“Come over,” Liam says.
The words hang between us in the dark driveway, hanging there with the moisture in the air. The fog on the slope thickens around the streetlights, turning every beam into a smear across the slick pavement. Somewhere up the hill, the freeway hums like a distant machine I can’t shut off.
“No,” I say automatically. “I’m going home.”
“You wanted answers,” he says. “I’m offering some. My office. Ten minutes.”
A door across the street opens; a neighbor steps out to bring in a trash can, phone in hand, blue light flashing over their face. I picture their doorbell camera catching this little tableau: grieving mother and strange new neighbor in low conference, framed nicely in HD.
“You requested footage from the memorial,” I say. “From everybody but me.”
“And I’ll explain why,” he says. “But I’m not doing it in the middle of the cul-de-sac while Denise’s Nest records every syllable.”
I follow his gaze to the dark eye of the camera above her garage. Glass framing us again. My skin crawls.
“Ten minutes,” he repeats. “You can walk out whenever you want.”
My better judgment mutters no like a mantra. My curiosity, raw and jittery, answers by stepping off the curb toward his house.
His place smells like coffee, electronics, and that clean laundry scent you only get from obsessively following the dryer-sheet instructions. Cool-toned LEDs wash the entryway in a pale glow. Where my Craftsman sags and creaks, his renovated smart home clicks softly, things whirring on invisible schedules.
I kick off my shoes by the door; the hardwood is cool under my socks. “You know this is the part in my books where the widow visits the neighbor’s lair and finds a shrine to herself,” I say.
“You’re not a widow,” he says quietly, shutting the door. “And I don’t have shrines. I have evidence.”
“Comforting.”
He leads me down the hallway, past the open-plan kitchen with its pristine counters and the wall of windows looking out over Maple Hollow. The glass shows the cul-de-sac as a hazy duplicate, fog-soft and ghostly, headlights dragging pale fingers over the rows of houses. My own dark porch sits across the way, a shadow with peeling edges.
His office door is closed. He pauses with his hand on the knob. “You’re sure?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “Open it.”
He does.
The first thing that hits me is the light. Four monitors glow on the desk in blues and whites, stacks of windows tiled like a digital mosaic. My eyes adjust and then I see the wall.
Every inch of it is covered.
There are photos printed on cheap matte paper: twisted guardrails under overpasses, crumpled sedans, pickup trucks with their fronts bitten away. Road names written in black marker: OLD WILLOW RD, HWY 217 EXIT 12, MILLER CREEK BRIDGE. Yellow string connects some of them, drawing lines between crash sites on a pinned map of the state.
The second thing that hits is the sound. Fans whir inside the tower; the monitors buzz faintly. Somewhere under it all, I catch the distant freeway again, a steady low growl under the house.
I step inside slowly. “You weren’t kidding,” I say. “You really did build the conspiracy wall.”
“Pattern,” he says. “Not conspiracy.”
I move closer to the photos. A young woman’s car folded around a guardrail. A minivan with a child’s seat visible through the back window. A pickup that looks terrifyingly like Caleb’s, nose gone, metal curled back.
“These are all the same model guardrail,” he says, standing a careful distance behind me. “Different installs. Different weather. Similar failures.”
My fingers drift up, stopping just short of a photo where the guardrail has skewered a hood instead of deflecting it. The gloss of the paper catches the monitor light.
“How long have you been collecting this?” I ask.
“Years,” he says. “Before Caleb. Before Maple Hollow.”
“Waiting for us,” I say, my throat tight. “Waiting for my son to add to your string art.”
“Hoping the pattern was done,” he says. “Hoping I was wrong.”
I let that sit. On one monitor, a spreadsheet glows: dates, coordinates, weather conditions, speed estimates. On another, an email thread with subject lines redacted in black rectangles. A third shows what looks like bodycam footage paused mid-frame, headlights frozen in the dark.
Micro-hook: if he’s telling the truth, Caleb isn’t the story; he’s one entry in a long, ugly series.
“You get why I didn’t lead with this at the block party,” he says.
“The corkboard of doom might have killed the vibe,” I say. “Yes.”
“And you get why I requested footage from other houses,” he adds.
I turn around. “No,” I say. “Try me.”
He rests his hip against the desk, crossing his arms. “If you requested the footage, every neighbor would frame it as you spiraling again,” he says. “If I request it, they frame it as boring liability review. Which worked.”
“You still cut me out,” I say. “I live in the house the crash emptied. But sure, protect me by making decisions over my head. That’s new.”
His jaw tightens. “Your system glitched that night,” he says. “Your words. I needed clean angles.”
“You needed control,” I shoot back. “And speaking of control—”
I point at the nearest monitor, where a folder labeled CRASH_ARCHIVE sits in the corner of a file manager.
