Jonah’s townhouse sits three neighborhoods over, in a development that looks like Maple Hollow’s wealthier cousin—same manicured shrubs and HOA-approved paint colors, more glass and sharper corners. Fog crawls along the street when I pull up, hugging the curb line so headlights smear across windshields in slow streaks. My phone dings with a mechanical chime from the Maple Hollow parents’ group: a new memorial post, today’s grief packaged in a square photo and a hashtag.
I swipe the notification away and grab the empty laundry basket from the passenger seat. The plastic bites into my palm; it gives my hands something to do besides shake.
Jonah opens the door before I knock. He must have been watching for my car through the sidelight glass. His shirt is still tucked crisp from work, sleeves rolled to his forearms. A faint chemical tang of office air freshener floats out around him, layered over coffee and the lemon cleaner he uses on weekends when he pretends scrubbing countertops equals emotional labor.
“Hey,” he says, stepping aside. “Come in. I pulled a few things together. Didn’t want you to have to… dig.”
“Thanks,” I say. The word lands flat between us.
The entryway tile chills the soles of my boots. On the console table, a framed photo of Caleb at eleven watches me—gap-toothed smile, soccer jersey, one arm thrown over Jonah’s shoulders. The glass catches the porch light, throwing a glare over Caleb’s eyes.
Jonah notices my stare and clears his throat. “The box is in the garage,” he says. “I’ll grab it. You can wait in the office?”
He phrases it like a question but moves toward the hallway without waiting for my answer.
“Sure,” I say to his back.
His office used to be our shared catch-all room for bills and kids’ art projects. Now it’s sterile, curated: dark wood desk, glass top, framed degrees aligned with military precision on the wall. One of the frames holds a glossy architectural rendering from a case he worked years ago—some civic project with swooping angles. The room smells faintly of toner, dry paper, Jonah’s cologne.
I hover in the doorway for a second. “Do you want me to help carry—”
“I’ve got it,” he calls from the garage. His voice echoes off the concrete, muffled. “It’s not that heavy. I might have over-labeled things, that’s all.”
Over-labeled. That tracks. I step inside the office and trail my fingers along the desk edge. No dust. Of course. His laptop sits closed on one side, flanked by a legal pad with tiny, neat handwriting and a pen perfectly aligned with the pad’s edge.
A single drawer faces my side of the desk. The handle shines from use.
I tell myself to sit, to scroll my phone or look at the bookshelf or count the knots in the hardwood. Instead, my gaze fixes on that drawer.
My brain starts stacking files: Dana’s anonymous warning email, Ruiz’s quiet admission about “reuploaded” bodycam footage, the camera contractor linked to Liam’s clients, Caleb’s playlist titled For When I Tell Her. All those lines point into institutional shadows—law firms, shell companies, the people who write the contracts that bury blame.
And Jonah stands in the middle of that web, holding a box of our son’s things.
“Don’t,” I whisper to myself.
My hand closes around the drawer handle.
The top drawer slides open with a soft sigh. Inside: phone chargers, post-its, a stress ball shaped like a gavel, unopened tins of mints from some conference. My shoulders sag and then knot again. The normal layer on top, the human decoy.
I nudge the drawer shut and try the one below.
That one sticks before giving way in a small jerk. Files sit in immaculate rows, each with a labeled tab. Client names I don’t recognize. Acronyms. Project codes. My pulse taps in my ears.
One tab catches my eye: NISG v. State – Settlement Docs. The folder itself is thinner than the others, almost delicate. Across the front, in red ink, someone has stamped CONFIDENTIAL.
NISG. I mouth the letters. I’ve seen them before. On Liam’s screens, buried on a slide in some PDF: Northwest Infrastructure Safety Group, the blandest possible name for a company that manufactures hardware that either saves lives or slices them open.
My hand shakes when I lift the folder.
The paper inside is smooth, cool with the faint smell of toner and recycled fiber. The first page is a letter on Jonah’s firm letterhead, addressed to the state attorney general’s office. It references “resolution of claims related to roadway safety hardware installed pursuant to the 20– contract.” My eyes skate down the lines until numbers pop: payout amounts, structured settlements, dates.
I turn the page.
The next sheet is the NDA. The header reads MUTUAL CONFIDENTIALITY AND NON-DISPARAGEMENT AGREEMENT. My gaze hooks on phrases in bold: known design vulnerabilities, no admission of liability, sealed court records, prohibition on independent testing results disclosure.
My throat goes dry. I taste metal and stale coffee.
I read faster, words blurring then snapping into focus.
…guardrail terminal model SGX-17 and similar configurations…
SGX-17. The same model code I saw in the accident reports someone dropped into my inbox. The same code Ruiz frowned at. The same code whispered under breath by a maintenance worker at Old Willow Road.
Lines further down:
…participating families in consolidated actions agree to refrain from public comment regarding allegations of product defect, design flaw, or negligent installation…
…state agrees to suspend or discontinue pending safety bulletins and to route future concerns through confidential arbitration…
At the bottom, above a signature block for NISG’s representative and the state’s, the firm’s name appears again, tucked in a paragraph about legal counsel. Jonah’s initials sit in the margin beside a handwritten note: “Language tightened per client request. Exposure minimized.”
