Night drapes itself over Maple Hollow in layers—fog hanging low, headlights dragging white scars across windows, the faint hum of the freeway under everything like a bad memory that never shuts up.
I clutch the manila folder hard enough to crease the edges. The printed photos inside feel heavier than paper has any right to be. Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s house glows in measured rectangles: living room, kitchen, the faint bluish pulse from his office down the hall. A phone chimes somewhere in the neighborhood, that familiar mechanical ping of a new angelversary post or ring-camera notification.
I step off my porch.
Wet leaves cling to my boots as I cross the street. The fog kisses my cheeks, cool and damp. I keep replaying the lobby through my head—badge, handshake, that woman’s tailored suit—running the scene again and again, a film I refuse to let anyone edit.
By the time I reach his door, my heart hammers high under my ribs.
I don’t knock.
I jab the doorbell and, before he finishes opening the door, I push past him into the clean smell of his house—citrus cleaner, electronics, the faint metallic tang of screen-warmed air. Behind me, the fog presses against his glass like it wants in too.
“Good evening to you too,” he says, closing the door slowly. “Everything okay?”
“No,” I say.
I move straight to the kitchen island and slap the folder down so hard the quartz gives a dull thud. Photos fan out—Liam at the lobby turnstiles, Liam shaking Evelyn Hart’s hand, Liam leaning toward her over a low table. Their bodies align neatly in glossy ink.
“Explain,” I say. “Right now.”
For a second, he just looks at the photos, expression still. The overhead pendants throw soft circles of light onto the paper; his badge catches a gleam that makes my skin crawl.
“You printed them,” he says quietly.
“You’re welcome,” I say. “They’re higher resolution on my laptop, but I wanted you to see the part where you meet with counsel for Meridian Barriers and Infrastructure.”
His gaze flicks up, searching my face. “You followed me.”
“I followed the calendar reminder you left open on your monitor.”
The silence between us tightens.
He exhales through his nose, a small, contained sound. “Mara—”
“No,” I cut in. “You know Evelyn Hart is lead counsel for the company that supplied the guardrail on Old Willow Road. You know that because you’re in their lobby, with a badge, talking to her like colleagues. So try again. Explain.”
His jaw works. Then he reaches for a photo and straightens it, aligning the corners like he’s tidying data on a screen.
“I don’t work for her,” he says. “I work near her.”
“Wow,” I say. “What a comforting preposition.”
He glances toward the office where a wash of blue light spills onto the hallway floor, then back at me. “Can we not do this in five-second bursts? Sit down. Let me pour you a drink.”
“I didn’t come for wine,” I say.
“You came for the truth,” he says. “Sometimes those arrive together.”
Micro-hook: he pours the wine, but which version of truth is he decanting?
He pulls a bottle from the rack under the counter, wipes a nonexistent speck from the label, and opens it with quick, practiced turns. The cork pops with a soft sigh. Dark red arcs into two glasses, catching reflections from the recessed lights and the screens down the hall.
The smell hits first—berries, something earthy underneath. My mouth fills with saliva despite myself.
“Meridian retained Hart Risk Solutions after the first wave of lawsuits,” he says, speaking while he pours. “They wanted a risk audit. PR, legal, the whole package.”
“And you?” I ask. “What did they retain you for? Consulting on how to handle unstable mothers?”
A muscle jumps in his cheek. He slides a glass toward me, keeping his hand on the stem for a beat until I take it.
“They hired me on paper to help ‘assess reputational exposure,’” he says. “In practice, that means combing through internal reports, installation logs, crash data. Things they’d never hand over to outside critics voluntarily.”
“So you’re a mole,” I say. “That’s the story tonight.”
He lifts his own glass but doesn’t drink yet. “It’s not a story. It’s the only way I have found to get close to their records since my last investigation blew up in my face.”
I picture Evelyn Hart’s corporate bio, the polished language about balancing safety and shareholder value. I picture my son’s car wrapped around metal that folded like foil.
“Funny,” I say. “The only way they’ll talk to you is if you help them manage risk. Which includes me.”
“Exactly.” He finally takes a sip, throat working. “Which is why you tailing me to a client meeting is a problem. For both of us.”
His tone is calm, but the rebuke lands with practiced force. Client. Problem. Not betrayal—misstep.
Heat flares in my chest.
“I’m the problem,” I repeat. “Not the secret meetings with the company that killed my son.”
“You following me downtown confirms what they already suspect,” he says, setting his glass down with care. “That you’re spiraling. That you’re unpredictable. I’m trying to keep you out of their narrative machine, not feed you into it.”
