I stare at the cardboard box on my dining table and dial Jonah before I can talk myself out of it.
His name glows on my phone screen, framed by a spiderweb of hairline cracks I keep meaning to fix. Through the front window, Maple Hollow slopes away under a lid of low cloud, fog hanging in the cul-de-sac so headlights smear across neighbor’s glass like fingerpaint. The distant freeway hums under it all, a bassline I can’t shut off.
He picks up on the third ring. “Hey,” he says, breath a little rushed. “What’s up? Everything okay?”
“Define okay,” I say, then soften my tone. “I’m calling about Caleb’s stuff.”
There’s a short pause, that tiny inhale he does when he’s bracing. “Right,” he says. “Tessa texted me you’ve been going through boxes.”
“I found more of his clothes,” I say. I touch the edge of the box; cardboard fibers prick my skin. “And the soccer trophies. And the headset he used to scream at strangers on Fortnite. You said you might want some of it at your place. For… I don’t know. A shrine. An offering to the HOA gods.”
He blows out a breath that tries to be a laugh. “I don’t need a shrine,” he says quietly. “But yeah, I’d like a few things. Maybe the state cup trophy and the hoodie from that tournament. We can figure it out. No rush.”
“There is,” I say. “There’s rush for me.”
My phone chimes in my other hand—a neighborhood group alert about “increased teen activity near the reservoir, parents please talk to your kids.” Parents are probably typing “So scary” under lake sunset photos right now, affixing #angelversary hashtags to other people’s tragedies.
“Okay,” Jonah says. Paper rustles on his end, like he’s shuffling files around to make room for this conversation in his day. “Do you want me to come by this weekend? Or you can drop a box here after therapy in the city, if that’s easier.”
“I went today,” I say.
“And?” He tries for casual, but the word lands heavy.
I move to the window, palm resting on the cold glass. Across the street, Liam’s house sits dark, blinds closed, a mirror with no reflection.
“I need to ask you something about the night of the crash,” I say. “And I don’t want to do it on speakerphone while you’re half-thinking about contracts.”
“Mara…” His voice tightens. “We’ve gone over that night.”
“Not like this.” I hear my own breath hitch. “Are you home?”
“Yeah,” he says slowly. “I came back early. Why?”
“Because I’m bringing the box,” I say. “And while I’m there, you’re going to walk me through that night, minute by minute.”
He’s silent for a beat too long.
“I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” he says. “You’ve been doing EMDR. Dr. Navarro said—”
“Dr. Navarro isn’t my husband,” I cut in. “Or my ex. Or Caleb’s father. You are. And right now my brain is running two completely different versions of where I was when our son died. So you’re going to help me triangulate. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Micro-hook: if his version holds, mine has to fold.
I hang up before he can marshal his lawyer voice.
Jonah’s condo sits on the other side of town, in a development that tried hard to look like an urban loft but couldn’t quite shake the smell of new carpet and HOA rules. The rain follows me there, a misting drizzle that beads on the windshield and blurs taillights into red smears.
I park in the guest spot and heft the box out of the back seat. The cardboard dampens under my fingers by the time I climb the stairs. Through the stairwell glass, I catch a slice of the freeway in the distance, headlights sliding down the hill away from Maple Hollow, away from Old Willow Road.
Jonah opens the door before I knock, like he’s been watching the peephole. He looks thinner, or maybe just more folded into himself. His button-down sleeves are rolled to the elbow, creases sharp, but his hair does that thing where one lock refuses to lie flat.
“You didn’t have to haul that yourself,” he says, reaching for the box. “I could’ve—”
“I needed to feel the weight,” I say, and step past him into the living room.
The place smells like lemon cleaner and coffee gone cold. His furniture is neutral and arranged with a draftsperson’s precision: gray sofa, matching armchair, blond wood coffee table, exactly one plant in the corner surviving out of guilt. Floor-to-ceiling glass sliders open to a small balcony and a view of rain-streaked rooftops.
Glass again, making everything look softer than it is.
I set the box on the coffee table. A plastic trophy rattles inside, tinny clink in the quiet.
