By late afternoon the fog rolls up the hill again, pooling low over the lawns and blurring the edges of Maple Hollow like someone smudged the neighborhood with a thumb. Headlights drift across windows as parents return from work, streaks of white sliding over glass and then gone. In the middle of it, my phone buzzes with Liam’s name.
I stare at the screen for three rings before answering. “Hey.”
“Don’t panic,” he says. “But I have an idea.”
“I don’t love that opener.”
“You keep saying you’re scattered,” he goes on. I hear clacking in the background, the sound of equipment knocking against something hard. “Pieces of your story in different files and notebooks and therapy homework. That makes you vulnerable if they decide to portray you as unstable.”
“You’re referring to ‘they’ in the corporate villain sense, right?” I ask. “Not some vague chorus of concerned neighbors on the HOA Facebook page.”
“In this case, Hart, the guardrail manufacturer, any counsel who might be circling,” he says. “Look, I think we should record a full, clean version. Your narrative, in your words, start to finish. Time-stamped. Backed up.”
My heart ticks faster, a little drum behind my ribs. “Like a deposition?”
“No,” he says quickly. “Nothing formal. Think of it as a long-form interview. Documentary style. You know those podcasts where survivors tell their own story instead of letting the news spin it? That. We get ahead of anybody else’s framing.”
The phrase hooks into me: get ahead of anybody else’s framing. Glass and lenses again. I picture the bodycam file being reuploaded in some back office, someone deciding which version of me goes on record.
“What would you do with it?” I ask.
“Right now? Nothing,” he says. “We keep it encrypted. If Hart or their proxies come for you later, we have a contemporaneous record that shows you’re coherent and consistent. That you flagged the guardrail pattern long before any lawyers whispered in your ear.”
“You would hold onto that kind of leverage for free?” I ask.
“I’d share custody,” he says. “You get a copy. Or three. I’m not trying to own your voice, Mara. I’m trying to protect it.”
The idea of my voice burned into a file that can’t white out or glitch away lands heavy and tempting. I think of Ruiz’s quiet unease, Jonah’s careful vagueness, the neighborhood whispering about the crazy mom across the street. A record “on my terms” feels like armor.
“When?” I ask.
“Now,” he says. “Before you talk to anyone else. Before more people try to ‘help’ you remember.”
I look out my front window. His house sits directly across, glass panes dulled by fog, porch light off. No glowing monitors yet. “Fine,” I say. “Let’s make a movie.”
He snorts. “Bring water,” he says. “And whatever talisman you need. Notes, photos. I’ll handle the rest.”
Ten minutes later I stand in his doorway, palms slightly damp on the strap of my bag. The familiar clean scent of his house hits me—citrus cleaner, coffee, and a faint electronic heat from the equipment that never fully powers down. The contrast to my cluttered Craftsman always knocks me sideways. No half-open boxes here, no piles of laundry mourning a normal life.
“Studio’s this way,” he says.
He leads me down the hall to his office. Last time I stood here, my back was pressed against his desk and his mouth was on mine and monitors flickered all around us. Today the room looks reconfigured: two black cameras on tripods, one centered in front of the desk and another angled from the side. Softbox lights bloom in opposite corners, diffusing a white glow that smooths shadows. Two chairs face each other: one near the desk, one closer to the cameras.
Glass dominates the room: the big window that looks over the cul-de-sac, the glossy screens on his monitors, the camera lenses staring with unblinking black pupils. My own reflection bounces between surfaces, multiplied and thinned.
“You weren’t kidding,” I say. “You upgraded since your citizen-journalist days.”
“Freelance corporate surveillance pays better than bylines,” he says. His tone is dry, but his hands are careful as he adjust a tripod knob. “Sit there.” He nods to the chair opposite the cameras. “We’ll keep me mostly off-screen.”
“That hardly seems fair,” I say, dropping into the chair. The cushion gives a quiet sigh under my weight. “You get all the control and none of the visual accountability.”
“I’ll take accountability in other forms,” he says. “This is about you. On your terms.”
He crosses the space between us with a small black clip in hand. “Mic,” he says. “May I?”
I nod. His fingers graze my collarbone as he clip the lavalier to the edge of my sweater. The mic cable trails down to a wireless pack he tucks into my pocket. His knuckles brush my hip for a fraction of a second longer than strictly necessary, or maybe my body exaggerates the contact. I hold my breath anyway.
“Levels,” he mutters, stepping back to his laptop. He puts on bulky headphones, taps a key, and my own voice comes back to me in a faint echo from the speakers as he instructs, “Say something normal. Favorite breakfast, first car, whatever.”