The word narrative pricks my skin.
“Don’t quote my own job back at me,” I say. “You’re not protecting me. You’re working me.”
He leans on the counter, close enough that I catch his soap and coffee smell under the wine. “I’m doing both,” he says.
My grip tightens on the glass. The stem presses into my palm, thin and fragile and easily snapped.
“Answer me clearly,” I say. “Are you being paid by Meridian or not?”
“Technically,” he says, and lifts a hand when my mouth opens. “Technically, I’m paid by Hart Risk, which invoices Meridian. That’s one shell company of many. You know how this works.”
“I know how fiction works,” I say. “I’m learning how this does.”
“I took the job to get access,” he says. “I insisted on audit rights. I wrote the engagement to include a review of safety protocols. I’m inside their firewall now, and they think I’m on their side. That’s leverage I did not have when I was shouting from the outside in op-eds no one read.”
His eyes lock on mine. “Do you honestly believe I would have pushed you this hard, moved into your cul-de-sac, sat through your HOA’s theater of cruelty, if I wanted Meridian protected?”
My brain scrambles to hold onto the indignation that carried me here, but his words wedge into all the cracks—the HOA gossip, the badge, the anonymous files.
I take a long drink of wine to buy time. It hits my tongue lush and sharp, sliding down my throat in a warm rope. The edges of my nerves dull a fraction.
“You lied by omission,” I say. “You should have told me.”
“You’ve been clear you don’t trust me,” he says. “If I had said ‘I have a client meeting with their counsel’ while I was still building access, would you have given me space to do it? Or would you have stormed the lobby and handed them a perfect example of the ‘unstable mother’ they want to discredit?”
That phrase scrapes something raw in my chest. I remember the HOA president’s carefully concerned voice, the neighbor whispering unstable writer, the way eyes followed me out of the community center.
“They already think that,” I say.
“Which is why we have to be strategic,” he says. “We don’t get a second chance at how you come across when this breaks open. Emotionally honest is not the same as legally credible.”
Micro-hook: if he can cast my outrage as a liability, how long before he convinces me my memories are too?
I set the glass down, harder than I mean to. The wine licks up the side in a thin wave.
“Fine. Let’s say I buy that you’re playing double agent,” I say. “That still doesn’t explain why you are so interested in what’s inside my head.”
His gaze shifts, sharpened. “Because your head is part of the evidence,” he says. “And right now, it’s being handled in ways that could hurt you.”
“You mean therapy,” I say. “Dr. Navarro.”
“I mean any process that invites you to re-immerse in trauma without guardrails,” he says. “No pun intended.”
I stare.
“That was terrible,” I say.
“I know,” he says, mouth quirking for a second. “Look. Have you ever read about memory contamination studies? Eyewitness reliability? You write about this in your books.”
“I write worst-case scenarios,” I say. “I don’t want to live one.”
He pushes away from the counter and paces once, energy tightly leashed. “There’s decades of research,” he says. “Show someone misleading details, ask leading questions, and their recall shifts. People swear they remember broken glass after a minor accident because they heard the word ‘smashed,’ not ‘hit.’ They remember stop signs where there were yield signs. Confidence goes up even when accuracy drops.”
“You think I’m misremembering a stop sign?” I ask. “I’m talking about being in the passenger seat when my son died.”
His shoulders sag slightly. He softens his voice. “I think your brain is trying to protect you and make meaning,” he says. “That’s what brains do. That’s what stories do. EMDR can unlock real stuff, yes, but it can also tangle it with suggestion. Rapid eye movement, bilateral stimulation, a therapist asking ‘What happens next?’—do you know how close that sits to guided imagery? To hypnosis?”
Dr. Navarro’s gentle voice slides through my mind, the way she tapped her fingers, the way she asked me to go with whatever came up. The memory of the passenger seat comes in hot and bright—Caleb’s jaw, my hand grabbing the wheel—then flickers, like film burning in a projector.
“She’s not hypnotizing me,” I say, but the words land weaker than I intend.
“I’m not saying she’s malicious,” he says. “I’m saying she’s operating on a model that treats all resurfaced images as equally trustworthy. Meanwhile, the company whose guardrail failed has teams of people trained to attack the credibility of traumatized witnesses. They will go through your sessions line by line if they can.”
He steps closer, close enough that I can see the constellation of faint freckles on his nose, the tiny scar near his eyebrow.
