By the time Quinn sends the file, the glass walls of my house feel more like an aquarium than architecture.
Sunlight pours over the canyon, catching on the fingerprints I haven’t bothered to wipe from the sliding doors. Down on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, SUVs nose through traffic toward green juice bars and boutique pilates studios, like nothing has happened. Up here, I sit on the floor with my back against the couch, laptop balanced on my knees, noise-canceling headphones already starting to sweat against my temples.
The subject line in Quinn’s email reads: “Special Episode – Final Cut for Consent.”
My fingers hover over the trackpad long enough that the screen dims.
I nudge the cursor, exhale through my teeth, and hit play.
The loft’s sound fills my ears before any of our voices do: the low hum of an overworked air conditioner, a car horn six floors down, the faint buzz from Quinn’s neon “ON AIR” sign bleeding into the mix. For a second, I’m back on that thrift-store couch in the “Second Take” studio, watching red:REC lights burn.
Then I hear her.
“Okay,” Quinn’s voice says, a little closer to the mic than usual. “I’m rolling on Room Tone.”
There’s the scrape of a chair leg, a soft cough that I recognize as my own, Lila’s slight shift in the other seat. Quinn lets the silence stretch out—five, six, seven seconds—until I start to reach for my keyboard out of reflex.
She could have trimmed this.
She didn’t.
“Thank you,” Quinn says in the recording. “Now we have the awkward silence on tape.”
I wince and laugh at the same time. I remember that moment; the air between us felt like unspun glass, too fragile to touch.
Quinn jumps forward in the timeline—there’s a barely audible click where she’s made a cut—and suddenly we’re mid-conversation.
“I shoved you,” my own recorded voice says. “I’ve spent years calling it an accident, because that kept me employable. But I shoved you, and then I let other people build a whole career out of pretending I hadn’t.”
On the recording, my breath catches at the end of the sentence. Quinn leaves that in too.
Lila’s voice answers, crisp and tired. “You shoved me, and I grabbed the railing wrong. Both things are true. Every lawyer I met tried to pick one.”
I listen to the burn of that exchange, body rigid against the couch. Quinn hasn’t sweetened our levels, hasn’t smoothed my rasp or Lila’s clipped consonants. Anyone who listens will hear exactly how small I sounded on that couch, and how controlled Lila kept herself even while cutting into me.
The conversation rolls on. I hear Jazz in the background at one point, muffled as she adjusts something in the kitchen; Quinn left in the clatter of a spoon hitting a mug, the faint hiss of the espresso machine. Domestic noises, edging against the surreal content of our words.
“You said you wanted me to feel what you felt at the mill,” I say in the recording. “The panic. The not-being-believed.”
“I did,” Lila replies. “And then other people got caught in my crossfire. That part is on me. I’m not proud of turning the same system against other bodies.”
When we first recorded that, I stared at the exposed brick instead of at her, counting the flecks of old paint to keep from crying. Hearing it now, the brick is gone, but my chest tightens in the same place.
Quinn could have cut her own questions down, edited herself out until it sounded like we performed our confessions into a vacuum. She hasn’t.
“I’m not neutral here,” Past Quinn says in the track. “I grew up watching you, Nora. I wanted you to be the heroine of my little internal movie. At the same time, I became the person who made charts about your inconsistencies. I need to own that.”
She lets her own voice crack on “own.”
I scrub backward and replay that line twice, listening for the edit that might make it cleaner. There isn’t one. She left her stumble in like she left our silences.
My phone, face-down beside me, buzzes in little insect bursts on the hardwood. Jazz has texted three times in the last hour: Have you listened yet?; We can delay if this feels bad; Also I brought real donuts not the craft-services kind if you need sugar later.
The sticky sweetness of those on-set donuts hits my tongue memory without warning—cheap glaze, fluorescent sprinkles, the taste of exhaustion disguised as a treat. I swallow hard and turn the volume up.
Quinn has divided the recording into three acts. I can tell by the way the room tone shifts: the first portion is just us in the loft; the second includes a faint echo from the metal case sitting on the table, every latch click ringing in the mic when Lila opened it; the third is newer, squeezed in after the fire, after Lila’s arrest.
