I drive back into Maple Hollow on autopilot, the cul-de-sac rising up out of the fog like it’s on a slow lift. Headlights smear across the front windows, leaving streaks on the glass that hang there for a second before dissolving. The HOA newsletter still flaps under my windshield wiper where someone tucked it, lecturing me in cheerful font about lawn length and acceptable mulch colors while Old Willow Road curves like a bruise in my head.
Inside, the house smells like stale coffee and wet dog even though we never had a dog. Just that damp, lived-in sour under the pine-scented candle I forgot to blow out this morning. I drop my keys in the bowl by the door, toe my shoes off without untying them, and go straight for my laptop on the dining table.
The cardboard box of Caleb’s stuff sits where I left it, lid half-open, a soccer trophy leaning out like it’s trying to escape. Next to it, my external drive blinks a slow, patient blue.
I wake the laptop. The lock screen is a reflection of me in miniature: hollow-eyed, hair frizzed at the edges from the rain. I swipe in, click open the folder I swore I wouldn’t open again, and there it is, waiting—Caleb_Backup_CloudPull.zip.
“Okay,” I say out loud to the empty room. “Let’s rewrite this.”
I open the third-party recovery program Liam recommended once in an offhand text, during a phase where he was still pretending he didn’t live and breathe in other people’s metadata. The interface is ugly and utilitarian, gray boxes stacking on gray. A progress bar fills in jittery bursts as it digs through the backup.
I wrap my hands around a leftover mug of coffee, now cold and oily on top. The bitter taste drags across my tongue, but I drink anyway. The mechanical chime of another neighborhood alert shrills from my phone on the table—someone complaining about kids gathering near the reservoir again, suggestions for more patrols, someone else posting a candlelit photo of their “angel” nephew with a halo filter, captioned with three hashtags and three crying emojis.
Parents in this neighborhood curate their grief like Pinterest boards. I’m the one digging through code.
The scan completes with a soft ding. A list of “recoverable conversations” blooms on screen, numbers without names first, then contacts with labels. I scroll past my own name, past Jonah’s, thumb dragging the touchpad too fast. Tessa’s contact pops up halfway down, saved in Caleb’s phone as “Aunt T (DO NOT TXT WHEN DRUNK).”
I click.
The thread unspools in the right-hand pane. Normal stuff at the top: memes, a picture of his dinner, her sending a selfie from the ER wearing a ridiculous face shield filter. Then a blank zone with gray placeholder brackets: [deleted message], [deleted message]. After that, fragmented bubbles clinging to the edges of nothing.
My heart starts a staccato under my ribs.
I scroll to the bottom and work backward. The most recent message I can see is from Tessa, weeks before the crash: Proud of you, kiddo. Text me when you get home. Above it, more ordinary chatter. I keep scrolling until the header shows the date I’m looking for, the night that swallowed everything.
There—distance-narrowed by a timestamp just after ten p.m.
Green bubble, from Caleb: plz don’t tell Mom, Tess
The rest of the line is ragged, cut short, a rectangle of digital static where words should be. Next up, her reply, blue bubble with the first half intact: Hydrate. Food. Then we talk about— cut off into [deleted].
My breath catches. The program does its best to reconstruct what’s been torn, showing trailing characters in gray: driv at the edge of one bubble, e?? at the top of the next. Not enough to be proof, more than enough to be accusation.
Another green fragment from him: I’m good to drive, promise.
The word glows toxic on the screen.
My throat dries out. I scroll again, fingers shaking. Above those, earlier that evening, more talk: How many drinks, Caleb?, FaceTime me. The video icon shows, but the content is gone, just a dead link to a call that doesn’t exist anymore.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no.”
I pull the police report PDF from its folder and resize the windows so they sit side by side. Timestamps line up like teeth. Caleb’s last visible text to Tessa: 11:42 p.m. Time the neighbor near the party called noise complaints: 11:50. Estimated time of crash on Old Willow Road: 12:13 a.m.
Thirty-one minutes where my son was alive and my sister was his lifeline. Thirty-one minutes neither of them ever shared with me.
Micro-hook: if Tessa helped write the night, then everything I’ve built on top of it might be a fanfic version of our worst hour.
