I stare at the question on my screen until the words blur.
Do I warn Jonah about the leak—or protect the leak from Jonah?
The cursor pulses at the end like a trapped heartbeat. Outside my dining room window, Maple Hollow lies under its usual wet blanket of fog. Headlights crawl up the slope and smear across the glass, twin streaks of white that stretch and then snap back to nothing.
I close the laptop.
The room exhales into darkness, leaving only the weak amber glow from the porch light. My pulse rattles in my ears. The freeway hum slides in under the walls, steady and indifferent, and a lone phone alert pings in some neighbor’s house, another memorial hashtag or surveillance clip uploaded for the cul-de-sac to judge.
I push back from the table.
“I can do this myself,” I say, just loud enough for the empty house. My voice cracks. “I don’t need Navarro steering me. I don’t need Liam touching it.”
Determined control tastes like metal on my tongue.
I move through the house turning off lamps until only the living room light remains. That one I dim to the lowest setting and then flip off completely. The room shrinks. Shadows gather in the corners where Caleb’s trophies still sit, dusty and loud in their silence.
I take the fat candle from the mantel—the one my sister brought from some overpriced shop that claims to smell like “Pacific mist.” I set it on the coffee table, strike a match, and touch the flame to the wick. The sulfur stings my nose. The candle catches and throws a small, wavering circle of light, turning the room gold at the center and charcoal at the edges.
I grab the shoe box from under the couch and spill its contents onto the rug.
Crash photos slide out in a crooked fan: the guardrail crumpled inward; the car folded like a fist; a wide shot with Old Willow Road bending under the overpass, police lights washing the scene in red and blue. The glossy finish catches the candlelight, tiny camera lenses scattered around my knees.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Let’s stage the scene.”
I arrange the photos in rough progression from approach to impact, leaving a gap between two of them where the missing minutes should live. My own handwriting stares up at me in the margins—notes from nights I barely remember, from sessions where Navarro guided my eyes left-right, left-right, bidding me to “follow the thread.”
Tonight I am both patient and therapist.
I pick up my phone and open Caleb’s old playlist, the one I keep telling myself I’ll delete and never do. My thumb hovers over a song title I know by muscle memory: the track he played in the car the night before the crash, and probably the last night too. A pulsing synth intro, lyrics about driving nowhere, about starting over on some imaginary road.
I tap it.
The speaker in the corner blinks blue and fills the room with sound—not loud, but insistent. The familiar beat slips under my skin. My chest tightens in that old reflex of yelling up the stairs, “Turn it down, Caleb, other people live here too.”
“Leave it,” I tell the memory. “We need it.”
I sit cross-legged in front of the photos and let the first verse wash over me. The candle flame sways with each breath. Outside, another car creeps past, its headlights sliding across the frost-blurred maple leaves stuck to the window.
Micro-hook: if I can pull the truth out on my own tonight, I don’t have to let anyone else rewrite it for me.
I close my eyes.
“Body first,” I say quietly. “Not story. Body.”
Navarro’s voice rides in on the rhythm: Drop down into sensation, Mara. No judgment, just notice.
I lie back on the floor so my spine aligns with the grain of the wood. The boards are cool through my shirt. I plant my feet, knees bent, the way I sit in a car. I drag the seatbelt from the passenger side of memory and lay it across my chest in my mind.
“Pressure,” I murmur. “Right shoulder. Diagonal across my ribs. Fabric scraping my neck.”
My right hand moves up and presses into my shoulder where the bruise bloomed after the crash. The skin there still feels foreign sometimes, like someone else’s body part grafted onto mine.
I inhale through my nose.
Beer hits first—yeasty, stale, cut with the sweetness of some cheap citrus body spray the girls wore at those parties. Underneath that, pine and wet asphalt, the twin signature scents of every Oregon back road. A hint of old french fries ground into the car mats, the teenage ecosystem I always threatened to clean and never did.
“Cold air,” I whisper.
My fingers uncurl and lift, hovering in front of my face. I picture the window cracked open, early spring air knifing across my knuckles. My nails bite into my palms to mimic the chill.