“You going to pretend you don’t know anything about anonymous emails?” I ask. “About file drops full of dashcam clips that show your reflection in a window?”
He doesn’t flinch. That makes me angrier.
“Answer me,” I say.
“Some of the files came from me,” he says. “Not all.”
“Of course,” I say. “Because clarity would be too easy.”
“You weren’t ready to talk to me directly,” he says. “You burned me alive on your porch with your eyes when I introduced myself at the memorial. So, yes, I used an anonymous account to get information in front of you.”
I pace in the narrow space between the desk and the wall, fingers spidering along the edges of papers, string, tape. “You fed the crazy woman more evidence,” I say. “For entertainment? For a case study?”
“For leverage,” he says. “Not against you. Against them.”
“You really expect me to draw a line between those?” I ask.
He exhales through his nose, a soft, frustrated sound. “You needed to see the pattern before you could hear it,” he says. “That’s how your brain is wired. Story first, analysis second.”
“You read my books,” I say.
“Of course I read your books,” he says. “I moved in across the street from you with a guardrail file in my suitcase. You think I didn’t do homework?”
A bitter laugh slips out. “You researched me like a mark,” I say. “Right on brand.”
Micro-hook: if my own life is an investigation file on his wall, I’m not the author; I’m the unreliable narrator under review.
“I pushed you,” he says, quieter now. “I admit that. I pushed with the files, with questions, with what I did at the memorial. But the goal wasn’t to break you, Mara.”
“What was the goal,” I ask, “exactly?”
He looks past me at the wall, then back. “You built a story that kept you functioning,” he says. “You at home, Caleb on the road, guardrail as random tragedy. That story locked your memory in place. I needed you to question that narrative before anyone else did. Because once their lawyers start picking it apart, they won’t care about the truth, they’ll care about discrediting you.”
His words land in my chest like thrown stones. I picture Jonah’s careful face in his condo, his firm’s clean conference rooms, the nameless “consultant” in Denise’s email. My own EMDR visions, flaring behind my eyelids.
“So you decided to pre-discredit me yourself,” I say. “Great plan.”
“No,” he says. “I decided to give you space to hold more than one version of the night. To understand how fragile memory is before they use that fragility against you.”
“You talk like you invented trauma,” I say.
He flinches then, a tiny flick of muscle at the corner of his mouth. “My sister died on a guardrail installation I don’t trust,” he says. “I watched my mother rewrite that night a hundred ways to keep breathing. I watched a company twist her grief into PR. I’m not theorizing, Mara.”
The room contracts. The monitors dim in my peripheral vision; the photos blur.
“You think I enjoy pushing you into this?” he says. “You think I don’t see what it costs?”
His voice roughens on that last word. I feel it more than hear it.
I lean back against the wall, the printed photos crinkling softly behind my shoulders. “Then stop,” I say. “Stop playing puppet master.”
“You’re not a puppet,” he says. “You’re… God, you’re the last person who would ever let someone pull your strings.”
“You just admitted you’ve been pulling them,” I say.
“I nudged the narrative,” he says. “You moved.”
“That is not better,” I say.
The argument hangs there, suspended. The fans whir. On one monitor, a progress bar crawls across a window: COPYING 342 FILES. A phone on the desk buzzes with a notification, the mechanical chime too bright in the dim room.
I realize my hands are shaking. I wrap my arms around myself, elbows digging into my ribs.
“Here’s the part you’re missing,” I say. “You’re not the only one who knows narratives. I make them for a living. I know exactly how to edit a scene to push a character where I want her to go.”
“You’re not a character,” he says.
“You keep saying that,” I answer. “And then you treat me like one.”
His eyes meet mine. They look darker in the monitor glow, pupils wide, catching fragments of windows reflected across the glass of his screens. I realize we’re standing closer than we were. The air feels thinner.
Micro-hook: if he can see that I’m a character in someone else’s story, why does my body react like this when he steps closer?
“What do you want from me right now?” he asks. “This second. Tell me and I’ll try to give it to you.”
The question hits someplace I don’t trust.
“I want my son back,” I say. “Since that’s off the table, I’ll take the truth.”
“I’m giving you the truth I have,” he says. “Guardrail specs, crash data, contracts. The rest…” He gestures at my temple. “The rest is yours.”
“You keep poking at my memory like it’s clay you can mold,” I say. “Then you tell me it’s my responsibility when it reshapes.”
“That’s not what I—”
I push off the wall and cross the space between us in two steps. My finger lands hard against his chest, right over the line of buttons on his shirt.
“You like control,” I say. “Say it.”
His breath hitches under my hand. “Of course I like control,” he says. “Control keeps people alive.”
“Control keeps them obedient,” I say. “Keeps them useful.”