My fingers leave little crescents in the wood of the table. I zoom in on the phrase again—I’m good to drive, promise—the blue light from the screen turning my nails ghostly. My EMDR memory of the passenger seat pulses at the edges of my vision, dashboard glow, Caleb’s profile lit in choppy flashes.
Tessa looked me in the eye and swore she’d told me everything.
I slam the laptop shut. The click is too loud in the quiet house. The external drive’s blue light keeps blinking, indifferent.
Keys. Phone. I snatch both and head for the door.
The drive to St. Agnes threads past Maple Hollow’s darkening porches, each bay window a little stage with its own show: a dad in joggers scrolling, a mom wiping a countertop that’s already clean, a teenager’s room lit neon blue behind half-open blinds. Headlights from the slope above smear against all that glass, turning everyone’s lives into quick, warped glimpses.
By the time I hit the freeway, rain needles the windshield, the wipers scraping in a rhythm that grates. The distant hum I hear at home swallows everything out here. I don’t put music on. My son’s playlists are landmines.
The hospital parking lot is three-quarters full, sodium lights reflecting off wet asphalt in hazy halos. I park badly, crooked between lines, and jog toward the entrance, damp air cold in my throat.
Inside, the smell hits first: antiseptic, over-brewed coffee, and something metallic underneath that’s not quite blood but lives next to it. The sliding glass doors hiss shut behind me, sealing me into the bright aquarium of the ER waiting area. The TV on the wall plays a muted local news segment about a community vigil for traffic safety—candles, posters, a clipped woman in a blazer talking about “personal responsibility on the road” while a crawl at the bottom advertises a guardrail manufacturer’s sponsorship of some charity run.
Of course.
I walk past a cluster of parents hunched over their phones, fingers flicking feeds, faces glowing blue. One woman wears a sweatshirt printed with her son’s smiling face and the date he died in big looping script. A caption under a recent post on her screen reads #HeavenGainedAnotherAngel.
My pulse drums in my ears. I head for the badge-protected door. The security guard recognizes me by now; Tessa’s brought me here for coffee enough times.
“Evening, Ms. Ellison,” he says, buzzard-humming the door open. “Tessa on tonight.”
“I know,” I say, and try to turn my mouth into something that won’t start a fire.
The nurse’s station feels like the inside of a fluorescent seashell, monitors beeping in layered beeps, keyboards clacking. Tessa stands with her back to me, curls twisted into a knot under a colorful scrub cap patterned with cartoon lungs. She’s charting, pen clamped between her teeth, fingers flying.
“Tess,” I say.
She turns, pen dropping into her hand. A smile flashes reflexively, then stalls when she sees my face.
“Hey,” she says slowly. “Why aren’t you home hate-watching true crime?”
I hold up my phone. The screen glows with the screenshot I took of the recovered messages, green and blue bubbles fractured but legible. Her gaze snags on it.
“We need to talk,” I say. “Now.”
Her shoulders slump, just a millimeter, but I catch it. She glances over her shoulder at the board, the red-lit patient statuses, the charge nurse on the phone.
“Break room,” she says. “Two minutes.”
“Stairwell,” I counter. “No audience.”
Her jaw works, but she nods.
The east stairwell is quieter than the main one, concrete steps, metal railing cool under my palm. The wired-glass window on the landing smears the view of the parking lot into a blurred painting of brake lights and rain.
Tessa leans against the wall, arms folded, badge swinging. “You look like you haven’t slept in three days,” she says. “I mean, more than usual.”
“Don’t try to babysister me,” I say. “I dug into Caleb’s phone backup.”
Her eyes flick to my hand. “Mara…”
I hold the screen up between us. “You knew he was drinking that night,” I say. “He texted you. He asked you not to tell me. You have him on record saying he’s ‘good to drive.’ And you never mentioned any of it.”
Her face drains, freckles standing out stark. She reaches for the phone; I pull it back.
“Where did you get that?” she asks. Her voice is a notch too high. “Those messages were—”
“Deleted?” I say. “Funny thing about deletion. It doesn’t mean gone. It just means buried deep enough that normal people stop looking.”
She closes her eyes for a heartbeat, lashes dark against her skin. When she opens them, they shine too bright under the fluorescent light.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Let’s sit.”
“I’m not here for a guided meditation,” I snap.
“You’re here on no sleep, hopped up on trauma therapy and whatever conspiracy Liam’s feeding you,” she says. “And you’re about to go nuclear in my workplace. So yeah, we’re sitting.”