I tap my hands on my thighs, left-right, left-right, syncing with the beat. My eyes stay closed. The EMDR rhythm without the therapist, a bootlegged technique for a bootleg memory.
“Night of the crash,” I say. “We’re on Old Willow. We’re tuned to this song. Start the scene where the body knows it.”
The music hits the chorus. My throat closes around the words I already know. I let my mind ride the notes backward, searching for whatever my brain folded and tucked away.
A flicker rises at the edges of the dark behind my eyes.
Caleb’s laugh.
Not the forced one he used on grandparents and teachers. The sharp, uncontrolled bark that tore out of him when a joke truly landed. He’s in the driver’s seat, jaw stubbled, fingers drumming on the steering wheel in time with the song. A streetlight flicks across his face, carving his grin into halves.
“You good?” I hear myself say in the vision. My voice sounds too light. “You sure you’re okay to drive?”
He rolls his eyes, still laughing. “Mom, relax. I told Tess, I’m good. You gonna breathe down my neck the whole way or what?”
I feel the seat under my thighs. I feel the belt cut across my body. I feel my right hand clap onto the dashboard when the car hits a bump.
The image jerks.
Suddenly I’m not in the car. I’m on the gravel shoulder, knees wet, palms pressed into the rocks. The music is still playing, faint and tinny from inside the wreck, like a song from another apartment bleeding through drywall. My breath comes in sharp bursts that scrape my throat raw.
I look up.
The guardrail looms, twisted metal gleaming in police lights. My own scream hangs in the air, present and echo at once. My fingers dig into cold mud. Glass glints in the dirt near my hand, catching red-blue pulses from the cruisers.
“Where’s my son,” I sob to no one visible. “Where’s Caleb? Caleb!”
The words slam through my chest hard enough to jolt my physical body. I twitch on the floor, breath rising. My nails scratch the living room rug instead of gravel.
“Stay,” I say through clenched teeth. “Stay with it.”
I drag myself backward into the car. Seatbelt. Shirt damp at the neck from the drizzle when he made me sprint from the house. The windows fogged at the corners. The glow from the dashboard in Caleb’s pupils.
He glances over at me.
“You drive,” he says in one shard of vision. His hand pushes the keys toward me, the fob digging into my palm. “I’m done ruining things.”
The scene shatters and reforms.
Now his knuckles are white on the wheel. The speedometer needle climbs. Headlights from an oncoming car flare through the windshield, turning everything inside silver. He’s still laughing, but it cuts off mid-note when the road curves tighter than he expects.
The car swerves.
My body braces for impact. Seatbelt digs into my ribs. The world folds around a point of sound: tires screaming, a thud in the rear, metal grinding against metal. My head whips left. My temple hits glass.
For a second, everything goes dark.
“Eyes in the dark,” I choke.
I don’t know whether I’m narrating or remembering. Behind the windshield, beyond the reflection of my own face, I see them: two circles of light low to the ground, not headlights but something closer, watching. They hang there at the edge of the road, fixed on us. In the backseat mirror, another set gleams, matching them.
The image lurches again.
I’m standing now. I’m on the roadside, arms wrapped around my chest so tight my fingers dig into my skin. Sirens wail in the distance, climbing, descending, climbing again. Cold air slaps my cheeks. Rain needles my hair. I taste blood in my mouth, sharp and electric.
The car sits at an angle, nose buried in the guardrail. Steam curls from the hood in a faint, ghostly ribbon. The song has cut out. All I hear now is the ticking of cooling metal.
And breathing behind me.
“Hello?” I gasp. “Who’s there?”
No answer.
The breathing slows, steadies, syncs with my own, until I can’t tell whether it belongs to me or someone else. Then a shape resolves in my periphery, near the tree line where the ditch drops off.
A figure stands there, half-hidden by shadow and the curve of the overpass. Tall, shoulders hunched slightly forward. Hands at his sides. The silhouette cuts a gap in the spill of distant headlights.
My mind slams his features into place.
Liam.
