me. Including you.”
With a quick flick of her wrist, she throws. The camera follows the arc of the metal, a brief glint against the dark, then a soft splash off-mic. Ripples catch the streetlight for a moment and disappear.
The video ends on the mill’s jagged outline, fog hugging its lower floors like a secret.
When the file stops, the room around me rushes back: the faint lemon cleaner, the whir of the AC, the distant whoop of a siren climbing the hill road. I realize my hand is pressed flat over my own chest, like I’ve been checking for a hole.
I scroll down. Below the video link, there’s a list of file names: PDFs, audio snippets, scanned memos. Lila’s evidence tree. At the bottom, one more line of text.
You don’t get to control all of this anymore. But you do get to choose whether you show up honest.
I close the laptop slowly. On the glass wall, my reflection hovers over the city: pale face, dark eyes, a smear of light. For a second I see the mill superimposed on the canyon, its rusted bones standing where my house sits. Both structures held up by stories.
My phone buzzes again.
This time it’s Quinn: a link to a private audio file and a message.
Quinn: Rough intro for tomorrow’s episode. Sharing in case you want to know how I’m framing my own guilt before you walk into yours.
I plug in my headphones before my courage can drain.
The audio opens with room noise from the loft: the faint hiss of the air conditioner wedged in the window, the subtle buzz of old wiring, a passing car outside on the side street. Then Quinn’s voice comes in, closer than I’ve ever heard it, stripped of the bright hosting energy she usually wears.
“Okay,” she says. “Take one. This is Quinn Hart, and before I tell you anything about anyone else’s choices, I need to talk about my own.”
She pauses; I hear a small click, maybe a pen she’s fidgeting with.
“I started this show because I loved stories that lied to me,” she says. “Teen dramas that promised transformation through better hair and more eyeliner. I said I wanted to unpack them, hold them accountable. But the truth is, I chased the high of being the smart fan who noticed what everyone else missed.”
Another pause. I picture her pushing her glasses up, glancing at her corkboard, familiar motions I’ve watched from across the loft.
“When I found the missing episodes and the girl in the mill,” she continues, “I got excited. Not because someone might have been hurt, but because I thought, ‘This will make an amazing arc.’ I put download charts ahead of the anonymous voice on my tip line asking me to think about safety.”
She cuts the track—there’s a slight skip—then comes back in a little steadier.
“I’m about to let you hear a conversation that was never meant for you,” she says. “A recording between three women who were trying to tell each other the truth before they decided what to tell the world. I have their consent now, but that doesn’t erase the fact that I built my career on taking without asking first.”
My throat tightens. I remember the red light on her recorder in the loft, the way my confession poured out in stops and starts while knowing I had technically agreed but not knowing who I was performing for.
“So here’s my promise,” Quinn says. “I’m going to air this because I believe transparency can keep other people from being hurt. But I also promise to tell you where my own boundaries stopped short, where I enjoyed the spectacle. If you decide that makes me part of the problem, you won’t be wrong.”
She laughs, a short, self-conscious burst.
“Media literacy doesn’t cancel out exploitation,” she says. “Especially when you’re the one holding the mic.”
There’s a rustle of paper.
“Tomorrow, while cameras roll on a finale that’s supposed to be fiction,” she says, “some very real decisions are going to be made about what we value more: careers or lives. I’m not neutral. I’m not objective. I care about some of the people in this story more than others, and I have to live with that too.”
She ends with a breath that hits the mic.
“Okay,” she murmurs. “Cut there. We’ll see if I still stand by this when the lawyers call.”
The track stops.
I pull the headphones off and let them dangle from my hand. My ears ring faintly in the sudden quiet; the house’s AC fills the gap, a constant low sigh like stage air handling on Stage 14. I smell printer ink, citrus, and the faint plastic tang from the headphones’ rubber.
On my desk, three things now sit within reach: my printed confession, Lila’s video still frozen on the mill, and Quinn’s audio file, its waveform a jagged line across the screen.
Three versions of the same night, three attempts at honest storytelling, all bent by different kinds of guilt.
I tuck the printed pages deeper into my bag and slide my laptop into its sleeve. I forward Lila’s video to a secure folder, then to a burner account Quinn gave me “for the day you get tired of pretending,” her words. I don’t tell Lila I did it. I don’t tell Marcus any of this.
The city outside pulses, cars threading through canyon roads. Somewhere across the country, the river keeps running past the mill, carrying a rusted bracket along its bottom or burying it in silt. Up in the loft downtown, Quinn probably sits hunched over her console, editing breaths and pauses into something that sounds deliberate.
I set my alarm for 3:30 a.m., the screen glow bright in the dark bedroom. Call time is five. Hair and makeup will paint my face into a version that looks good crying, in case the live coverage gets that far.
“Tomorrow,” I whisper into the room, voice catching. “Tomorrow I stop pretending this is just a role.”
The glass walls throw my words back at me, soft and warped.
I turn out the light, but sleep doesn’t come. I lie there listening to the faint hum of the house and the blood rushing in my ears, thinking about a mill in the fog, a loft full of red string, a soundstage loaded with fake fire and very real exits that might not open.
By the time the alarm finally pierces the dark, I haven’t decided whether I’m walking into a confession, an execution, or both.
I only know I’m still going.