It’s unfair that she’s right. It’s unfair that I sink down onto the step anyway, spine against the cold wall. She lowers herself beside me, knees sticking out in pale blue scrub pants, sneakers squeaking faintly on cement.
Micro-hook: if she says the words out loud, there’s no deleting them, no recovery software that lets us pretend they never existed.
I shove the phone into her hands. She studies the fractured bubbles for a long moment.
“I told you he texted me that night,” she says.
“You said memes,” I shoot back. “You said it was stupid stuff.”
“It started that way,” she says. Her thumb hovers over the screen but doesn’t touch it. “He was sending drunk selfies with that stupid dog filter. Calling himself ‘old man drunk’ because he’d had two beers.”
The words cut. “You didn’t mention him asking you not to tell me,” I say.
She lets out a short, humorless breath. “When has Caleb not asked me not to tell you something?” she asks. “‘Don’t tell Mom I failed the quiz.’ ‘Don’t tell Mom I shaved my chest hair.’ It’s our whole dynamic.”
“Two beers,” I repeat. “That’s what he said?”
“At first,” she says. “Then he called. Not just texts. A real call.” Her voice tilts, that nurse steadiness thinning. “He was outside. I could hear music through the phone. He was… more than two.”
My nails bite into my palms. “And you—what? Gave him a gold star? Told him to hydrate via emoji?”
Her head snaps toward me. “I told him to put the phone in his pocket so I could hear his gait,” she says. “I listened to his breathing, his speech. I am an ER nurse. I know drunk. I deal with it every damn shift.”
“So you did a phone sobriety test,” I say. “Great. Very scientific.”
She looks like she wants to hit me and hug me at the same time. “I told him to get someone else to drive,” she says. “He said his friend’s mom might freak if the car didn’t come back. He said Uber drivers call parents now when kids puke, and he didn’t want you getting some message at two a.m. I told him to find a couch. I told him to eat something. I told him I’d come by on my break.”
“You went there.” The words taste like pennies.
She nods once. “I clocked out on an early lunch. Told charge I needed ten. Drove over. It’s fifteen minutes away if you don’t hit the lights.”
My head swims. “You never told me that.”
“I know.” Her jaw tightens. “I parked down the block so if some neighbor posted about noise on the Maple Hollow page, no one would see my car and tag me. He was outside on the curb, hoodie on, hair damp with sweat. He hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe.”
The image slices into my chest: Caleb’s arms around her, not me. His breath hot with beer and cheap vodka and teenage panic.
“How drunk?” I ask.
She stares at the window, where two distant headlights smear into a single streak. “On a college kid, I’d say pleasantly buzzed,” she says. “On an almost-eighteen-year-old who didn’t have a ton of tolerance? Enough that I didn’t like it. He walked a straight line for me. He recited the alphabet backwards up to, like, P.”
“And you let him get behind a wheel,” I say.
Tears gather in her eyes, stubbornly contained. “I made him drink water,” she says. “I sat there with him for twenty minutes, counting breaths. I checked his pupils with my phone flashlight. I told him if he felt even one tiny bit off, he had to text me and I would come back and drive him myself, I didn’t care about the shift.”
“And he said?”
Her voice drops. “He said, ‘I’m good to drive, promise.’ The same way he used to say, ‘I studied, promise,’ or ‘I’m not high, promise.’”
The phrase on my phone glows again; my hand shakes.
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” I ask. The anger in my chest goes white-hot, sizzling under my ribs. “Why did I have to dig it out of code like trash?”
She finally looks at me, face naked in a way I don’t see often. “Because I failed him,” she whispers. “Because I thought—God, Mara, I thought I was making it safer. I thought a little buzzed and watched by me was better than him sneaking off with some rando driving. I thought if I could just keep him calm and hydrated and away from cops, we’d get through the night and I’d lecture his ass in daylight.”
My laugh comes out like a bark. “We.”
“I am not proud of this,” she says sharply. “I’m telling you because you asked. Because you shook the skeleton hard enough and now it’s out dancing. I have replayed that curb in my head every night for months. I have checked his B.A.L. against charts on my lunch breaks. I have imagined grabbing his keys, dragging him into my car, calling you and letting you scream at both of us. I didn’t. I let him climb into his own car, and I watched his taillights turn the corner.”