He stands on the embankment, watching, the blue wash of police lights flickering over his glasses. His jaw is set, lips pressed thin. One hand lifts as if to step toward me; then he freezes.
“Liam?” I shout in the memory. My voice cracks on his name. “What are you—”
The vision fractures.
He is gone. The tree line is empty. Only headlights sweep over wet bark, pulling streaks of light along the branches that look like grasping fingers. All that stands between me and the road is a blank wall of black.
“No,” I whisper on the living room floor. My eyelids flutter. Tears slip down my temples into my hair. “Stay. Go back.”
I try to rewind.
Seatbelt. Wheel. Caleb’s jaw. Handing me keys. Refusing to hand me keys. Laughing. Crying. Guardrail in front. Guardrail behind. Liam on the hill. No one on the hill. Music blasting. Silence pressing in.
Every time I grip one frame, another slams into it from the side.
“Pick one,” I beg myself. My fists clench hard enough to ache. “Pick the real one.”
Navarro’s voice returns, steady and calm, a ghost therapist hovering over this amateur séance: Images are information, not verdicts. Don’t force them. Stay curious, Mara.
Liam’s voice layers over it, lower, coaxing: “Memory is plastic. Under enough pressure, it flows into whatever mold people hold up in front of you.”
I don’t know whose script I follow when I push harder.
I force my breathing shallow, the way it was on Old Willow, and lean into the spinning. I let the flashes pile up until they blur—Caleb’s profile at the wheel, my reflection in the passenger window, the frozen tornado of glass in Jonah’s firm lobby, Dana’s jawline in a memo margin, Liam’s silhouette watching from the roadside. The guardrail bends and bends and never finishes breaking.
The floor slides out from under me.
I don’t pass out exactly. I fall sideways into a gap where time loses shape. My body curls on instinct, arms around my ribs, forehead pressed to the wood. The candle flame continues its slow, ignorant dance. Caleb’s song finishes and restarts. The freeway hum swells and recedes in a long, droning tide.
When I come back, my cheek sticks to the floor.
The candle has burned down an inch. Wax has flowed over the edge of the glass and cooled in a uneven lip. The room smells like smoke, synthetic ocean, and salt from my dried tears. My shirt clings damp to my back. My fingers ache from the way I’ve been gripping the rug.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
For a second, the shadows coalesce into eyes watching me from the corners, twin pools of darker darkness. My heart jackhammers against my ribs. I blink, and they flatten into the usual water stains.
The music cuts mid-verse when the playlist ends. The house falls quiet except for the tick of the kitchen clock and the distant hiss of tyres on wet pavement outside.
I push myself up.
The photos lie scattered around me, some flipped face down, others skewed, their glossy surfaces streaked with tear tracks. One of the close-ups of the guardrail sticks to my forearm; when I peel it off, it leaves a faint rectangle of cold.
I grab a pen from the coffee table and the notebook where I keep my therapy notes. The pages flutter, full of Navarro’s phrases and my own frantic underlining.
My hand shakes as I write:
Caleb handing me keys – “You drive, I’m done ruining things.”
Impact from behind? Sound like rear hit + guardrail.
Standing on roadside before/after? Both?
Liam on embankment? Watching? Or my brain pasting him in because I know he was “nearby” from files?
I circle that last line hard enough to rip the page.
“Which part is true?” I ask the room. My voice scrapes. “Which part did I just invent to match the story I already believe?”
No answer, only the faint rumble of the freeway reminding me that traffic keeps moving over Old Willow Road whether I remember it or not.
Micro-hook: in one version of the scene, Liam is the witness who did nothing; in another, he never stood there at all, and I have turned him into a ghost to haunt myself.
I close the notebook and hold it against my chest, palms pressed flat, the same way I held Caleb’s baby monitor all those nights he was tiny and every silence felt like danger.
I have no new solid facts—just a handful of jagged images and one silhouette that might be real or might be a story my grief-hungry mind just wrote on top of the wreck.
And in the morning, if I want anyone to take me seriously, I will have to decide whether I mention that silhouette to Detective Ruiz at all.