Jazz left a lipstick print on the rim of Quinn’s mug months ago, and the faint red crescent still clings there, ghosting every sip Quinn takes.
I stare at it while she paces the length of the loft, bare feet whispering over the scuffed floorboards, printed intro pages fluttering in her hand. The sliding warehouse windows are cracked just enough to let in city air: hot asphalt, car exhaust, a hint of weed from the alley. Underneath, the old building breathes dust and coffee.
The mics sit ready on the reclaimed wood table, black metal gleaming next to coils of cable and a tangle of headphones. The “record” button on the interface glows a steady, patient red.
“I can still back out,” Quinn says, not looking at me. “We could go back to the season four plan. More nostalgia. Less labor politics. ‘River’s Edge’ reunion arc. People love that.”
I lean back on the thrift-store couch, springs sighing under my weight.
“Do you want to?” I ask.
She stops pacing.
“No,” she says. “I want to pay rent.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive,” I say. “Not anymore.”
Her mouth twitches, not quite a smile.
“Tell that to the sponsor who pulled their ad buys when I said ‘structural harm’ in an email,” she says.
A siren wails down on the street, then fades. Bike bells ring somewhere beyond the brick, bright and briefly hopeful.
“You have other sponsors,” I say. “And you have listeners who stuck around through the fire, the hearings, that off-the-record episode you released on purpose.”
“Some stuck,” she says. “Some rage-quit in my DMs. ‘I miss when you just made fun of bad hair in the early seasons.’ Direct quote.”
She drops into her chair with more force than necessary. The wheels squeak. She smooths the printed pages, then pushes them aside and clicks open a blank document.
“Fine,” she says. “No script. I’ll ramble from the heart and edit out the self-indulgent parts.”
“You don’t have to perform a TED Talk,” I say. “Just tell them why you’re changing the stories you center.”
Quinn exhales, a long, controlled stream of air. She tugs her headphones on, the padded cups swallowing her ears, then gestures toward the laptop.
“Hit record for me?” she asks.
I roll the chair closer and tap the space bar. The waveform springs to life, a blue ribbon waiting for sound.
Quinn leans into the mic.
“This is Quinn Hart,” she says, voice softer than usual. “Welcome back to ‘Second Take.’”
I watch the waveform spike, then settle.
“If you’ve been here a while,” she continues, “you know this show started as a nostalgic rewatch of teen dramas and the actresses we grew up with. We laughed about fashion crimes, we cried about character deaths, we side-eyed celebrity apologies.”
She pauses, eyes flicking up to the corkboard wall. It still wears photos from the Nora investigation, but now they share space with articles about union drives, screenshots of safety memos, a printed still of Rhea mid-stunt, smiling at the camera.
“Lately,” Quinn says, “I’ve been thinking about who that lens left out. The people behind the faces. The ones who never made it to the poster, or the red carpet, or the interview couch with a funny anecdote about ‘doing their own stunts.’”
She glances at me, checking my face.
I nod: keep going.
“So this season,” she says, “we’re shifting focus. We’re still talking about the shows and films we love, but we’re starting from the ground up—from grips, stunt performers, day players, coordinators, the folks who stand in the fake smoke and hold the weight of those glossy shots on their bodies.”
Her hands shake a little on the table. The mic picks up the paper rustle.
“This isn’t a true-crime spin-off,” she says. “We’re not chasing fresh tragedies. We’re asking what it would take for everyone on a set to go home with all their bones intact and their stories respected. Today, that means talking to stunt workers about what safety actually looks like when the cameras are rolling.”
She stops, lips pressed together. Her foot taps under the table, a quiet metronome.
I make a circular motion with my finger: one more beat.
Quinn swallows.
“This season exists because of two women,” she says. “One who died doing her job, and one whose career was shattered and then weaponized in silence. Rhea Ortiz and Lila Park. Their stories changed mine. I can’t put that genie back in the press kit, and I wouldn’t want to. So if you’re still here, thank you for trusting me while we figure out a better way to watch.”
Her voice roughens on the last line. She lets the silence hang for a full breath before leaning back and lifting one headphone cup.
“Too much?” she asks.
“Not enough,” I say. “In a good way.”
She huffs out a breath, then hits a key to drop a marker in the track.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s bring in our human crash-test dummies.”
