The microphones stop mattering before they ever go dead.
The first wave hits as vibration, not sound—the tremor of a hundred phones buzzing through denim pockets and costume skirts, rattling against clipboards and metal folding chairs. Then comes the chorus of pings: notifications from a dozen apps layering over sirens and shouted orders.
“What the—” a PA mutters near the camera rig, staring down at his screen. “Inbox just exploded.”
My own phone, still zipped in the shallow pocket of my jacket, starts to buzz against burned skin. The sensation is weirdly intimate, like the device is trying to burrow its way into my ribs.
“Don’t look yet,” I whisper to myself.
I look.
The lock screen is a slot machine of banners: Breaking: Multiple outlets receive leaked documents tied to Nora Hayes confession; From: REDACTED—Subject: Evidence release – River’s Edge / Second Chances; From: Unknown—Subject: IF YOU’RE READING THIS, I’M NOT IN CONTROL ANYMORE.
The last subject line steals whatever breath the smoke left me.
Lila’s.
I thumb open my email.
At the top of my inbox, stamped with a time that makes my stomach twist, sits an unread message.
From: deadfile@protonmail.com
To: multiple recipients (undisclosed)
Subject: Lila Park / Elle Park – Evidence Package – River’s Edge High / Silverline Studios
My vision narrows to the text. The pavement feels less solid under my boots.
I tap it.
The message opens in a stuttering flood of black text on white.
If you’re receiving this, you have either:
(a) published work related to Nora Hayes, River’s Edge High, or Silverline Studios safety incidents, or
(b) served as legal counsel, executive leadership, or crisis management for Silverline during the years listed below.My name is Lila Park. You may know me professionally as Elle Park. The following attachments contain primary documentation of:
– My injury on the Riverside Textile Mill set (Pennsylvania)
– Subsequent medical treatment, surgeries, and disability assessments
– Internal legal memos outlining a strategy to erase me and rebrand Nora Hayes
– Confidential settlement agreements and NDAs
– Safety reports tied to later incidents (Rhea Flores, on-set fires, rigging “accidents”)Consider this a correction to the historical record.
A low whistle slips out of me.
“You’re seeing this too, right?” someone says.
I look up.
The social media manager from network PR—pink hair dull under soot, branded windbreaker half-zipped—stares at her phone like it’s turned into a snake.
“My editor just forwarded it,” she says. “Same time stamp as yours?”
“11:32,” I say automatically.
She holds her phone up. The screen flashes the same time, same subject line, same attached zip file icon.
Around us, other crew members mutter numbers.
“All the big trades got it,” a camera operator reports, scanning a group text thread. “Deadline, Variety, THR, the gossip blogs. Even that little fan forum that kept posting about the missing episodes.”
The studio’s glass office block looms beyond the parking lot, windows catching the glare. Part of me imagines editors in New York and Seoul and London unknowingly sitting under their own glass while this email lands like a stone.
For once, shattered glass bent toward truth, not spin.
“Nora!”
Quinn’s voice comes from just behind my shoulder, thin from the smoke but edged with urgency. I turn.
She’s still wrapped in the silver emergency blanket, but her laptop has appeared from somewhere, open on the hood of a production van like it’s a makeshift altar. The reflective foil crinkles with each breath, catching drops of sunlight, making her look like she’s standing in front of a moving mirror.
“She did it,” Quinn says. “She actually did it.”
On her screen, a progress bar glows neon green against a dark interface. In the corner, I recognize the logo of that secure server company she nerded out about in one of her episodes—the one she said was good enough to annoy governments.
Beside the bar, filenames pour down in a scroll that keeps refreshing.
MED_REC_LP_01.pdf
ORIGINAL_XRAYS_200X_SCAN.tiff
CRISIS_MEMO_RIVERSEDGE_1_of_3.pdf
SILVERLINE_INTERNAL_EMAIL_THREAD_REDRACTED.msg
HARNESS_FAIL_RHEA_FLORES_VIDEO.mov
“She put my server as a primary recipient,” Quinn says. Her fingers flutter over the trackpad, then curl into fists to stop the shaking. “Redundant cloud backups, onion routing, the whole paranoia kit. I’m watching the checksum scripts run in real time.”
“English,” I croak.
“Sorry.” Her laugh breaks halfway through. “I mean: this isn’t a random leak. She planned this for years. She’s making sure it can’t disappear again.”
The words land heavy and precise.
I inch closer, smoke-stung eyes scanning snippets that pop up in little preview windows as Quinn hovers.
A medical scan with my teenage face ghosted in the corner, blurry from motion, Lila’s neck immobilized in a brace.
A PDF stamped with a Pennsylvania hospital’s logo, diagnostic codes lined up like accusations.
A memo header: CONFIDENTIAL – ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE – Subject: Incident at Riverside Textile Mill – Talent: N.H., L.P.
My initials.
Lila’s.
“God,” I whisper.
Quinn points at a different document.
