The potato salad on my paper plate has formed a skin.
I pinch the flimsy edge of the plate until it buckles, watching mayonnaise congeal under the string lights, and I rewrite Mrs. Halpern’s sentence in my head so it doesn’t choke me.
“He’s in a better place now,” she says out loud.
In my draft, in the back of my skull, she lowers her voice and says, You put him in a better place, didn’t you?
I nod, because that is what people in Maple Hollow do. We nod and keep our lawns trimmed and our grief cropped to acceptable lengths, like the HOA newsletter suggests. I murmur something like thank you and stare at the condensation sliding down the side of the plastic cup in her hand, the way it tracks along the clear curve before dripping into the grass.
Glass, plastic, screens—this whole neighborhood lives behind something see-through.
“Mara.” A new voice, male, warm but edged, cuts across the backyard.
I turn. Jonah stands near the grill, talking to a man I do not recognize. Jonah’s tie is loosened, his dark hair a little messier than when he left his office, but he still radiates that steady architect calm that used to soothe me and now just makes me tired. The stranger is taller, in a dark jacket zipped up against the damp, his hands in his pockets like he’d rather not touch anything.
Tessa appears at my elbow and bumps me with her hip. The smell of hospital sanitizer clings to her scrubs under a sweatshirt, sharp against the soggy sweetness of coleslaw and supermarket cake.
“You need water,” she mutters. “You’ve had two glasses of Pinot and exactly half a bread roll.”
“I’m fine.” My voice sounds flat, like an audio file compressed too many times.
She scans my face with her ER-nurse eyes. “You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing.”
“The rewriting thing. You’re looking at everyone like they’re dialogue tags.”
I raise my plate and take a mechanical bite of lukewarm potato salad. The cold starch coats my tongue. “It’s this or flip the table, Tess.”
Her mouth twitches. “Fine. Do the thriller version. Just drink this first.” She trades my cup for water, presses it into my hand.
Behind her, the fog thickens at the edge of the yard, where our patchy lawn meets the fence. Beyond that fence, the slope drops toward the cul-de-sac. Headlights smear across the wet glass of my neighbors’ windows whenever a car creeps by, the light stretching and warping, then snapping off.
Somewhere under that hill, beyond the row of houses and the HOA-approved landscaping, Old Willow Road curves under a leaning overpass. Single-vehicle collision. Driver under the influence. Excessive speed for conditions. Guardrail impact. Case closed.
That’s the official story. Neat as a line in a press release.
I know the phrases by heart. I have read them, argued with them alone at three a.m., held them up against the raw, jagged thing in my chest and tried to make them fit.
They don’t.
“You going to mingle,” Tessa asks, “or keep interrogating the mayonnaise?”
“The mayonnaise gives more honest answers.” I drain half the water. It tastes like the hose from my childhood, metallic and faintly green.
“I’ll run interference,” she says. “Just…remember to breathe. And maybe don’t bite anyone if they say ‘everything happens for a reason.’”
“No promises.”
She squeezes my shoulder and moves away toward a cluster of coworkers. Their badges catch the light, little rectangles of authority and exhaustion.
I hover near the folding table where we’ve propped framed photos of Caleb. Sixteen years of haircuts and Halloween costumes. His senior portrait still smells like the print shop in my memory, chemical and hot. The glass over his face reflects the string lights, so depending on where I stand, his eyes disappear behind tiny golden bulbs.
“Hey, Mara.”
A neighbor from two houses down, the one with the immaculate hydrangeas, drifts up. I brace myself.
“We’re all so…devastated,” she says. Her hand finds her chest. “I just keep thinking about my own boys on that road. Old Willow is such a death trap. The police, they said—”
“Alcohol was a factor,” I supply for her. I could recite the report verbatim at this point. “Single car, high rate of speed, failure to negotiate the curve.”
She winces like I’ve broken some rule of euphemism. “Well. Yes. But teenagers, you know. They make mistakes.”
In my head, she leans in and lets the mask slip. They make mistakes, and some mothers don’t see them until it’s too late.
Out loud, she kisses the air beside my cheek and moves on.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with the mechanical chime I chose in the months after. Tessa says that sound wakes her up in the middle of the night, phantom alerts. #CalebForever, #Angelversary, photos of candles and sunsets and Bible verses scroll behind my eyes without me having to look. Digital grief, curated and cropped.
I reach for another bottle of water and catch a flicker of movement near the gate.
He’s standing there, the stranger from the grill, but now he’s alone. Broad shoulders, dark jacket, damp hair pushed back from his forehead. His eyes move slowly over the yard, not in that restless, social way people have at gatherings, but like he’s photographing everything, filing it away.
There is a tiny tremor in my paper plate.
“You’re staring,” Tessa murmurs, suddenly at my side again. She follows my gaze. “That’s the new guy. Moved into the smart house across the cul-de-sac. Tech something. Jonah told me.”
“He invited him?” A sour taste rises in my throat, vinaigrette and resentment.