A sound leaves me that doesn’t belong to any language.
“I told myself he was okay enough,” she goes on, words coming faster now, the dam cracked. “I told myself he’d driven that road a hundred times. I told myself you already carried too much, and I could carry this worry for you. And then the next time my phone buzzed, it wasn’t him. It was you. And your voice—it didn’t sound like… like anyone human.”
She scrubs at her nose with the back of her hand, hard. Her badge swings wildly.
“I wanted to tell you,” she says. “At the hospital, when you were scrubbing your hands in that sink like you could wash the night off. But you looked at me and said, ‘He wasn’t drunk. They’re lying.’ And for one second, I thought, if I agree with her, if I say yes, they’re lying, then maybe that’s the reality we get. Maybe my version dies in my throat and we live inside yours.”
The stairwell tilts. The paradox I keep circling clicks into place with a horrible clarity: we protected each other with stories that might have murdered the truth.
“So you let me be the righteous one,” I say. “You let me go on TV and tell the world he wasn’t impaired, that the guardrail failed, that the system killed him. You let me build a villain out of steel and corporate greed while the real betrayal was on our own cracked phone screens.”
“Both can be true,” she says quickly. “Guardrails fail. Companies cut corners. Kids make terrible choices. Aunts make worse ones. None of that brings him home. I didn’t correct you because I was scared that if I punctured your version, you’d see me as the reason he’s dead.”
“You think I don’t?” I whisper.
The words land between us like glass dropped on concrete.
Tessa flinches. Her breath stutters. For a second, I think she’ll stand up and walk out, go back to her orbit of drips and charting and beeping machines where death is clinical and logged. Instead, she folds in on herself, elbows on her knees, hands over her face.
“I know you do,” she says through her fingers. “Because I do. I look at every drunk kid that rolls into this place and I see him. I see my hands on his shoulders saying, ‘You’re okay,’ when he wasn’t. I see my car keys sitting in my pocket while his keys jingled in his. I carry that into every room. I don’t get to put it down.”
My anger, still white-hot, wobbles under the weight of her words. I press my head back against the cinderblock wall, the chill biting through my hair. My fingertips have gone numb.
We sit like that, two women in a stairwell, pinned by fluorescent light and the echo of a boy’s last casual promise.
“Did he say anything else?” I ask finally. “Anything I don’t know. Anything about… picking someone up. Dropping someone off.”
Her fingers slide down just enough for me to see her eyes. “He kept saying he had to fix something,” she says. “He said, ‘Tonight I make it right.’ I asked, right with who, and he said, ‘Mom. I’ll tell her after.’ I thought he meant grades, or weed, or that fight you had about the party.”
The air thins. In my EMDR memory, I hear his voice over the engine: I’m done ruining things. The words shift now, aligning with this new angle.
Micro-hook: if Caleb had a confession lined up for me, then the version of him as passive victim, as pure collateral damage, is just another angle I chose because it hurt less.
My eyes sting. I lean forward, elbows on my knees, mirror of Tessa’s pose. We sit, hunched twins, separated by a thin slice of air and a ruined boy.
“I don’t know how to forgive you,” I say quietly. “I don’t know how to forgive myself. Or him. Or anyone.”
“You don’t have to,” she says. “Not tonight. Maybe not ever.”
Down the stairwell, a code is called over the intercom, muffled through the door. Tessa’s pager vibrates against her hip, a low angry buzz.
She stands on shaky legs. “I have to go save someone else’s kid,” she says. “Or try. Please don’t do anything with this yet. Not with Jonah. Not with Liam. Not with… whoever you think is listening through those windows in your neighborhood.”
I look up at her. “The neighborhood already thinks I’m the crazy one,” I say. “The bad mom who can’t let go.”
“You’re the only one who knows we both let him go,” she says.
She takes the steps two at a time, disappearing through the heavy door. It swings shut, leaving me alone with the fading hum of her pager and the whisper of rain against the wired glass.
I stare at the phone in my hand, the jagged text bubbles reflected over the blurred parking lot beyond, two layers of reality fighting for the same space.
When the door clicks locked above me, one question curls tight in my chest, sharper than anger, heavier than grief.
If the people I trust most edited the story of that night to protect me, what else in my memory is a redacted document I’ve mistaken for the original?