“Look,” she says. “These are call sheets from River’s Edge days. And here—” she flicks to the next preview “—is a schedule from last month, same AD signing off on a compressed stunt schedule. She’s literally drawing a line from that railing in Pennsylvania to Rhea’s fall and today’s fire.”
The hum of the office building’s air conditioning unit grows louder in my awareness, a steady mechanical exhale that’s been background noise all day. Inside those glass walls, I know someone is already on a conference call, trying to figure out how to spin this, which synonyms for “unforeseen tragedy” to deploy.
“She even included the mill photos,” Quinn adds quietly.
The preview shows the river town in winter, fog hugging the slow water, the brick mill rearing out of it like a rusting shipwreck. Wooden stairs slick with damp. A metal rail stained with old, dark brown.
My stomach flips between past and present—the smell of wet iron from back home, the chemical tang of fake smoke from Stage 14 still clinging to my hair.
“Quinn.” My voice comes out hoarse. “Can you tell how many places this is going?”
She glances at a console.
“Counting mirrors? At least twelve primary outlets,” she says. “Plus whatever BCC list she set. And…” Her brows knit. “There’s a public link going live in—shit—thirty seconds.”
“Where?”
“Her dead-man-switch Tumblr,” Quinn says. “Of course it’s a Tumblr. Caption says: ‘For the girls who were told to stop being hysterical and hit their marks.’”
A young grip in a faded punk band T-shirt calls from a few feet away.
“Uh, the fan forums already have it,” he says. “They’re posting screenshots of emails. #LilaPark is trending. #EllePark too.”
The tidal pull of the internet presses at my back, invisible and huge.
Somewhere beyond the parking lot, Lila’s carefully hoarded privacy burns in its own kind of fire.
“She’s not just backing me up,” I say slowly. “She’s indicting herself.”
Quinn’s head jerks up.
I tilt my chin toward the list still populating on her screen.
“Those sabotage plans she described to us?” I say. “The sandbag, the taped emergency stop, the rigging modifications. Are those in there?”
Quinn scrolls, lips moving as she reads.
“Yeah,” she says. “There are schematics, emails from throwaway accounts where she warned about safety and got ignored, then her own… logs? It’s like a diary, but with timestamps and technical notes.”
She clicks one.
Text appears in a white window.
04:13 A.M. – Stage 14 – placed redundant signage around fire exits. PA removed per AD request (“clutters frame”).
05:47 A.M. – verified harness swap; left anonymous note re: inspection. Ignored.
15:22 P.M. – taped over emergency stop as escalation. Calculated risk based on rehearsal patterns and manual override time. Intended scare, not injury. Outcome: failure.
I am writing this down so no one else can edit my guilt for me.
The last line scratches across my chest.
“She’s giving them her own crimes,” I say.
I picture Marcus’s last look—fierce, terrified, still scanning for angles even as the ceiling came down. We spent years letting lawyers ration guilt for us, slicing it into livable pieces.
Lila refuses the diet version.
On the far edge of the parking lot, by the access road that curves toward the studio gate, a cluster of police cruisers and a black-and-white sheriff’s SUV block off traffic. Yellow tape flutters in the hot breeze, bright against the washed-out sky. Officers move in purposeful lines, radios crackling.
Lila stands just outside the medic tent, watching them.
The metal case hangs at her side, the handle cutting red into her fingers. There’s a patch of soot on her cheek in the shape of a thumbprint. Her eyes flicker to me, to Quinn, to the gate.
I take a step toward her.
“Lila,” I call.
Her hand tightens on the case.
For a beat, the wind carries the smell of coffee from somewhere—craft-services trying to keep people functioning with burnt diner-strength brew. It rides over the stink of smoke and charred plywood, familiar and wrong, half dragging me back to the all-night diner on the river road where crews used to gossip about us while we picked at fries.
Lila walks toward me.
Each step is steady, measured, like she’s hitting marks she taped herself.
“You knew about this trigger?” I ask, nodding at my phone. “About the timing?”
“I set it to multiple conditions,” she says, voice low. “Time, location, keywords. Silverline mentions plus your name plus mine. The system scraped for your confession and Quinn’s feed. When all three lit up, the send queue cleared.”
Her tone is clinical, almost bored. But her jaw muscle pulses hard enough to show.
“You built a Rube Goldberg machine out of trauma and Wi-Fi,” Quinn says weakly from behind me.
Lila’s mouth quirks.
“You would have told the story fine on your own,” she says to Quinn. “But I spent too long with lawyers calling me unreliable. I wanted the receipts already in everyone’s inbox before anyone asked if I was overreacting.”
I swallow ash.
“You didn’t have to send the sabotage stuff,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “I did.”
The metal case glints in the sun. She lifts it a fraction, then lets it drop again.
“I wanted the record to show exactly what I did,” she says. “No more, no less. They used my pain to build Nora’s brand. I used their negligence to build my war. People died inside that equation. I’m not going to let them frame me as either pure victim or cartoon villain. I get to draw my own outline.”