Jonah closes the door. “Do you want water?” he asks. “Tea? Something stronger?”
“I want the truth,” I say. “We can start with water.”
He gets a glass from the kitchen and hands it to me. The rim taps against my teeth when I drink, small, betraying clink.
“You said EMDR,” he says, sitting on the far end of the sofa, leaving a gulf between us. “Did something new come up?”
“Images,” I say. My hand tightens around the glass. “Me in the passenger seat of Caleb’s car. Arguing with him. Grabbing the wheel.”
He goes very still. His throat works once. The wall clock ticks behind him, louder than it should.
“Mara,” he says, voice careful, “you weren’t in the car.”
“That’s the official story,” I say. “You know what else used to be official? That guardrail behaving the way it was supposed to.”
He flinches. “This isn’t about your conspiracy with the guardrails,” he says. “This is about us.”
“Exactly,” I say. “So let’s talk about us. That night. Where was I, Jonah? I need you to tell me, in detail. Not just ‘you were home.’”
He rubs his hands over his face, then laces his fingers together so tightly his knuckles pale. “We’ve gone over—”
“Not like this,” I repeat. “Pretend you’re on the stand. I’m opposing counsel. Walk the jury through the moment the police arrived. Start with where you were.”
His eyes flick to mine, annoyed. “You’re doing that thing where you turn life into cross-examination,” he says.
“I write for a living,” I say. “I structure scenes. Right now my head is running two different drafts of the worst night of my life. I need a witness statement.”
Micro-hook: if his testimony cracks, my new memory stops being just a hallucination with good lighting.
He exhales, long and shaky. “Fine,” he says. “I was here. At this condo. I’d gone to bed a little after eleven. Phone on the nightstand. You were at home in Maple Hollow. You texted at, what, ten-thirty? Saying Caleb hadn’t checked in yet and you were trying not to spiral.”
I remember that part: my thumbs on glass, the dryness in my mouth.
“And then?” I ask.
“Then the call,” he says. “I don’t remember the exact time. After midnight. The officer asked if I was Caleb’s father. He told me there’d been a crash. That they were taking him to St. Agnes. I asked if he was—” He breaks off. His jaw tightens. “I asked if he was alive. The officer said yes, but critical. He asked if anyone else was at home with you. I said you were there alone.”
“You said I was there,” I say. “That’s not the same as seeing me.”
Jonah’s shoulders stiffen. “Mara, they told me they were sending a unit to your house,” he says. “To inform you. I drove over. I made it in fifteen minutes. I didn’t even put shoes on, just grabbed my keys and went.”
“And when you got there?” I press.
His eyes go distant, gaze shifting past my shoulder to the blank wall. “Two officers were on the porch,” he says slowly. “You opened the door. You had… you were in sweats. You were crying. You said you’d thrown up in the sink. The female officer was holding your arm so you didn’t fall.”
My skin prickles. “What color were my sweats?”
He blinks. “What?”
“What color,” I repeat. “The clothes I wore when they told me our son was dying. What did they look like in your head every night after that, Jonah?”
His mouth opens, then shuts. His brow furrows in a way I know means he’s scanning for a file that isn’t where he left it.
“Gray,” he says finally. “I think. Or black.”
“Which?” I ask.
“Does it matter?” His voice cracks. “You were a mess. Your face was—”
“I remember the pajama pants,” I say. “Blue flannel with little foxes. Caleb gave them to me for Christmas as a joke. You hated them.”
He stares. A flush creeps up his neck. “I… don’t,” he admits. “That night, I wasn’t looking at the pattern of your pants, Mara. I was trying not to throw up myself.”
“You’re an architect,” I say. “You remember the pitch of every roof you’ve ever drawn. You remember the grain of the wood on that table you built in college. But you can’t remember what I wore when three lives ended.”
“Two lives,” he snaps. The words hang there, too honest. “You didn’t die.”
I swallow hard. “Sometimes I think that’s debatable.”
Silence folds over us for a moment, thick and scratchy.
