I should leave the window and go to bed.
The thought passes through like a polite stranger, and I ignore it. Instead, I carry my mug of reheated coffee into the small front room Jonah still calls my office, though the only thing I’ve written here in months is condolence replies and half-finished grocery lists.
The coffee has gone cold again. I take a sip anyway. It tastes burnt and metallic, like the inside of an old thermos.
The window over my desk looks straight out at the cul-de-sac. I nudge the chair so the radiator doesn’t knock against the wall, then sit and pull my bare feet up under me. The glass chills my forearms when I lean closer.
Maple Hollow at midnight holds its breath. Fog hangs low across the street, clinging to the slope, muting the neat lawns the HOA obsesses over in their emails. A car rounds the top of the hill; its headlights smear across wet windshields, sliding over panes like someone dragging a flashlight under dirty water.
Farther away, the freeway hum threads through the quiet, steady and distant. Under it, my phone on the desk chirps twice with that bright, mechanical chime I picked months ago. Someone posts a new photo of Caleb’s face framed by digital wings, or another “angelversary” quote copy-pasted from Pinterest.
I flip the phone face down.
Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s house glows.
Not all of it. Just an upstairs window, rectangle of cold light in the dark façade. The rest of the house looks composed, blinds half-drawn, porch empty. That single window pulls my gaze like a magnet.
“And there he is,” I murmur, because talking makes the watching feel marginally less creepy. “The neighbor in Act One.”
A shadow moves across the square of light. Liam passes by once, twice, then returns and sits. I can’t make out his features from here, but the shape of him is unmistakable: shoulders slightly hunched, head bent toward whatever glows in front of him.
“Character note,” I whisper, curling my fingers around the mug. “Insomniac tendencies, workaholic posture. High likelihood of secrets.”
My breath fogs the glass. The reflected outline of my own face hovers over his window, faint and ghostlike. For a moment, his room sits inside my eyes.
I draw back a little and rub the sleeve of my sweatshirt over the pane. The squeak sounds too loud in the quiet house.
I should be doing my therapy homework. Dr. Navarro wants a narrative of the night of the crash from my perspective, scene by scene, no edits. I promised Tessa I’d start it this week.
Instead, I sit here building a dossier on my neighbor from a distance, one movement at a time.
Liam stands. He crosses the room, disappears from the window, comes back with a glass that catches the light. Water, maybe, or something stronger. He drinks in a slow tilt, throat working, then sets the glass beside his screens.
My fingers twitch toward the laptop.
If this were a novel, this is where the protagonist would type his name into a search bar and discover a history of restraining orders and missing ex-wives. That would be neat. Tidy. A villain with a bow on top.
The cursor on my black laptop screen blinks, a pale pulse. I flip the lid open, and light washes my face, pushing his reflection out of the glass. Now the window holds only the cul-de-sac and the quiet street in front of me.
I open a browser and place my hands on the keys. My heart bumps once, hard, like it wants first refusal.
“You moved into my story, Liam,” I say softly. “You don’t get anonymity.”
I type his name: Liam Rowe Portland.
The suggestions that pop up beneath the search bar tell their own tale: liam rowe article retraction, liam rowe crash tests, liam rowe lawsuit.
“Well,” I breathe. “Hello, backstory.”
I click.
The first hit is a glossy profile from a local business magazine, five years old. The headline names him a “data-driven truth-teller,” which sounds like something a PR department wrote on a conference room whiteboard. In the photo he stands in front of a bookshelf, arms crossed, beard shorter than it is now, eyes tired but determined.
I skim, taking in phrases: investigative journalist, crash-test data, consumer safety, corporate accountability. Two paragraphs down, my gaze snags on a familiar term.
Guardrail manufacturer.
I read the line twice, coffee cooling in my hands.
Micro-hook: what are the chances that the neighbor who knows Old Willow Road used to hunt guardrail companies for a living?
I open the article in a new tab and scroll, scanning for the name I dread. There it is, three lines later, baked into the middle of a sentence like a bone in meatloaf. The same manufacturer listed in Caleb’s accident report under “barrier specification.”
My pulse jumps.
I click back. The second result isn’t glossy at all. It’s a blog post full of righteous italics and grainy screenshots.
DISGRACED REPORTER LIES ABOUT DATA, HURTS LOCAL JOBS.
