The laptop waits for me in the place I left it: on Caleb’s desk, under a thin film of dust and one crooked Polaroid of him and Tessa at the reservoir, cheeks red from cold and whatever they were pretending not to drink. Outside his window, Maple Hollow lies under a gray lid. Fog clings low on the slope, wrapping the cul-de-sac so headlights smear across glass and disappear, turning the houses into lit dioramas of curated normal.
My hand hovers over the laptop lid. My thumb has a tiny crescent where I bit the cuticle too far during Liam’s “interview” earlier. My body still carries the mechanical chime of his recording equipment, the way my own voice sounded when it bounced back through his headphones. I need a different playback now.
I flip the lid open.
The faint smell hits at once, like someone cracked a capsule of the past: his cologne—cheap body spray, too much sandalwood and sugar—baked into the keyboard plastic. Under that, the sour ghost of gym socks, the citrus detergent I always bought because he said it smelled “clean but not like a hotel.”
The screen wakes, bleaching my face in the reflection before his login pops up. CALEB ELLISON in clean white letters. I type his password—an old gamer tag I pretended not to know—and press Enter. The machine whirs, fan stuttering, before his cluttered desktop appears.
His wallpaper is a photo he took at the reservoir: water black as oil, kids silhouetted against someone’s Jeep headlights, bottles like small glass rockets at their feet. When I lean closer, the reflection of my own face overlays the scene, my eyes cutting through their shadows. Another frame over a frame.
I exhale through my nose. “Hi,” I whisper to the empty room. My voice sounds too loud against the walls, against his trophies and the row of hoodies hanging like extra skins. “I’m going in, okay?”
No answer, just the distant freeway hum slipping through the window glass, cars rushing toward lives that still continue on schedule.
I click open his music app.
The library loads in rows of bright album covers and playlists he named with a teenager’s casual melodrama: “gym regret,” “party pregame,” “songs you pretend you don’t know.” I scroll through them, the whir of the laptop fan syncopated with the faint tick of rain starting against the window.
“I’m not here to snoop,” I tell the empty hoodie on his desk chair. “I’m here for… context.”
My cursor skates down the sidebar. There, tucked between “sadboi bops” and “roadtrip w/T,” is a playlist title I don’t recognize. It’s not in alphabetical order; it sits slightly indented, like he hid it by dragging it just out of obvious sight.
For When I Tell Her.
The words punch through me, sharp and clean, much worse than any of the songs queued underneath.
Tell who, I think, like an idiot. As if the answer isn’t sitting here with her hand shaking on the mouse.
I double-click.
The playlist opens in a column of tracks. Fifteen songs. The date created blinks in small gray text at the bottom: the afternoon before the crash. I pinch the bridge of my nose until colors explode behind my eyelids.
My laptop with Liam’s interview file is still downstairs, my voice testifying about guardrails and patterns. Here, my son built his own record in a language he trusted more than mine: playlists instead of affidavits.
I grab my own headphones from my bag and plug them into the jack. The cable coils over my wrist like a thin black vine. I settle on his bed, the mattress dipping under my weight, the worn sheet smelling faintly of his shampoo and dust.
“Okay, kid,” I breathe. “Play.”
I hit shuffle.
The first song opens with a low, steady drum and a voice talking about taking wrong exits and wanting to turn around but not. The lyrics skirt apology without saying the word, a confession tied up in metaphors about late-night highways and dashboard light. I let the words wash over me in blurred chunks, refusing to cling to any line too hard. My brain likes to weave narratives out of scraps; Dr. Navarro drilled that into me. I’m trying, for once, to just listen.
Outside, a car creeps around the cul-de-sac, tires hissing on damp pavement. Headlights smear across Caleb’s window and across the glass of his framed soccer photo, bending his teenage face into a streaky ghost. The HOA group chat on my phone lights up for a second—someone complaining about wet leaves in the storm drains, probably—but I flip it over without looking. Maple Hollow can keep its curated anxieties.