“He invited the whole street,” she says. “And the unit from the station and half the hospital. People feel better when they do something.” She lowers her voice. “Do you want me to eject him?”
The man steps onto the grass, heading our way. The fog curls around his ankles above the lawn where sprinklers ran earlier, dampening his shoes. His hands are empty. No casserole, no sympathy card. Just him.
“No,” I say, though my fingers tighten on the bottle. “I’m not a skittish widow in Chapter One.”
“You are literally in Chapter One,” Tessa says.
I don’t have time to glare at her. He stops a respectful distance away, nods once.
“Mara?” His voice is lower than I expected, a little rough.
“That’s me,” I say. My mouth feels dry again, despite the water.
“I’m Liam.” He gestures vaguely toward the front of the house. “I live across the way. I, uh, didn’t want to intrude earlier, but Jonah said…”
“Jonah says a lot of things.”
His gaze flicks to Tessa, then back to me. He takes my scrutiny without flinching. His eyes are gray-green, like the wet underside of leaves.
“I’m sorry about your son,” he says. No elaborate phrasing, no higher power invoked. Just that.
The words slide in differently, heavy, catching on bone.
“Thank you,” I say, because the script demands it.
He shifts his weight. “Old Willow Road, right? The curve under the overpass?”
My heart gives a sudden, hard kick. “Yes.”
“I drove it when I was house hunting,” he says. “The sightline is garbage, and they put the barrier too close to the lane. I covered a case just like it a few years back.” He pauses. “Well. Not exactly like it.”
Covered a case. Not, read about. Not, heard about. The choice of verb lodges in my writer brain.
“You’re a journalist,” I say.
“I was.” He offers a faint, crooked smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Now I tell rich people why they should be worried. Different kind of storytelling.”
The word storytelling scrapes at a raw place in me. My fingers itch for a keyboard, for control. For a version of events I can shape.
“They said it was just him,” I say, before I can stop myself. “Drunk. Too fast. His fault.”
Tessa’s hand finds my elbow, a subtle warning.
Liam’s jaw tightens. “Reports love that word. Just. It keeps infrastructure cheap and convenient.”
My skin prickles. Fog presses closer, muffling the hum of the freeway beyond the trees. A gust carries the smell of wet pine and grill smoke and candle wax.
“I should…check on the food,” Tessa says tightly. She squeezes once and drifts away, leaving me with the stranger who knows the name of the road that took my son.
“I appreciate you coming,” I say, because my mother trained me in politeness. “Most people only know the hashtags.”
He glances toward the table of photos. “I saw some of the posts,” he admits. “I wanted to say something real, but there isn’t anything, is there.”
The honest dread in that sentence unsettles me more than any platitude. I step back half a pace.
“Excuse me,” I say. “I need to—”
“Of course.” He lifts his hands, palms out. “I’ll get out of your hair.”
He moves toward the grill again, where Jonah calls his name in that overly hearty tone he uses with new clients. I pretend to refill water, but really I watch.
Micro-hook: Why does he know Old Willow Road like that?
A cluster of neighbors surrounds Jonah, laughing too loudly at something about HOA fines. Liam stays at the edge, sipping a beer, listening more than talking. His gaze drifts back to the photos, to me, then away, restless but focused.
“You’re doing it again,” Tessa murmurs when she reappears. “Narrating.”
“He knew the curve,” I say softly. “He said he covered a case there. A case, Tess. Not a story.”
“Plenty of reporters covered it,” she says. “Maple Hollow loves a scandal, remember?”
“There wasn’t a scandal,” I say. “Officially, there was nothing to cover. Drunk teen, bad decisions, tragic but clear.”
Her eyes darken. “Officially,” she repeats. “Mara, don’t do this to yourself tonight.”
“Do what.”
“Go hunting for a villain in the crowd.” She nods toward Liam. “People came because they care. Let that be enough for one evening.”
I swallow, my throat tight. “He’s not just a neighbor.”
“You met him ten minutes ago.”
“He knew the guardrail.”
Her exhale is sharp. “I’m getting more cake. You should eat some that hasn’t been sitting in the fog for an hour.” She walks away before I can brainstorm comebacks.
I tell myself to drop it. To sink back into the numb gray place where the words from the report form a wall: blood alcohol concentration, loss of control, impact speed.
Then I hear Liam say, “Do you know who installed the barrier on Old Willow?” and my spine locks.
He stands closer to Jonah now, both of them half-turned away, facing the dark outline of the fence. The cluster around them has thinned. People are drifting inside for coffee and warmth, leaving murmur trails in the damp air.
I migrate a few steps, pretending to rearrange plates, and angle myself so their voices reach me through the clink of cutlery and low conversations.
“I don’t,” Jonah says. “Why would I?”
“I’ve been looking at the layout,” Liam replies. “The guardrail failed in a way that doesn’t match the specs.”
The word failed buckles something in my chest.
“The police report said—” Jonah starts.
“I read it,” Liam cuts in. “Single-car collision. Driver impairment. Case closed. I also read the damage pattern. Those photos were public for a day before they disappeared from the local site.”
