I spend the whole drive home pretending my shoulder doesn’t hurt.
By the time the car gates close behind me and the house glows on the hill like a glass jewelry box, the adrenaline has bled out, leaving a low, electrical buzz in my muscles. I stand in the kitchen with the lights off, letting the city spill in through the windows, a spilled galaxy of brake lights and office towers. The marble counter chills my palm. The bruise under my shirt throbs in pulses that match the hum of the refrigerator.
I pour wine, then set the glass down untouched. My tongue tastes like sawdust and craft-service sugar, and the thought of adding tannins to the mix makes my stomach lurch. I open the freezer, grab an ice pack, and press it to my shoulder. The cold bites hard enough to make my eyes water.
“You did nothing wrong,” I hear Marcus in my head, like he’s still at my back on Stage 14. “We don’t borrow trouble.”
I walk into the living room and drop onto the couch so the leather sighs around me. The house is quiet except for the soft rush of climate control and the distant yip of a coyote in the canyon. I pick up my phone from the coffee table, already lighting up with notifications—texts from my publicist, a missed call from Marcus, a flood of mention alerts on social.
I should answer the call. Instead, I open the app that hates me but pays me.
The feed spits headlines at my face:
@StreamInsider: Hearing unconfirmed reports of a minor injury on the set of prestige drama #SecondChances today. Studio reps say production is “proceeding as planned.”
@NoraHayesDaily: please let our girl be okay 🥺💔
@UnionEyes: “Minor injury” = background worker gets crushed, star gets ice. We see you.
My thumb scrolls faster than my brain can keep up. Every vibration from the phone buzzes through the bone of my bruised shoulder. Someone has posted a blurry photo from outside the lot—just a line of ambulances and golf carts, tiny on the screen—but the comments already know my name.
“They overwork crews for those ‘cinematic’ shots.”
“Nora’s show about redemption injuring extras? That’s a narrative.”
“Accidents happen, you all are wild.”
A pit opens behind my ribs. I drag the ice pack across the bruise until the skin numbs, chasing that tiny mercy.
I tell myself to stop, to hit the power button and toss the phone onto the table. Instead, my thumb keeps moving, an idiot metronome. The algorithm learns quickly; the accident chatter thins, replaced by edits of my old work, throwback interviews, fan cams cut to nostalgic pop.
A familiar tag jumps out at me.
#RiversEdgeHighRewatch
I tap the hashtag before I can talk myself out of it. The feed shifts into a different river, one I know too well.
A fan thread scrolls up, posted a few hours ago. The first tweet is a screenshot from that grainy still—me at sixteen, standing halfway down the mill staircase in a union-issue safety harness, cheeks rounder, eyeliner thicker. Behind me, in the shadowed blur of the staircase, a smaller figure leans on the rail.
The caption curls under my tongue as I read it.
@MillTownTrash: can we talk about the background girl who literally VANISHES after ep 5??? #RiversEdgeHighRewatch #TheMissingGirl
My throat tightens. I tap into the thread.
Fans have turned the girl into a tiny legend in my absence. They’ve zoomed into low-res screenshots, brightened shadows, circled the outline of her face and her hand on the railing. They’ve clipped the same three seconds of her laughing at a line reading I can’t even remember delivering.
“She had more presence in 10 seconds than some of the mains.”
“Production did her dirty dropping her tbh.”
“Conspiracy theory: that mill really is haunted and the ghost ate her.”
My thumb hovers over the reply button. I can taste the metallic air of the real mill on the back of my tongue, that cold Pennsylvanian river breath that cut through knit gloves and cheap wardrobe coats. My mother used to say you could always tell who worked the night shift by the smell of damp wool and burnt coffee in their clothes.
I lock my jaw and scroll further.
Someone has mashed up the mill footage from the show with recent promo shots of me on Stage 14’s reproduction, overlaying them so the fake rusted stairs line up over the real ones. The caption reads:
“Full circle mill queen.”
A noise escapes me, thin and ragged, halfway between a laugh and a choke. I tuck my bare feet under me, pressing my toes into the couch until the leather squeaks.
I reach for the wine. My fingers brush the stem, then a notification slides down from the top of the screen, neat and innocuous.
New message request.
The handle is a jumble of letters and numbers: @riverwatcher000. No profile photo, no bio. Just the default gray silhouette on a blank background.
My thumb hesitates.
I should ignore it. Message requests are where the worst stuff lives—marriage proposals, graphic fantasies, people who think I personally ruined their childhoods by taking a hiatus. My heart beats harder anyway, like my body already knows something my mind refuses to articulate.
I tap.
The chat window opens to a single image. Beneath it, a short line of text.
For a second, the thumbnail refuses to load, a gray box with a spinning circle. The phone warms in my hand. Sweat prickles along my hairline.
Then the picture resolves.
The mill staircase fills the screen.
Not the cleaned-up version from the still that made the rounds last week. Not the one the fans keep editing and brightening. This shot is wider, the frame pulled back enough to show the whole flight of steps and the landing below. A bare bulb swings at the top, caught mid-arc in the flash, casting a smeared halo on the cracked brick wall.
My breath stops halfway to my lungs.
At the center of the frame, on the landing, a girl lies crumpled.
Her body angles away from the camera, but her face turns toward it, caught mid-grimace. Blood streaks from her hairline down across her eyebrow, shiny where the flash hits it. Her mouth hangs open like she’s trying to form a word. One arm stretches up toward the railing above, fingers curled in the air.
The railing itself is wet. Not just with fog or condensation. Dark streaks run along the metal, dripping toward the floor.