The first guest arrives ten minutes later, an older woman with cropped silver hair and a faded stunt team hoodie. Her name is Teri, and she moves like every joint remembers falling; careful, efficient, no wasted motion. A younger man, Malik, follows her, lugging a gym bag that rattles with clips and chalked gloves.
The loft fills with new smells: gym rubber, menthol ointment, the clean cotton of clothes washed in cheap detergent instead of studio wardrobe services. They settle at the table, testing headphones, laughing about how they prefer being on fire to being on mic.
Quinn drops into her interviewer posture, shoulders loose, pen ready.
“Thank you both for being here,” she says. “I know long-form audio isn’t in most stunt contracts.”
Teri grins, lines carving deeper around her eyes.
“I’ll take a chair and free coffee over a ratchet pull any day,” she says. “No offense to ratchets.”
Malik chuckles.
“Speak for yourself,” he says. “I miss flying. But I’ll take not being set on fire for this hour.”
The red light glows steady. I retreat to the couch with my own set of headphones, listening in.
“Let’s start with your best day on set,” Quinn says. “I want to show people what good looks like before we talk about the rest.”
Teri talks about a HBO shoot in the desert, a coordinator who doubled safety meetings, who stopped the schedule more than once to adjust rigging, who refused to let a director bully anyone into “just one more” after a near miss. Malik describes an indie production where cast and crew voted to cut a rooftop gag entirely when the wind picked up.
Their voices heat up when they talk about good bosses. They laugh, tease each other, interrupt with little details: the taste of dust in the desert, the feel of a harness that actually fits, the director who brought ice cream to the crew after a rewritten day that cost him prestige.
Then Quinn pivots.
“You both have been at this a while,” she says. “What about the days that still live in your bodies in another way?”
The air shifts.
Teri’s fingers drum once on the table, then still.
“I doubled a lead on a streaming show set in a steel mill,” she says. “We were shooting in a real location back east. Rust, wet floors, bad lighting. We had maybe ten minutes to rehearse a stair fall before cameras rolled, because they wanted that ‘raw energy.’”
My throat tightens. Pennsylvania rises in my mind: the river fog, the mill skeleton, the taste of iron on the rails. I swallow, feeling the headphones clamp that memory in place.
“We flagged the slick spots,” Teri continues. “Production brushed gravel around, called it ‘texture.’ We did three takes. On the fourth, my foot went out on a puddle no one saw. I hit the landing wrong. Torn ligaments, back never recovered fully. Producer’s note afterward was, ‘At least it looked real.’”
Malik lets out a low whistle.
“Did they change anything after?” Quinn asks.
“They put a mat down where I fell,” Teri says. “For the next girl.”
The phrase punches a hole in my chest.
Malik shares his own story: a wire gag rushed before lunch, a director who refused to bring in a second performer after the first went down, the quiet pressure to say yes because “we already lost time on that actor’s crying fit.”
“Was there a crying fit?” Quinn asks.
Malik shrugs.
“He asked for another rehearsal,” he says. “Same difference in their minds.”
They trade anecdotes, small and sharp. A coordinator pressured to sign off on equipment they hadn’t inspected. A background performer asked to run through fake smoke until they threw up. A young woman told to “toughen up” when she requested a waist harness instead of a leg loop after a previous unreported injury.
The sensory details pile up: the chemical sting of smoke fluid, the weight of wet clothes in a rain sequence, the slap of a poorly placed pad. My own memories slot into their stories like puzzle pieces from the same factory.
Quinn keeps her questions open, letting them steer, nodding when they mention union wins and recent pushes for better language in contracts. She asks what listeners can do besides tweet outrage.
“Stop sharing clips of ‘crazy stunts’ without context,” Malik says. “Ask who paid the cost.”
“Support shows that brag about their safety coordinators instead of stars doing stunt work,” Teri adds. “Boring is underrated.”
The hour passes faster than any red-carpet recap I ever sat through.
When we finally stop and Quinn pulls off her headphones, her hair clings damply to her forehead. She looks exhausted and lit from within at the same time.
“You good?” I ask.
“I need a gallon of water and a nap,” she says. “Also I want to unionize every YouTuber with a GoPro.”