“Okay,” I say, voice low. “You don’t remember my clothes. What about me. What did I say when I opened the door?”
He stares at the glass slider instead of me. Outside, rain streaks down, catching yellow balcony light in thin lines.
“You didn’t say anything at first,” he says. “You just… made this sound. Like your lungs stopped. You backed up, and the officer caught you. When you could talk, you kept asking if Caleb had anyone with him. You said, ‘He hates hospitals alone.’”
My fingers dig crescents into my thighs. The words ring true and foreign at once.
“You called me by name,” he adds. “You said, ‘Jonah, did you hear him on the phone? Was he scared?’”
The room tilts for a second, the memory in my head of dashboard glow and Caleb’s music bleeding into the one Jonah is painting at the doorway.
“Do you remember how I looked?” I ask. “My hair, my hands, anything.”
“Wet,” he says. “You were sweaty. Or maybe you’d splashed water on your face. Your hair was pulled up. Or—” He shakes his head, frustrated. “I don’t know, Mara. I remember your eyes. That’s it.”
His memory frays right at the edges where truth usually lives.
“Why don’t you remember?” I ask. “You have no concussion excuse. No ten-minute black hole. You were stone-cold sober, and this was the worst phone call of your life. Why are the details fog?”
“Because I compartmentalized,” he fires back. “Because that’s how I didn’t lose my mind. I focused on what needed doing. Getting you to the hospital. Talking to the attending. Signing forms. Calling Tessa. I had to, because you were—” He shuts his eyes for a second. “Because you couldn’t.”
“Convenient,” I say. I hear the acid in it and don’t back off. “You get to erase the messy parts until your story lines up with whatever protects you.”
“Protects me from what?” he asks. “From grief? You think I haven’t paid for that night every day since?”
I take a breath that scrapes my ribs. “From liability,” I say. “From your job.”
He goes absolutely still.
“What did Dr. Navarro tell you?” he asks slowly.
“This isn’t from Navarro,” I say. “This is from patterns. You lawyered up early, Jonah. Before there was any hint the guardrail could be an issue. Before I had my first therapy intake. Why?”
He lets out a bitter huff. “You think I called an attorney because I thought you caused the crash?”
“I think you called an attorney because your firm has ties to whoever built that overpass,” I say. “And you realized our dead son might be bad for business.”
His gaze snaps to mine then, sharp, no longer drifting.
“Who have you been talking to?” he asks. “Is this Liam?”
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Don’t make this about my dangerous neighbor. This is about you. Tell me the truth.”
He scrubs a hand over his mouth. The lemon-cleaner smell suddenly turns acrid in my nose.
“We represent a consortium,” he says at last. “Construction, engineering, maintenance. Infrastructure projects, yes, including the Old Willow Road overpass. Or rather, the parent company of the subcontractor that did that stretch. After the crash, the firm’s risk team did a conflict check. My name lit up because of you and Caleb.”
Heat floods my face. “You knew,” I say. “You knew there could be a link between their work and the crash, and you stayed quiet.”
“It wasn’t that simple,” he says quickly. “The police report said single-car accident, probable driver impairment. The guardrail failure wasn’t flagged. The firm decided there was no direct conflict. But they still put me behind a wall—no talking to press, no contact with any potential litigation, no internal chatter about Old Willow. They assigned senior partners to monitor, in case anything changed.”
“And you?” I ask. “What did you do?”
He looks down at his clasped hands. “I signed an internal memo,” he says. “Acknowledging the potential appearance issue. Agreeing not to disclose client names to you or Tessa, in case you pursued civil action.”
“So you lied by omission,” I say. “In my own kitchen, in that hospital waiting room, while I was scrubbing Caleb’s blood off my hands in the ER sink.”
His shoulders fold inward. “I couldn’t talk about clients,” he says. “That’s my job. That’s… the oath I took.”
“You took vows with me first,” I say. My voice comes out low, not the raw scream the words deserve. “In front of our families. You remember those details, I bet. The color of my dress. The song we danced to. But the night our son died, what sticks is the version HR approved.”