“For the record,” Detention-Center Lila says through a slightly tinnier line, “I consent to releasing this conversation in full, minus names of people whose lawyers would sue you into oblivion. Not because I think the internet deserves my trauma, but because I’m tired of everyone pretending your worst harm was a rumor.”
My skin prickles under my sweatshirt. The audio from the jail phone has a faint hiss; Quinn could have noise-gated it into something smoother. She didn’t.
“Okay,” Quinn says softly in that segment. “I just want to be obnoxiously clear: you’re sure. This is more exposure, and you’re the one who’s historically gotten crushed by that.”
“I’m sure,” Lila answers. “If they’re going to screen my life like content, I prefer they work with the director’s cut.”
I stop the file there, fingers clenched around my knee.
I know what comes next: Quinn’s new intro. The thing she refused to send as a transcript until I agreed to listen with everyone else.
My throat dries out.
I back the playhead to the start and click on the chapter marker Quinn has titled simply: “Intro – Quinn.” The waveform that appears is narrower than our three-way conversation, mostly her voice, a few pauses, ambient loft noise. The kind of minimal opening that makes advertisers nervous.
“Hey,” she says on the recording, breath loud in my ears. “This is Quinn Hart. You’re about to hear something I wasn’t sure I should ever release.”
She stops there.
The silence stretches—a full three beats. I count them. One, two, three. Somewhere in that gap, I can hear the nervous tap of her fingernail against the mic arm.
“First,” she continues, “content warnings. We’re going to talk about physical violence, sabotage on sets, the way money and power can bury both. If you don’t have the bandwidth for that today, I want you to turn this off. You can still be part of this community without listening to every painful detail.”
I imagine ad sales reps flinching at listeners told not to listen. Quinn left it anyway.
“Second,” she says, “I want to name my own role in all of this. I started this season chasing a mystery because mysteries make good episodes. I framed a real person’s injury—the disappearance of Lila Park—as a puzzle for us to solve together, instead of centering her as a subject with agency. I benefited from the spectacle of Nora Hayes’s downfall. That’s on me.”
She breaks up the confession, letting each sentence land. No orchestral swell, no branded apology language. Just the slight creak of her chair.
“Third,” she adds, “this isn’t a neat redemption arc. Nobody gets out of this episode as The Good One. Not Nora, not Lila, not me. I’m asking you not to use what you hear as ammunition in stan wars or cancel threads. If you can’t make that promise, I’d rather you skip this.”
My heart starts hammering. I picture her sitting at that wooden table, Jazz’s mismatched mugs stacked in the sink behind her, the city’s smudged light leaking through the loft windows. She could be recording this intro for a jury, not a fandom.
“With everyone’s consent,” Quinn finishes, “you’re about to hear a conversation that was never meant to be content. It’s three women trying to tell the truth to each other before we tell it to you. We’ve bleeped out names where people didn’t consent to being mentioned. We’ve left in pauses, contradictions, and changed minds. That messiness is the point.”
She breathes in, breathes out.
“Okay,” she says. “Here we go.”
The opening chords of the “Second Take” theme song slide in, stripped-down—just a single guitar track, none of the bouncy percussion. Quinn’s edit choice is obvious: less podcast, more document.
I pause the file and pull the headphones down around my neck, sound bleeding into the cavernous quiet of my living room. The AC kicks on with a low whoosh; the house changes temperature faster than I do.
My phone buzzes again.
Quinn’s name lights the screen. I answer.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” Her voice in my ear is smaller than on the recording. “You listened?”
“Half,” I reply. “Enough.”
“Do you still consent?” she asks, skipping any preamble. “Because if any part of you wants to pull it, I will argue with you, but I won’t override you.”
I look past my reflection in the glass at the city, the smear of brownish haze over the hills. Somewhere back east, a damp river town breathes through autumn fog, the mill skeleton still leeching into the water. Both lives exist at the same time, whether I curate them or not.
“I consent,” I say. My fingers dig into my sweatshirt hem. “I want people to hear… the before. Not just the fire and the confession. The way we talked when we thought no one was listening.”