Teri and Malik pack up, hugging Quinn goodbye, promising to send follow-up links and names of colleagues who might talk about specific specialties. The loft door thunks shut behind them.
The silence that follows feels full, not empty.
Quinn spins her chair toward her laptop, pulls it closer until the edge presses into her stomach. The screen reflects faintly in the loft’s single pane of glass that overlooks the alley, two versions of her hunched over the waveform.
“Moment of truth,” she says, opening her analytics dashboard. “Let’s see how many people bailed at my intro.”
The numbers populate, little graphs twitching upward. The live counter tick-ticks like a nervous heartbeat.
“Downloads are lower than a Nora episode,” she says. “Higher than the one where we did forty minutes on denim skirts. Drop-off after the intro… not catastrophic.”
I lean over her shoulder. Comments trickle in: a heart emoji from a longtime listener, a paragraph about a father who used to work on sets, a complaint from someone accusing her of “ruining the fun.”
Quinn clicks on that last profile, reads two lines, and closes it.
“I can’t curate my ethics around someone whose avatar is an anime girl with a gun,” she says.
“That feels like progress,” I say.
Her phone buzzes on the table, rattling against a coaster. A text preview flashes from Jazz: You sound good. Less apologetic, more pointed. I like pointed.
“Jazz approves,” I report.
Quinn exhales, shoulders dropping.
“Okay,” she says. “We still need an outro. I want to dedicate the episode, but I don’t want it to sound like I’m engraving names on merch.”
“What do you want it to sound like?” I ask.
She turns the question over, chewing the inside of her cheek.
“A promise I can keep,” she says at last.
She drags the playhead to the end of the conversation, arms herself with a fresh track, and nods at me.
“One more for the road,” she says.
I hit record.
Quinn leans closer to the mic, voice lower now, more intimate.
“Before we go,” she says, “I want to dedicate this episode to three groups of people. First, to Rhea Ortiz and every stunt worker who never got a proper wrap party because the job ended in a hospital room.”
My chest tightens.
“Second,” she continues, “to Lila Park and everyone whose injuries were edited out of the official narrative to keep a brand clean. You deserved better than a rumor mill and a redacted contract.”
Her eyes flick toward me. I grip the side of the couch.
“And third,” she says, “to the crew members listening who think their stories are too small to matter, or too messy to say out loud. This season is for you. I can’t promise we’ll fix the industry in ten episodes. I can promise we’ll keep asking who’s off camera, and why.”
She stops, breath uneven, then adds one more line.
“If you have a story about safety, credit, or harm on set,” she says, “email us. Record a voice note. Stay anonymous if you need to. We’re done pretending the only people who shape a show are the ones on the poster.”
She taps the mute button with a shaking hand and rips off her headphones.
“Too earnest?” she asks.
“Perfectly earnest,” I say. “In a terrifying way.”
She laughs, brief and sharp, then leans back, spinning away from the screen like she needs physical distance from her own words.
“They’re going to email, aren’t they?” she says.
I picture inboxes filling: ex-PAs with mill stories, stunt workers with scars, hair stylists who watched girls break under NDAs. Viewers who sat in diners in Pennsylvania, passing rumors over bottomless coffee while the mill rusted outside.
“Yeah,” I say. “They are.”
That night, back at my glass house in the hills, I play the rough cut on my tablet while the city lights flicker below. Quinn’s voice fills my open-plan living room, her dedication bouncing off the floor-to-ceiling windows until it sounds like a chorus.
My reflection hovers over the paused waveform on the screen, layered with the city, with the distant memory of the river town’s fog.
Quinn’s final question hangs in my ears: Who’s off camera, and why?
My own phone lights up with new mail notifications from an address she set up for the show—she insisted on copying me on submissions tied to safety, so I wouldn’t pretend ignorance later.
Subject lines scroll by: “Former extra on Second Chances,” “Mill incident crew perspective,” “How your confession helped me speak up.”
The numbers climb, tiny and relentless.
I don’t open them yet. I just watch them stack, knowing that in the next days the stories Quinn asked for will become mine to read, mine to answer, mine to carry or drop.
For the second time, our lives share an inbox.
I grip the tablet, Quinn’s outro still vibrating in my bones, and wonder who will write next—and what I’ll owe them when their words finally land in my hands.