“That’s what they believe,” he says. “I’m not them.”
“You’re still using their tools,” I say. “Surveillance. Anonymous files. Emotional pressure.”
“And you’re using yours,” he counters. “Words. Scenes. You’re narrating me into a villain because that’s the shape that makes sense. It’s how you survive.”
His voice has dropped. I can feel it in my finger, in the faint vibration under his sternum. I suddenly realize how close we are, the exact heat of his body, the faint scent of coffee on his breath, a trace of pine from the detergent in his shirt.
My hand stays where it is. His stays at his sides, but his fingers curl, like he’s fighting the urge to move them.
“You put my son’s crash on your wall,” I say. “You moved in across from my house on purpose. You sent me files in the dark. You don’t get to lecture me about narrative ethics.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t. But I can admit that every time I do any of that, a part of me wants to walk away and never talk to you again because I know exactly how much I’m hurting you.”
His voice cracks on “hurting.” The sound goes through me like a live wire.
“Then why don’t you?” I whisper.
His eyes flick to my mouth, then back up. “Because you’re the only person who cares enough to burn everything down,” he says. “And because—”
He stops.
“Because what?” I ask.
“Because I care about you,” he says, almost under his breath. “More than I should. More than is safe. For either of us.”
Something in the room shifts, a current I can’t name. The buzz of electronics recedes; the wall of crashes falls away. There’s only the inch of air between his mouth and mine.
I don’t plan it. That’s the worst part. I don’t weigh pros and cons, don’t storyboard the scene. One second I’m standing there, furious and raw, and the next I close that inch.
Our mouths meet.
The kiss is not soft. My hand fists in his shirt; his hand finds my jaw like it’s been dying to. His lips are warm and unsteady against mine, breath catching in his throat. I taste bitter coffee and something frightened, mirrored by the shake in my own chest.
For one long beat, everything lines up—grief, fury, the need to be seen by someone who has watched me through glass and data and still stepped closer. Heat flares low in my body, shocking in its intensity.
Then guilt punches up through it.
I jerk back. My shoulder hits the wall of photos; a pushpin stabs through my sweater into skin. Papers rustle and flutter around us.
“No,” I say, breathless. “This is insane.”
He lets his hand fall away from my jaw like it’s heavy. His eyes are wide, stunned. His lips look redder in the monitor glow.
“You’re right,” he says hoarsely. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t,” I cut in. “Don’t pretend you led and I followed. That’s not how that just went.”
He scrubs a hand over his face. “I want you,” he says. “And I hate that I want you in the middle of all this. It’s the worst timing in the history of timing.”
“You’re investigating my son’s death,” I say. “You’re feeding my obsession. You might be working with people who want me quiet. Want does not get to enter the chat.”
His mouth twists. “It already did,” he says.
Silence crawls in, sticky and loud. On the nearest monitor, a calendar window flickers awake, a reminder pop-up blooming in the corner: MEETING – HART RISK SOLUTIONS, DOWNTOWN, 10:00 A.M.
The name hits me like a slap. Hart. Denise’s half-remembered “Hart Risk something.” The consultant. The footage request.
“You have a meeting,” I say, nodding toward the screen.
He follows my gaze. His shoulders stiffen. “That’s nothing you need to worry about,” he says. “Yet.”
“You’re telling me you’re not the consultant who asked my neighbors for our lives on video,” I say, “but your calendar thinks you have a date with Hart Risk Solutions in the morning.”
“It’s complicated,” he says.
“No,” I answer. “It’s very clear.”
I push off the wall, pulling the pin from my shoulder. A tiny dot of blood stains the fabric. Another red mark, another point on someone’s map.
“We don’t talk about that kiss,” I say, heading for the door. “Not until I decide what story it belongs to.”
“Mara,” he says.
I stop in the doorway but don’t turn around. The monitors throw my shadow long across his floor.
“You can dig into me,” he says. “Follow me. Make me your next chapter. I probably deserve it. Just remember, while you’re writing that story, that the guardrail company already has a draft of their own. And they’re not waiting for you to finish yours.”
The words lodge themselves next to the taste of him, sharp and impossible to separate.
I step out into the hallway, past the glass wall, into the cool night air that smells of rain, pine, and distant exhaust. The cul-de-sac lies below me in its foggy bowl, every window a glowing rectangle, every camera a tiny, watching eye.
In the reflection on Liam’s front window, I catch a double image: my face, flushed and wild, and behind me the faint glow of his office, where his wall of crashes waits and his calendar counts down to a meeting I’m no part of.
One question follows me across the street and into my dark house, folding itself into the leftover heat of that kiss.
If I’m already losing the line between evidence and manipulation, what will happen to the truth when I start following the man whose mouth I can still taste straight into the heart of his secrets?