“If your memory shifts again,” he says, “they’ll call it proof you fabricate.”
My head feels thick. The wine warms my veins, wraps my thoughts in cotton. I take another sip to steady myself and end up taking three.
“So what?” I ask. “You’re the corrective? You get to decide which parts stay and which parts are contamination?”
He flinches like I hit a nerve. “No,” he says quickly. “That’s not what I want. I want you to have anchors outside your own head. External points to triangulate with, so you’re not carrying this alone and vulnerable.”
“External points you control,” I say.
“External points like footage,” he counters. “Dashcams. Bodycams. Installation logs. Things that have their own flaws, yes, but exist outside the storm in your nervous system.”
The phrase storm in your nervous system slinks under my skin. It sounds like something pulled from a clinical article, polished for laypeople.
“You’ve read papers on this,” I say.
“Of course I have,” he says. “Trauma, recall, interrogation tactics. I need to know how they’re going to come at you. I need to see the angles they’ll use to twist your words.”
Micro-hook: if he knows every angle they might use against me, what stops him from testing those angles himself first?
My glass is empty. When did that happen?
Liam notices and reaches for the bottle. “Top-up?”
“No,” I start, but the word comes out late and soft. The wine’s already flowing, a dark ribbon thickening the red stain at the bottom.
“You should eat something,” he says, sliding a small bowl of almonds toward me like that fixes the balance. “You haven’t had dinner.”
“Stop guessing what I’ve eaten,” I say, but I pick up an almond anyway, its salt rough on my tongue.
The room feels slightly unmoored, the edges of the counters and cabinets too smooth. The light from the office flickers in the corner of my vision, a steady blue heartbeat.
“Tell me straight,” I say. “Do you think the image of me in the passenger seat is fake?”
He looks pained. “I think it’s dangerous to treat it as literal fact without corroboration,” he says carefully. “It might be a composite—pieces of that night mixed with fear, with other drives, with what-ifs. Our brains splice scenes all the time. You know this. You’ve written characters who discover their flashbacks were edited memories.”
“Fiction,” I say again, but the word feels thin.
He touches the counter between us, just the marble, not my skin, though heat ghosts across my wrist anyway.
“Mara,” he says, and my name in his mouth does something low and traitorous in my stomach. “You’re not crazy. You’re not broken. You’re in pain, and your mind is trying to build a story big enough to hold that pain. I just don’t want Dr. Navarro or anyone else to end up scripting that story for you in ways you can’t unspool later.”
A part of me wants to scream that he is doing exactly that, right now, with his careful tone and his research references and his wine. Another part of me, the exhausted, hollow part that spent the afternoon staring at Evelyn Hart’s smile, leans toward the relief of someone saying, You’re not crazy.
“So what do you suggest?” I ask. “I stop therapy? Stop trusting my own brain?”
“I suggest you broaden your data set,” he says. “Let me show you some of what I’ve found. Then we can sit with your memories next to those, instead of holding them in a vacuum where anyone—from a therapist to a corporate lawyer—can tell you what they mean.”
The word vacuum echoes, and I picture my house across the street, one dim blue Craftsman full of ghosts and security camera glitches, floating alone in the fog. The thought tilts the room again.
“You want me to look at your evidence,” I say slowly.
“I want you to see that there are fixed points,” he says. “Things that don’t change when you close your eyes. You deserve that.”
The wine hums in my veins. My earlier fury feels far away, like a scene I wrote a draft of and left open on another screen. In its place sits a tired, wary curiosity.
“What evidence?” I ask.
His shoulders drop a fraction, tension easing. “Internal incident summaries,” he says. “A pattern of failures they internally admit look bad. And something else I shouldn’t have, which I’ll only show you if you understand the risk of knowing it exists.”
“Risk,” I repeat.
“If you repeat where it came from,” he says, “they’ll make you the problem again. Not the guardrail. Not the driver. You.”
The word you lands heavy.
He holds out his hand, not touching me, offering an invisible handle.
“Come into the office,” he says. “Just to look. Not to decide anything tonight.”
The floor feels soft under my feet as I step away from the island. The photos of him and Evelyn Hart stay where they are, the glossy paper catching a last glint of light before we leave the kitchen behind.
I follow him down the hall toward the glow of his monitors, carrying a glass that no longer tastes strictly like wine and a head full of memories that no longer sit neatly in their boxes.
A thought slips in, slack and uneasy.
When I watch whatever he’s about to play, will I be seeing the truth of that night—or the first rough cut of a story he wants me to believe instead?