“Favorite breakfast is coffee,” I say. “First car was my sister’s hand-me-down Civic, smelled like french fries and strawberry lip gloss.”
“Levels are good,” he says. “Your voice records well.”
“Flatter me before we talk about my dead child, by all means,” I say. I force a small smile to show I’m not fully made of glass.
He studies me for a beat, then nods toward the camera. “Ready?”
I pull my hair out from under the mic cable and settle back. “Ready.”
A red light blinks on the nearest camera. Liam presses one last key, then takes his seat across from me, close enough that I can see the faint stubble along his jaw, far enough that his knees don’t touch mine.
“State your name for the record,” he says, and his voice shifts. Less neighbor, more interviewer. Measured, neutral.
“Mara Ellison,” I say.
“And your relationship to Caleb Ellison?”
“I’m his mother.” My tongue trips slightly over present tense; the mic probably picks that up. “I am his mother,” I repeat.
His eyes flick briefly, a flash of approval. “Good. Okay. I want you to think of this as a way to get your narrative clear for yourself first,” he says. “No one else in the room. No judge, no jury. Just you documenting your lived experience. I’m going to ask open questions. Take your time.”
Lived experience. I tuck the phrase away. “Okay.”
“Let’s start before the crash,” he says. “Tell me about Caleb in the weeks leading up to that night. What did you notice about him, in concrete terms?”
The question lands like therapy, not interrogation. My shoulders loosen a fraction.
I talk. Short bursts at first—Missed curfews, hollow-eyed mornings, the smell of weed in his hoodie. Then I spill more: the party nights I pretended not to clock, the half-finished college brochures, the way his text bubbles paused before sending, like he was editing himself to keep me at a safe distance.
Liam only nudges. “You mentioned he ‘edited himself.’ What gave you that impression?” “You said you pretended not to clock the parties. Why?” The mic catches my sighs, the small dry clicks when I lick my lips between sentences. The room stays steady. The lights hum.
Micro-hook: For a few minutes, I forget the cameras exist.
“Now walk me through the day of the crash,” he says. “From when you woke up, in as much sensory detail as you can tolerate.”
The EMDR rhythm echoes in my head—follow the finger, follow the beeps. I keep my eyes on his face instead of any swinging object. I describe the rain streaking the dining room window, the email from my editor, Caleb walking into the kitchen smelling like cologne and sleep. I talk about the guardrail article I half-read during lunch and shoved into a folder. My fingers knot together in my lap until the knuckles blanch.
“Okay,” he murmurs. “Good. When you think about that night now, what are the anchor points? The moments you’re most certain of.”
Anchor points. Another phrase I file under Liam-speak. “The last text from Caleb,” I say. “The ring of the phone when the police called. The sound of my own footsteps when I ran toward the lights at the curve.”
“Describe the curve,” he says. “Slowly.”
I do: the leaning overpass, the slick asphalt, the guardrail wrapping the car like bent foil. The smell of wet pine and gasoline. The way the police bodycam later showed me coming in from the side, not climbing out of the passenger seat like my therapy image insisted.
“And the guardrail itself?” Liam presses. “Talk about that hardware the way you see it when you close your eyes.”
“Failed,” I say. “Not deflected, not absorbed. It folded. It pierced. It behaved in a predictable way for that model, according to the crash reports you showed me.”
I hear my own words and then his, lodged inside them: predictable failure pattern. He nods once, satisfied.
At one point, my voice steers on its own. “Jonah’s firm knew about other incidents,” I say. “They represented—”
Liam lifts a hand, palm down, calming gesture. “Let’s bookmark the law firm,” he says gently. “We can record a separate segment later, once you decide what you’re comfortable putting on tape about their role.”
“You just told me this is for me, not for court,” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “And right now your strongest ground is what you witnessed directly and what you documented before any legal entanglements muddied the water. Hardware, timing, pattern. We want that crystal clear before we add hearsay or confidential stuff that could get you in trouble.”
I glance toward the camera. “Or get you in trouble, you mean.”
“Us,” he corrects. “Anything that hurts your credibility hurts the case I’m trying to build. Focus on the guardrail, the cluster of crashes, your sensory memory. We’ll loop back to Jonah once we know where the legal landmines are.”
The argument slides into me with the smoothness of rehearsed copy. I swallow the urge to push. “Fine,” I say. “Guardrail first.”
We go back to impact angles and torque, to the way the barrier cut into Caleb’s car instead of catching it. He phrases questions in a way that plants the answer he wants: “Would you say you registered the guardrail’s failure before anyone mentioned drunk driving?” “So your immediate impression wasn’t ‘my son was reckless’ but ‘the scene looked wrong’?”