“Okay,” she says. Paper rustles on her end; I picture her checking a rundown, even though she doesn’t need one. “We go live at noon. Jazz threatened to tackle me if I let the network retitle it ‘Nora Tells All,’ so we’re calling it ‘Three Versions of the Same Night.’”
I bark out a laugh that sounds more like a cough.
“Not exactly clickable,” I say.
“Yeah,” she answers. “That’s the point.”
There’s a beat where neither of us says anything.
“You know it’s going to hurt,” she adds quietly. “For you. For Lila. For people who hear their own stories in it.”
“It already does,” I say. “But at least this time the hurting is… honest.”
I don’t use the word “healing.” It still feels too aspirational, like a press release.
“I’ll text you when the download map crashes my server,” she says, trying for lightness. “Go eat something. Or drink that terrible green sludge you pretend to like.”
I glance at the sweating bottle of cold-pressed kale juice on my coffee table, untouched.
“I’m switching to bottomless diner coffee in solidarity with rural America,” I say. “Talk later.”
We hang up.
At 11:59, I put my headphones back on and refresh the podcast app. The special episode appears, cover art grayed out instead of the usual bright logo, title exactly what Quinn promised.
I don’t hit play again.
I’ve already heard it. This part isn’t for me anymore.
Instead, I open a browser tab with the podcast’s dashboard—Quinn gave me guest access when everything blew up, a gesture of transparency I didn’t really deserve. Little colored dots bloom on the world map as the feed propagates: Los Angeles, New York, my hometown back in Pennsylvania, Seoul, London. Each one represents someone pressing play and letting our messiness into their ears.
Notifications start layering over the screen.
On Twitter: “This @SecondTakePod ep is… a lot. Appreciating the content warning and the refusal to give us a clean narrative. #NoraHayes #LilaPark”
On Instagram: a story repost from Jazz’s account, showing Quinn at the loft board with a caption: “We didn’t go into journalism for easy answers. Link in bio, listen with care.”
In the podcast app’s review section, new comments appear in real time. I click one open.
I grew up in a town like Nora’s, with a mill like Lila’s. I’ve been on small sets where safety was a joke. Hearing them argue and still stay in the room gave me more hope than any PR apology ever has.
Another:
Thank you for not editing out Quinn’s mistakes. Hearing her admit she chased downloads over people made me check my own listening habits. This is the first time I’ve heard a podcaster say “don’t listen if this will hurt you” and mean it.
The knot behind my sternum loosens a fraction.
Not all responses are grateful.
One thread already pushes for a tidy boycott: “Nora confessed to a crime; why are we giving her podcast space?” Another demands that Lila be framed purely as a victim, chastising Quinn for “platforming her accountability” when the system abused her first.
I can’t say they’re wrong. I also can’t make them listen the way we want.
A new email lands in my inbox, forwarded from Quinn with the subject: “Sharing with consent – thank you?” My cursor shakes as I click.
I’ve been both Nora and Lila in smaller ways. I hurt someone when I was twenty and spent a decade pretending I hadn’t. I also reported an assault and watched an institution close ranks around my attacker. Your conversation didn’t excuse either role. It did make me feel less alone in the contradictions. Please keep making messy things.
My vision blurs.
I wipe my eyes with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, annoyed at the salt sting on skin still raw from smoke.
Out by the pool, the surface of the water reflects the sky like another screen—a shimmer of blue interrupted by the dark line of the railing, a faint echo of the mill’s cold metal. Glass sliding doors separate me from the sunshine and chlorinated air, keeping me in this climate-controlled confession booth.
My phone vibrates again.
A new notification from a news app announces: “DA schedules press conference to address Hayes/Park case and Silverline inquiries – tomorrow 10 a.m.” The headline sits beside a thumbnail of my face from some red-carpet night, all glossy hair and borrowed diamonds.
The episode keeps downloading.
The waveforms keep playing in people’s ears.
I stare at the DA alert and at the listener’s email stacked above it, wondering which version of me will walk into that press conference—America’s sweetheart, the girl from the mill, or the woman on Quinn’s podcast who finally stopped editing.
For once, I don’t have a media-trained answer.
I just know that whatever I say next, there will be tape.