The tone isn’t subtle. The writer calls him “a self-styled crusader” and “sensationalist,” accusing him of “twisting statistics to scare readers.” There’s a lot of exclamation points, quotes from anonymous “industry insiders,” and exactly zero links to primary documents.
“Smear campaign,” I mutter.
Out of habit, my hand reaches for a pen that isn’t there. I settle for tapping the mug instead.
A third link leads to a formal statement from the manufacturer: a dry page full of phrases like deeply flawed, regret the confusion, no evidence of systemic failure. Near the bottom, in corporate blue, they announce that the paper involved has “chosen to retract the article in question due to inaccuracies.”
I click the retraction.
A short paragraph pops up, bloodless and clean. The newspaper expresses “regret for any misunderstanding” and states that the original story “did not meet our editorial standards.”
No explanation. No data. Just erasure.
My cursor hovers over the white space where a long, investigative piece should live. Some archives leave a ghost; this one offers nothing.
“They scrubbed you,” I say, lifting my eyes toward his lit window.
He is still up there, a dark shape in front of the glow. To anyone else, he probably looks like another tech worker answering emails at midnight. To me, with this new information scrolling across my screen, he starts to refract.
I search again, narrowing it: “Liam Rowe” “single-vehicle crash”.
This time, older, more obscure links surface. A regional paper in another state. An archived podcast episode. A PDF of testimony he gave at a transportation safety hearing.
I open the regional article first. The layout screams underfunded newsroom: ads crowding the margins, photos compressed and grainy. The headline mentions three deaths at one curve in two years.
The story centers on a stretch of rural highway, the same model of guardrail, a string of single-car crashes with eerily similar damage patterns. A quote from Liam jumps out at me: he calls the collisions “preventable tragedies” and questions whether installation shortcuts turned the barrier into a blade.
Under the article, a frustrated comment thread argues about personal responsibility versus bad engineering. The dates are eight years old. No one has posted since.
“You’ve been chasing the same ghost for a long time,” I whisper.
My chest tightens, ragged and hot. Caleb’s crash aligns on an invisible map with these others, dots on a pattern my brain wants to connect, no matter how late it is or how loud my therapist’s voice rings in my head.
Be careful about the stories you build, Mara. Grief wants answers. It doesn’t care if they’re right.
I close the comments and open the PDF of Liam’s testimony.
In the scanned pages, his words appear in that dead black of old toner. He lays out inconsistencies in crash reports, mentions missing footage, questions influence from “corporate partners.” Someone, somewhere, thought his voice mattered enough to type up and preserve.
Then the podcast. A talk show host with a too-loud laugh interviews him about whistleblowing. Liam’s voice in my headphones is younger, a little cockier, but the cadence matches the man in my yard earlier.
“I’m not anti-business,” he says in the recording. “I’m anti-corruption. There’s a difference.”
I take the earbuds out. The house feels even quieter now that his voice isn’t filling it.
Micro-hook: how many crashes did he dig through before he landed here, in this cul-de-sac, watching mine?
I lean closer to the screen, scrolling through the podcast’s old episode page. A small, forgotten photo sits to the right of the text. I click to enlarge it.
The image fills half my monitor. Grainy, high contrast. Liam stands at the edge of a road that could be anywhere in the Pacific Northwest: wet asphalt, a curtain of pines, gray sky. Behind him, a twisted car hugs a barrier that bows inward in a way my body recognizes before my mind catches up.
The guardrail curves with a warped intimacy, metal folded around the crumpled front end. Bits of glass lie across the pavement, catching light in hard little shards. A bouquet of cheap flowers leans against the post, petals collapsing under rain.
His face in the photo stops me.
In the memorial article from earlier, he looked polished, ready for a byline. Here, his hair falls over his forehead, damp. His jaw tightens. His eyes focus on something just outside the frame, gaze sharp, furious, and deeply tired.
I know that look. I see it in my bathroom mirror when the house goes quiet.
My finger drags across the trackpad, zooming in until the pixels break apart. I swear the shape of the damage matches the way Caleb’s car wrapped around the barrier under Old Willow. The angles line up in my mind’s eye.
My scalp prickles.
“Did you stand near my son’s car too,” I whisper to the photo, “or is that next on your list?”