I find myself repeating his constructions. “My immediate impression was that the scene looked wrong,” I say, listening to the words click into place like joints.
The interview stretches into an hour, then more. My throat dries out; he slides me a glass of water without stopping the recording. I hold it with both hands, feeling the condensation cold against my palms, and keep talking.
At the end, he removes the mic with the same gentle touch, coiling the cable into a neat loop.
“You did well,” he says. “You came across grounded, detailed, not hysterical.”
“That’s the baseline we’re shooting for,” I say. “Not hysterical.”
“You know what I mean.” He unplugs a card from the camera, slots it into a reader. “I’ll export a copy for you. Raw file. No edits.”
“You’re trusting me not to cut a supercut of you interrupting me?”
“You’re welcome to,” he says. “As long as you keep the original intact.”
He drags a folder to an external drive and labels it before my eyes: MARA_INTERVIEW_MASTER. The word master makes my shoulders stiffen and I force myself to exhale.
“I’ll walk this over in a bit,” he says. “Take a break. Eat something. You did heavy lifting today.”
I nod, suddenly tired. “Don’t… scrub it, okay?”
His eyes meet mine. “I won’t,” he says. “That defeats the point.”
An hour later, the drive sits on my dining room table next to a half-eaten granola bar and three unopened HOA mailers about shrub height. Outside, fog presses up against the windows again, turning the cul-de-sac into a snow globe of blurred headlights and perfect lawns.
I plug the drive into my laptop. The file pops up, heavy with promise: MARA_INTERVIEW_MASTER.MP4. My finger hovers over the trackpad.
I hit play.
The screen fills with my own face, washed in soft light, eyes ringed and brighter than I feel. The audio picks up every breath. Hearing my voice from outside my skull rattles me more than I expect.
“State your name for the record,” Liam says off-camera.
“Mara Ellison,” past-me answers.
I lean closer, elbows on the table. The smell of stale coffee drifts up from a mug by my wrist. Rain ticks against the windows, a counterpoint to my recorded speech.
As I listen, patterns emerge. Liam’s questions, threaded with specific phrases, recur: lived experience, anchor points, clear pattern of mechanical failure. Each time he offers one of those terms, I hear myself pick it up a few minutes later and use it without thinking.
“My lived experience is that the guardrail failed in a predictable way,” I hear myself say, and my stomach drops. That line could live in a closing argument.
At the fifteen-minute mark, I watch the moment I veer toward Jonah’s firm. “They represented—”
“Let’s bookmark the law firm,” recorded-Liam interjects, voice calm. “Focus on what you directly witnessed. That’s where you’re strongest.”
On screen, I nod, chastened. In my chair now, I don’t.
I scrub forward to another section. He asks, “Would you say your immediate impression was that the scene looked wrong rather than that your son was reckless?” His tone wraps the answer in bubble wrap, ready to ship.
“My immediate impression was that the scene looked wrong,” I echo onscreen, obedient.
Listening, I hear the shape of his questions narrowing paths in my brain, guiding me away from certain exits and toward a clear, singular hallway: guardrail, pattern, negligence. Every time I try to detour into Jonah, or Dana at the firm, or my EMDR flashes, he steers me back with a soft redirect and a legal-sounding reassurance.
“We can do a separate segment on therapy later,” he tells the past-me when I mention EMDR. “Right now let’s keep this clean of anything opposing counsel can twist into ‘memory contamination.’”
“Clean.” “Opposing counsel.” The words sound helpful. They also sound like someone rehearsing for future courtroom playback.
I pause the video on a frame where his hand appears in the corner, offering me the glass of water. The glass distorts the background, bending the lines of his desk and the camera tripod behind it. A small lens within a bigger lens.
The laptop fans whir quietly under my palms. Outside, a car crawls up the Maple Hollow slope; its headlights smear across my dining room window, turning my reflection into a ghost laid over the paused image of me on Liam’s screen.
I study both versions of myself: the one speaking in crisp, guided sentences about predictable failure, and the one staring back, realizing those sentences were nudged into shape.
He told me this was on my terms.
Maybe it is. Or maybe I just let the man who already lives in my nightmares direct the official director’s cut of my grief.
I close the laptop halfway, stopping just short of fully shutting it. The screen glows in a narrow strip, freezing my own mouth mid-word.
The file still exists on his drive, in his house, in whatever off-site backup he never talks about.
I press my fingers into the lid and hesitate, caught between the urge to slam it shut and the knowledge that my recorded voice—curated, shaped, ready—might be the sharpest weapon in his arsenal.
Or in mine.