Track two presses in. A chorus about things left unsaid, lines about rehearsing what to say in the shower and flunking the conversation live. My throat tightens. I smell dish soap and lime, which makes no sense until I realize my brain is lifting scents from memory, stitching them onto sound.
“Don’t read into it,” I mutter, but my hand pressed over my sternum tells a different story.
The third song makes pretending impossible. It opens with a synth line that mimics the rise and fall of wind through a car window, then lays down lyrics about “one more drink at the kitchen sink” and promising “I’ll explain on the ride back home.” I flinch, headphones shifting.
“You did this on purpose, didn’t you?” I say to the laptop.
It glows in answer.
Micro-hook: My brain picks up speed, stitching music to a night I thought I already knew the shape of.
I press the earbuds harder into my ears and let the rest of the playlist spin out. Patterns emerge. Every song circles the same cluster of ideas: screwing up, wanting to tell the truth, rehearsing a big reveal in your head and postponing it until after some fixed point—after the show, after the party, after one last ride. Confessions in future tense.
By track six, my chest feels raw, scraped from the inside. Tears slip out without the drama of sobbing; they just leak, hot and constant, onto my collar. I make no move to wipe them at first, letting them fall.
Near the end, a song begins with the sound of water layered under the beat. It’s not drowning exactly, more like submersion—the sense of being pulled under by the weight of everything not said. The vocalist keeps coming back to a phrase about “pulling over before the point of no return.” My fingers curl around the edge of the mattress until my nails bite the fabric.
A picture drops into my mind, not from the crash site this time, not from the road. From my kitchen, hours earlier, when everything was still salvageable.
In the memory, the kitchen is full of late afternoon light and clutter. I stand at the sink, hands slick with dish soap, a podcast murmuring low from my phone on the counter. The smell of garlic from last night’s pasta still ghosts in the air. The window over the sink shows Maple Hollow in its late-shift costume: kids on scooters, a neighbor sweeping damp leaves off a sidewalk so the HOA can’t send one of its polite threat letters.
“Mom?” Caleb’s voice comes from behind me.
I glance over my shoulder. He leans against the fridge, arms crossed, in that way he does when he’s trying to look casual and lands on cornered instead. His hair sticks up in damp spikes; he showered late, towel still looped around his neck. There’s a faint halo of his cologne, woodsy sweetness pushing against the smell of soap.
“You’re early,” I say. “I thought you were still finishing that history project with Ben.”
“We turned it in,” he says. “I… left early.”
The sink gurgles. I shut the water off and wipe my hands on a dish towel, giving him my attention the way Dr. Navarro tells me I should have more often. “Is something wrong?”
He shrugs one shoulder, then drops it. “I’m going to Tessa’s before the party. She wants to check my blood pressure or whatever.”
“That sounds like Tessa,” I say. “Have you been feeling off?”
“No, she’s just being… Tessa.” His mouth twists. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.”
I set the dish towel down. The podcast chatters in the background about somebody’s new book deal; I reach over and pause it. “Okay,” I say. “Talk.”
He snorts a little laugh, nervous. His hands tuck into the front pocket of his hoodie, wringing the fabric. “Not right now.”
“You brought it up,” I say. “I can handle teen revelations before five p.m., promise.”
He shakes his head. His gaze skates past me to the kitchen window, where a car crawls up the hill, headlights smearing across the glass and then vanishing. He swallows hard.
“After,” he says.
“After what?” I ask.
“After the party,” he says. He won’t look at me. “When I get back. I just… I don’t want to start it and then bail. That’d be worse.”
My stomach pinches. I hear the way he says it—start it. A story that has a middle and end he’s already imagined.
“Is this about a girl?” I ask, half teasing, half braced. “Or school? Drugs? Please say it’s about drugs so I can feel culturally relevant.”
He huffs out air. “It’s not about a girl.”
That leaves a smaller, more jagged handful of options: school, mental health, the party, the crash article I caught on his screen and pretended not to see. I step closer, until the edge of the island counter presses against my hip.
“Caleb. Whatever it is, I would rather know now,” I say. “I’d rather know while you’re still here and not… hung over and evasive.”