A plastic fork snaps in my hand. Tiny teeth of white plastic bite my palm.
“Disappear is a strong word,” Jonah says carefully. “Maybe they rotated the story down after the initial coverage.”
“Maybe,” Liam says, and I hear the doubt coiled in that single syllable. “Do you remember any mention of the manufacturer?”
“I’m an architect, not an engineer,” Jonah says. “I deal with elevations, not guardrails.”
“Architects sign off on site plans,” Liam says. “You know how liability works.”
Jonah’s shoulders tense. “I’m not discussing liability at my son’s memorial.”
The words slam into the yard and crack the hushed politeness for a heartbeat. Conversations falter, then start up again, louder.
My son’s memorial.
Air leaves my lungs in a shallow rush.
Liam lowers his voice. “I’m sorry. That was clumsy. I didn’t mean—”
“What do you want?” Jonah asks. “If this is about a story, you’re too late.”
“Stories don’t expire,” Liam says. “They just get buried.”
My fingers throb where the fork cut my skin. A thin smear of blood gleams against the white. I watch it bead, bright and undeniable.
I tell myself to step in. To ask him, point blank, what he knows. Instead, the numbness pulls at me, heavy and familiar. I throw the broken fork into the trash and busy myself stacking plates, going through the motions of a hostess.
The sky finishes sliding from purple to black. The fog thickens into a damp wall beyond the string lights. The smell of pine deepens, mixing with candle wax and smoke.
People leave in waves, hugs pressed against my stiff shoulders, whispers of “Call me, okay?” and “We’re here for you, really.” Tessa ushers them out with gentle authority. Jonah thanks them, his hand steady at the small of my back when I start to drift away.
“You did well,” he says quietly at one point.
“Like a dog at obedience school?” My voice comes out thin.
He flinches, then lets his hand drop. “I’m going to walk the Halperns to their car.”
“Fine.”
Eventually, the yard empties. The string lights hum. Wax puddles around the photo frames, some candles guttered out, others still clinging to flame. The hydrangea neighbor’s perfume lingers in the air, powdery and out of place.
Tessa helps me carry dishes inside. Warm air hits my damp clothes, smelling of coffee and lemon cleaner. I stack plates by the sink, the clatter echoing in the quiet house.
“You should go,” I tell her. “You have the early shift.”
“I can sleep on your couch,” she offers. “We can watch trash TV until you pass out.”
I picture reality show contestants screaming at each other while Caleb’s senior photo stares from the mantle. My chest tightens.
“I need to be alone,” I say. “For a bit. I’ll call you if—”
“If what,” she asks gently.
“If I start writing monologues on the walls.”
Her laugh is small but real. “Fine. But text me once before midnight or I start spamming you with GIFs.”
She hugs me, hard, ribs pressing against ribs, and then she is gone, her taillights sliding down the street, red streaks across misted glass.
The house settles, creaking in familiar places. The distant freeway hum rises and falls outside, a constant undertone. My phone buzzes twice on the counter. I flip it over without looking, face down. Let the hashtags pile up without me.
I should wash dishes. I should wipe tables, blow out the last candles, file the evening away in the folder labeled “doing better.”
Instead, I drift to the front window.
The glass is cold under my fingertips. Tiny drops of moisture have gathered along the outside, making the cul-de-sac shimmer. Porch lights glow in a rough circle. Maple Hollow under a dome.
Across the street, the renovated house stands out: clean lines, wide windows, cool-toned light spilling from the front door. Liam’s place. Different from the Craftsman bones of mine. Minimalist, controlled. Nothing peeling or sagging.
The door stands open, just a slice, throwing a column of brightness onto the porch. In that doorway, a figure stands.
Liam.
He is backlit, his features in shadow, his posture still. Not moving toward his car, not taking out trash, not checking a package. Just…there. Facing my house.
Heat crawls up my neck.
I should step away. Draw the curtains. Pretend I didn’t see him.
Instead, I stay. I hold my breath and keep my fingers on the glass, watching him watching me. The pane reflects my own pale face, ghosting over his silhouette, so for a moment I can’t tell which one of us is standing outside.
Then he reaches up, a small gesture, and presses his own hand against his doorway frame, like he is bracing himself. His head tilts, question or calculation, I can’t tell from here.
The porch light clicks off. Darkness swallows him. The door closes with a soft, definite finality.
I release my breath in a shaky burst.
Old Willow Road. A case just like it. Guardrail failure.
I stare at the blank rectangle of his front door until my eyes sting, until the glass blurs and doubles. My reflection swims, and for a heartbeat, I don’t trust the picture at all.
“Who are you,” I whisper to the empty street.
No answer, of course. Just the low hum of the freeway and the faint glow of screens flickering in other houses, other curated lives.
I know better than anyone that stories start with the wrong detail, the one that doesn’t sit right on the tongue. The curve under the overpass. The way the guardrail folded. The neighbor who shows up knowing too much.
I should be mourning my son.
Instead, I stand at my window, pulse drumming, already writing the stranger across the street into Chapter One.