His eyes shine, but he doesn’t let the tears fall. Typical Jonah, containment in human form.
“Mara, I wasn’t trying to protect the company from you,” he says. “I was trying to keep both worlds from collapsing at once. We were already drowning. If I’d told you my firm had any connection to that road, you would have gone nuclear. You would have gone online. You would have talked to reporters. You would have—”
“Gone looking for the truth?” I cut in. “Yeah, what a nightmare.”
“You don’t understand how this works,” he says, desperation edging his words. “If you come at a client like that without evidence, they crush you. They dig into everything. Your prescriptions, your therapy notes, your aunt’s psych history. They’d make you look unstable. They’d say you were rewriting the past to dodge your own guilt.”
The word guilt lands between us like a dropped glass, threatening to shatter.
“Whose idea was it to stick to the story that I was home?” I ask. “Yours, or theirs?”
He squeezes his eyes shut briefly. “You were home,” he says. “That’s not a spin. That’s what happened.”
“You can’t remember what I wore,” I say. “You can’t say for sure my hair was up or down. You remember one line I supposedly said, and the rest is blur. That’s not a memory. That’s a script.”
He leans forward, elbows on knees, head in his hands. “The officer’s report says you were at the house when they arrived,” he says. “Time-stamped. That’s the version I anchored to. That’s the one thing I could hold still.”
“Reports can be wrong,” I say. “Bodycam footage can glitch. Guardrails can fail. How many times does this town need proof that official doesn’t equal true?”
Micro-hook: the more I dig, the more everyone’s story starts to look like a legal brief—clean margins, no blood.
He looks up at me, and for a second I see the man I married, the one who used to trace floor plans on my back when I couldn’t sleep.
“What did you see in EMDR?” he asks quietly. “When you were in the car.”
My throat tightens. “I saw Caleb driving drunk,” I say. “I saw myself in the passenger seat, trying to stop him. And right before the crash, I saw my hand on the wheel.”
Jonah inhales sharply. His fingers curl into fists.
“No,” he says, almost to himself. “No. You weren’t there. You can’t have been there. That would mean—”
“That would mean what?” I push. “That would mean your neat little narrative of the sainted mother at the sink is wrong? That your firm’s conflict check wasn’t just theoretical?”
He shakes his head hard, like he can rattle the thought loose. “It would mean you could have died too,” he says. “And I can’t—” He swallows. “I can’t hold that picture. So no. I reject it. I choose the one where you’re home.”
There it is. The word he doesn’t say but I hear anyway: choose.
“You’re an architect,” I say softly. “You pick the load-bearing walls. You decide which ones get knocked down. Maybe that night you did that with reality.”
He doesn’t argue.
I stand, knees stiff. The room smells thicker now, lemon layered with something human—fear, sweat, grief. The glass slider throws our reflections back at us, two blurred shapes hovering over the city lights, overlapping in a way that makes it hard to tell who’s in front.
“I’ll leave the box,” I say. “Take what you want. Or don’t. I’m done curating his image for you.”
“Mara,” he says, standing too. “Please don’t go chasing this.”
“Chasing what?” I ask. “The possibility that the story we built is wrong?”
“Chasing a version where you hurt him,” he says, each word like he’s chewing gravel. “You don’t come back from that.”
I stare at him. “Maybe I don’t come back from not knowing,” I say.
His shoulders sag. “If you drag the firm into this,” he says quietly, “they will come for you. Not me. You. You’re the unstable grieving mother. I’m the professionally obligated ex. Remember that.”
“I remember more than you think,” I say. “And I’m starting to remember things you’d prefer I didn’t.”
I walk to the door, hand on the cool metal handle. Behind me, the clock ticks over another minute I can’t account for.
On the balcony glass, my reflection hovers next to Jonah’s, warped by rain, two versions of me layered in the same pane: the woman at the sink and the woman in the passenger seat.
I step into the hallway with one question louder than the rest, drilling into my skull all the way back to Maple Hollow.
If Jonah’s story protects his clients, who is protecting the truth about where I really was the night our son’s car met that guardrail?