His eyes finally meet mine. They’re the same shade as when he was five and lied about breaking the neighbor’s window, just with new shadows underneath. He opens his mouth.
“It’s about—”
My phone rings. The sound slices through the room: the bright, chiming alert I never changed from factory settings. It vibrates against the counter, screen flashing TESSA in big white letters.
I remember glancing at it, irritation flaring. “She knows you’re coming over,” I say. “Maybe she’s cancelling.”
“It’s fine,” he says quickly. “Answer.”
“You were about to—”
“Seriously, Mom.” He backs up a step, shoulders hitting the fridge. “I’m not going to disappear in the thirty seconds it takes you to pick up a call.”
My cheeks heat in the remembered moment. I know what I chose. I swipe to answer.
“Hey,” I say, sticking the phone between my ear and shoulder so I can go back to wiping the counter. “You good?”
“Define good,” Tessa says, breathless. I hear hospital noise behind her—monitors beeping, an intercom crackle. “I just got asked to stay over for a double, and I’m losing my mind. Tell me to say no.”
I look at the clock on the stove. “You need the overtime,” I say. “Say yes and complain about it later. I’ll send you a martyr trophy.”
She groans. “You’re useless. Is Caleb still coming over before the party?”
I glance at him. He’s shifted his weight, eyes back on the window, jaw working. “Yes,” I say. “He’s here. He’ll be there in a bit.”
“Good,” she says. “I want to eyeball him. He was a mess last time, and I don’t trust these kids with their ‘I’m fine’ faces.”
The memory blurs here, edges fuzzed by time and maybe by concussion. I remember laughing, promising coffee later, hanging up. I remember turning back to Caleb with the phone still warm in my hand.
“Sorry,” I say. “You were saying?”
He lifts the towel from the counter, folds it into increasingly neat lines. “It’s nothing,” he says. “We’ll talk after.”
“Caleb—”
“Mom.” He forces a smile that looks like a mask someone slid half-on. “I don’t want to be late and get the lecture about respecting Tessa’s time. I’ll be back later, okay? We’ll have the whole talk. I promise.”
The memory stops there, like someone hit pause. I don’t recall his exact exit, whether he hugged me, whether I said I love you out loud or in my head. The crash and the police call shove in on the back end, crowding out details.
What stays sharp is the phone ringing, the choice to answer, the way his shoulders curled in and then smoothed out, tension shoved back into whatever box he thought he could open “after.”
Back in Caleb’s room, I yank the headphones off. The playlist keeps ticking silently on the laptop, track indicator crawling forward.
My own phone lights up on his desk, a notification from the neighborhood Facebook group: someone posting photos from a new memorial bench at the reservoir, captioned with an angel emoji and #GoneTooSoon. Parents feeding grief into the machine, likes and comments chiming in neat rows. Performative closure.
I stare at the glowing screen on his laptop instead. “For When I Tell Her” sits at the top of the window, calm and patient. Below it, the tiny gray timestamp: created at 4:12 p.m. the day he died.
The same band of time when he stood in my kitchen and said, It’s about—
So what did he mean to tell me? That he was drinking more than I knew? That he was scared of driving that route? That Jonah’s work and the guardrail company weren’t abstract anymore but pressing up against his real life?
Or am I retrofitting a confession into a teen playlist because I can’t bear the idea that he died without wanting to tell me anything important at all?
The questions pile up, heavy as wet laundry. I rest my forehead against the heel of my hand and let the laptop’s glow soak into my closed eyelids.
Caleb built a soundtrack for a conversation we never had.
I lift my head and scroll through the track list again, slower this time, reading the themes like a code I’m only now learning how to break. Each song is a breadcrumb along a path that ends in a broken guardrail and a reuploaded bodycam file.
I don’t know yet whether following it will clear his name, or mine, or bury us both in a different story we can’t escape.
What I do know is this: whatever he carried that night, he built words for it, notes for it, a title that names me directly.
For When I Tell Her.
I press my fingertips to the glass of the screen, watching my reflection blur under my touch, and I wonder who else, if anyone, I can trust with what he wanted to say.