In the foreground, just within the bottom edge of the photo, a hand reaches down. My hand, I know instantly, because the nail on my index finger has a tiny chip in the polish, exposing the pale half-moon underneath. I remember biting that nail between takes.
The caption sits under the image in tidy black font.
“Do you remember what you did here?”
The words click through me like a lock engaging. My heart snaps into a sprint. The ice pack slides off my shoulder onto the couch and lands with a dull, wet thud.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no.”
My voice sounds thin in the glass box of the living room, swallowed by the high ceiling and the hum of the vents. I taste copper, though I haven’t bitten my tongue. The faint smell of chlorine from the pool drifts in through the ventilation system, clean and sharp, fighting with the phantom scent of river sludge my memory drags in from the past.
I pinch the screen to zoom in.
Lila’s face enlarges until the pixels blur at the edges. The cut by her temple gapes wider. Her eyes are half-lidded, lashes clumped. In that moment trapped by the flash, she looks not dead but suspended, waiting to find out which way the story tips.
My hand, reaching down, is frozen an inch above her shoulder. I search the curve of my fingers for intention—grabbing to help, shoving away, pulling back. The photo catches none of that. It only shows proximity.
“Who are you?” I whisper to the blank username at the top of the chat. “Where did you get this?”
I swipe up, looking for more messages, earlier ones, anything. The thread is empty except for this single image and the caption.
My thumb hovers over the account name. I tap it.
A small warning pops up: “This account is private. Limited profile view.” When the page loads, there is…nothing. No posts, no followers, no following. The handle floats over a blank gray circle, completely hollow.
I take a shaky breath and move my thumb back to the photo, intending to screenshot it. Proof. Evidence. Something to bring to Marcus, or a lawyer, or anyone else who can tell me what to do when the past shoves a receipt in my face.
I press the volume up and power buttons. The phone gives a little click, the fake shutter sound I forgot to turn off. Relief rises hot behind my eyes.
Before I can check the camera roll, the image flickers.
For a heartbeat, static crawls over the picture, digital snow across the mill’s bricks and Lila’s face. Then the screen goes white.
A new line appears where the photo was: “This message is no longer available.”
My brain lags behind my eyes. I stab at the white space, the back button, the chat history. Nothing brings it back.
“No,” I say again, louder this time. “No, come on.”
I exit the chat to the main inbox and scroll through my messages. The request from @riverwatcher000 has vanished. The handle no longer appears in the list. When I search the name, the app returns the polite digital void: “No users found.”
I flip to my photos, breath stuck high in my chest. The most recent image in my camera roll is from three days ago—me and the director, grinning on a publicity shoot, Stage 14’s fake mill soft in the background.
No screenshot. No staircase. No blood.
My fingers go numb. The phone wobbles in my grip, slick with sweat.
I stand up too fast. The room tilts for a fraction of a second, then snaps back into place. City lights glitter beyond the glass in a dense, indifferent grid. The room smells like cold stone and the faint floral detergent clinging to the blanket on the couch.
“Okay,” I say to my reflection in the window. My breath fogs the glass in a small, transient cloud. “Okay, you saw that. You did.”
My reflection stares back—eyes wide, hair messy, shoulders hunched against the chill. For a second, the glass doubles my image, two Noras overlapping, one half a second out of sync.
I press my forehead to the pane. The glass is cool enough to soothe the pounding behind my eyes. Down the hill, someone’s pool lights shimmer turquoise, defiantly tranquil.
Who has that photo?
Studio stills always went through layers of approval. On River’s Edge, we had one set photographer, a woman with a permanent scarf and a gentle way of arranging us like we were already memories. She never pointed her camera at blood. That was the line, even on a show that loved a good bruise.
This shot is not hers. The framing is too low, off-balance, like it came from the waist level of a scared PA. The flash burns out the edges; the composition is an accident. It feels like a gasp, not a promo.
My stomach knots so tight it aches. I taste bile under the ghost of craft-service donuts. I walk back to the couch, sit down, pick up the ice pack, then set it aside untouched.
I open my texts to Marcus.
Marcus: Call me when you’re home.
Marcus: Studio wants to get ahead of this. “Minor set incident during rehearsal, all safety protocols followed, production continuing as scheduled.” Working on language.
I stare at the blinking cursor in the message field. I type:
Someone just sent me a photo from the mill.
I watch the words glare up at me, too bright. I delete “mill” and replace it with “old show.” Delete that and try again.
Someone sent me a fucked up photo.
My thumb hovers over send. I can already hear him on the phone:
Are you sure it was real, Nora? Screenshots or it didn’t happen. People fake things all the time. You had a long day. Let’s not feed something that doesn’t exist yet.
I backspace until the field is empty, the little bubble blank and waiting.
The house makes a settling noise, a quiet creak somewhere in the high ceiling over the staircase. My skin prickles. I glance toward the dark hallway that leads to my office, where the binder from Marcus waits on the desk with its “Legacy Narratives” tab like a tongue I don’t want to read.
The mill’s wet metal is still under my fingers, even though the only thing I’m touching is my own palm.
“Do you remember what you did here?”
They’re not asking for money. They’re not threatening to leak the photo to the press, not yet. They aren’t naming themselves at all. They just want my memory set on fire.
I lock my phone and set it on the coffee table face down, like that does anything. My own reflection stares up from the black glass, distorted by the slight curve of the screen.
I sit very still in the humming quiet of the glass house, every sense straining for a sound that doesn’t belong. The ice pack warms on the cushion beside me, slowly losing its shape.
I don’t call Marcus. I don’t call anyone.
I keep my hands in my lap and my mouth shut and listen to the past knocking on the windows of my life with nothing I can point to and say, “Look. This is real.”