Sirens wail closer now, this time from a different direction—an ambulance maneuvering toward the back lot gate. The sound ricochets off the studio’s glass lobby, doubling on itself.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
She releases a breath through her nose.
“What I said I would,” she answers. “Turn myself in. Testify. Let the evidence stand with the confession.”
Quinn steps forward, silver blanket dragging.
“You could still run,” Quinn says quietly. “Logically, you could disappear. Change your name again. Live in a town that doesn’t know any of these people, drink bad coffee in a diner where no one cares who you were.”
The river town flashes in my mind again—fog, rust, rumors clinging to chipped mugs. I’m not sure that town exists for Lila anymore. Maybe it never did.
Lila smiles, small and tired.
“I already tried disappearing,” she says. “Didn’t take.”
She looks at me then, directly.
“You did what I asked,” she says. “On camera. You named what you did. You named Marcus. You named the system. This part is mine.”
“You don’t owe them this level of honesty,” I say. My throat aches. “You’re the one they buried.”
“I owe it to myself,” she replies. “I don’t want my story edited into some neat revenge narrative where you’re the only one who did anything wrong and I was just the poor broken girl who snapped. That’s still their framing.”
We stand there for one suspended second, the three of us.
Quinn, cradling a laptop that now holds both my worst night and Lila’s meticulous record of surviving it. Lila, holding an empty metal case like it’s the last prop she’ll ever carry. Me, caught between the glass offices and the chain-link gate, between curated image and the raw parking lot.
Then Lila turns toward the street.
She walks down the access road, past the row of news vans bristling with satellite dishes, past influencers silently filming themselves with tearful eyes and smudged mascara for later captions about “being there when everything changed.” The asphalt radiates heat through the soles of her boots.
At the gate, a uniformed LAPD officer stands near the yellow tape, talking to a studio security guard. His badge gleams under the wrecked-blue sky.
Lila stops a few feet away.
I move without deciding to, edging closer until I can catch her words on the air.
She raises her free hand, palm open, like she’s approaching a skittish animal.
“Officer?” she says.
He turns, polite but distracted, hand resting near his radio.
“Ma’am, this area’s restricted right now,” he starts. “If you could step back behind the—”
“My name is Lila Park,” she says, clear and direct. “Legal name. I’m also known professionally as Elle Park. I need to report multiple crimes connected to the fire today and to prior incidents at this studio and at a mill in Pennsylvania.”
The cadence of her words rings with the same precise rhythm as the notes in her evidence files.
The officer blinks, focus sharpening.
“You’re saying you’re a victim?” he asks, moving toward her, hand lifting to gently steer her away from the tape.
“Yes,” she says. “And a perpetrator.”
Those two words crack the air wider than any siren.
The officer pauses, recalibrating.
Behind him, a second cop approaches, hand light on his belt. A third lifts his radio.
“Ma’am, would you be willing to come down to the station to give a statement?” the first officer asks carefully.
Lila nods.
“That’s why I’m here,” she says. “I’ve already released documentation to multiple outlets and to a journalist. I won’t answer questions without a lawyer present, but I am consenting to arrest.”
The word hangs there like another kind of glass, transparent and sharp.
The officer’s gaze flicks once, briefly, to the rows of cameras and phones trained on them. He adjusts his posture, suddenly aware of angles.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “Turn around for me, Ms. Park.”
Lila does.
Her shoulders hitch once, barely, then square.
The officer takes the metal case from her hand and passes it to a second cop. The faint click of handcuffs closing around her wrists cuts through the lot’s noise. It’s not a dramatic snap, just a precise little bite of metal.
Quinn’s hand finds my arm, fingers digging into my jacket.
“You’re seeing this?” she whispers, almost to herself. “Live streams, clips, captions. I don’t even have to hit upload. The narrative is writing itself.”
“No,” I say softly. “She wrote it. We just stopped editing.”
The cops lead Lila toward the waiting cruiser, guiding her head under the open door frame. Her bandaged arm brushes the metal, and she flinches, then steadies.
At the last second, before she disappears inside, she twists enough to look back.
Our eyes meet for a heartbeat.
There’s no forgiveness there, not yet, maybe not ever. But there is something else: a kind of acknowledgement, a grim shared ownership of the mess we’ve finally put on the record.
Then the door closes.
The cruiser pulls away from the curb, taillights flaring red against the studio’s reflective glass. For a moment, the car is mirrored there—Lila in the backseat, officers in front, the whole image hovering transparent and doubled before the light shifts and it’s gone.
My phone buzzes again.
A new banner scrolls across the top of the screen:
Breaking: DA’s office reviewing newly released evidence in Hayes/Park case—press conference expected.
I lock the phone without opening the article.
The evidence is already in the cloud. Lila is on her way to a cell. My confession is trapped in a thousand looping clips.
For the first time in my carefully managed life, I have no idea what the next line is going to be.
I only know there won’t be any more edits.