The coffee in my mug has gone undrinkable, a thick, cold sludge. I set it down and flex my cramped fingers.
Outside, the fog presses closer. Moisture beads along the exterior of the glass in tight, shimmering dots, catching the faint glow from the streetlamp. The cul-de-sac looks hazier, edges softened, every house behind a translucent veil.
I close the photo and sit back, eyes gritty. Fatigue prowls at the edges of my awareness, but curiosity curls tighter, foxlike and bright.
If Liam went after that guardrail manufacturer before, and they burned him for it—what is he doing living across from one of their crash sites now?
My mouse drifts to the search bar again. I type “Liam Rowe retraction” and hit enter.
New links pop up: a trade journal gossip piece; a press release from a law firm representing the manufacturer, boasting about a “successful resolution” of a “defamation dispute”; a message-board thread where anonymous user handles call him everything from hero to fraud.
Buried three pages deep, I find a cached version of the original article the newspaper pulled. Someone saved it on a personal site, a digital message in a bottle.
I click.
The story opens in stark black text on a plain white background, no masthead, no photos, just words. The lede drops me straight into another night, another stretch of road, another grieving mother.
My throat closes.
I scroll. He describes the crash scene in detail: the angle of impact, the yawning hole where the guardrail should have deflected the car, the history of complaints about that model. He lists dates, internal memos, test results. His writing is clean, precise, relentless.
A tiny note at the top reads: This article originally appeared in the Tribune on June 14, 2017. It has since been removed.
“They buried your work,” I say into the dim office. “And you kept digging anyway.”
My eyes sting. Whether from screen glare or the weight of it, I can’t tell. Memory, grief, and narrative jam together inside my skull, pressing against each other.
I picture Caleb’s text that night—I’m fine, Mom. Chill.—and the time stamp on the police call that followed. Ten minutes, swallowed.
I picture Liam’s hand on my lawn earlier, his voice when he said case just like it.
The story in front of me offers a simple alignment: bad company, brave reporter, dangerous curve. My whole nervous system leans toward that configuration. It would be so easy to anchor my grief on his old investigation and call it destiny.
Truth and illusion need each other, Dr. Navarro said once. The trick is noticing when you’re trading one for the other.
The fog outside thickens. Headlights crest the top of the hill and smear across Liam’s front windows, then mine, leaving watery streaks on the glass. The car turns the corner and disappears.
Curiosity wins over caution.
I close the browser tab and push back from the desk. The chair wheels squeak. I stand and lean toward the window again, palms flat on the cold sill.
Liam’s upstairs window still glows, but the angle has shifted. The bright rectangle now shows a side view of his office: a wall of monitors, their screens pale blue and white, a desk, the shadow of his shoulder.
Red pinpricks wink from one corner of the room. Cameras. Of course he has cameras.
My heart starts to drum.
I lean in, forehead nearly touching the glass. My breath fogs a small circle, and I wipe it away with the heel of my hand.
“What are you watching,” I murmur, “crash footage or Netflix?”
On his side of the street, the silhouette in the chair moves. He shifts, turns, and for one suspended second, his face comes into clearer view.
His head lifts.
He doesn’t look at his monitors. He looks toward the ceiling corner, where one of the red dots glows brighter. He stares straight into his own camera.
The muscles in my legs fire like I’m the one under a spotlight.
Every hair on my arms rises.
Then his gaze travels, a slow, deliberate sweep, toward my house. Toward my window.
I drop.
My knees hit the hardwood with a small, painful thud. Coffee sloshes over my hand and onto the floor, cold and sticky. My back presses against the wall under the window, heart pounding in my throat loud enough to drown out the freeway hum.
“You’re fine,” I whisper to myself, fingers shaking. “You’re in your own house. He can’t see you. He doesn’t know.”
The words feel flimsy.
I stay crouched there, staring at the floorboards, breathing in the mixed scents of coffee, dust, and faint pine that seeps in through the old frames. The radiator ticks beside me.
Above my head, the glass glows faintly with reflected light from my screen and his. The pane between us turns into a coin flipped in the dark.
On one side, I’m the watcher, collecting details for a new story. On the other, I’m already a character in his investigation, pinned in the crosshairs of that little red camera light.
I close my eyes and listen for any sign that I’ve been caught.
The neighborhood stays quiet, holding its secrets for one more night.