My stomach lurches. Exposure minimized. Families paid. Silence purchased.
My fingers clench on the paper so hard it strains.
Micro-hook: For one beat I can’t tell where the system ends and my family begins, because Jonah’s neat initials sit on the line that keeps other mothers from speaking.
“Mara?”
Jonah’s voice detonates in the doorway.
I jolt. The folder slips from my hands, papers fanning across the glass desk. My heart sprints. The word CONFIDENTIAL glares up from one page like it’s shouting.
He stands frozen on the threshold, cardboard box balanced against his hip. His eyes take in the open drawer, the scattered documents, my hand still mid-air.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
The question hangs there, deceptively mild.
I swallow. “You left me in your office.”
“I left you in it, not in my desk.” His jaw tightens. He sets the box down on the floor with more force than necessary; the contents thump.
“You knew I’d see it.” My voice sounds thin, foreign. “You always leave a flaw in the design, don’t you? One hairline crack.”
His gaze drops to the top page. He goes very still. “You read that?”
“I’m literate,” I say. My hands won’t stop trembling, so I curl them into fists on either side of the paper. “NISG. Guardrail terminal model SGX-17. Design vulnerabilities. Sealed payouts. You want me to quote more, counselor?”
“Stop.” He steps forward and reaches for the document.
I yank it back. “Don’t you dare.”
His voice sharpens. “This is confidential work product, Mara. You don’t get to rummage through my files and cherry-pick phrases you don’t understand.”
“I understand enough,” I say. “You represented the state in a settlement about guardrails that fail. You signed off on language that shuts families up. And then our son died on that hardware.”
His face folds in on itself for a second, the mask slipping. “It’s not that simple.”
“Simple?” My laugh scrapes my throat. “There’s an NDA spelling out design flaws and known risks. There are payouts. That is the definition of not safe.”
He scrubs a hand over his mouth. His fingers leave a faint sheen of sweat on his cheek. “Sit down.”
“No.”
“Mara, please.” His voice drops. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m standing.” I plant my feet wider. “You can talk to me at my height.”
He exhales through his nose and moves around the desk, keeping his eyes on the papers. He gathers one corner, careful, like he’s handling evidence at a crime scene.
I slam my hand down on the NDA page. “Leave that.”
Our fingers touch. His skin feels hot.
“You’re violating my clients’ confidentiality,” he says quietly.
“Your clients,” I repeat. “Are they the families or the people who installed the knives on the side of the road?”
He flinches. “You know the answer to that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I do now.”
He straightens, shoulders back in his courtroom posture. “NISG retained the firm. The state wanted exposure limited so infrastructure projects could continue. Families wanted to avoid drawn-out litigation. Everyone made trade-offs. That’s how settlement works.”
“Was there a clause for conscience?” I ask. “Because I didn’t see one.”
His eyes flash. “That contract put money into people’s hands within months instead of dragging them through years of discovery and trial. Memo lines paid for medical bills, college funds, mortgage payments. Are you going to tell those parents they should have held out for principle and bankruptcy?”
“You negotiated their silence,” I say. “You helped write the script that told them it was better to disappear.”
He looks past me, to the window. Fog presses against the glass. The distant freeway hum ghosts through the pane, muffled but relentless.
“You think you’re outside of this?” he says. “You write about women like them for a living. You turn their tragedies into narrative arcs.”
The words hit hard because they’re not wrong. My stomach clenches.
“I didn’t sell anyone’s evidence,” I say. “I didn’t sign a document that says ‘known design vulnerabilities’ and then tuck it in a drawer so my kid could drive out on Friday night.”
His head snaps back to me. “You think I knew Caleb would ever touch that particular stretch of road? Do you imagine I sit here with a map, matching every curve to every clause?”
“When did you sign this?” I tap the date on the first page. “Before he died or after?”
He hesitates a fraction of a second. It’s enough.
“Before,” he says. His voice has no room left for spin. “Six months before.”
The air leaves my lungs in one rush. I grab the back of the chair to stay upright.
Six months. That’s the same timeline as the memorial in my backyard. The same window when Liam moved into Maple Hollow. While I set up string lights and printed photos, Jonah inked his initials next to language about design flaws and non-disparagement.
“You knew,” I whisper. “You knew those terminals had issues and you still let him drive that route.”
“I didn’t know it applied to that installation,” he says. His words come fast now, defensive. “The data pointed to certain conditions—impact angles, end treatments. We pushed for retrofits. They were supposed to be rolling out changes.”
“Did you tell me?” I ask. “Did you say, ‘Hey, maybe avoid Old Willow Road until they finish quietly fixing their mistake’?”
His mouth works soundlessly for a second. “I couldn’t,” he says. “NDAs. Ethics rules. I would have been disbarred.”
“Disbarred,” I repeat. “Right. God forbid your license suffer.”
“My license,” he snaps, “is what pays for Caleb’s scholarship fund, for your mortgage when your advances stalled, for every therapy session you’ve had in the last year.”
“So we should thank NISG for killing him, too?” My voice spikes. “They bought our security. Great. Maybe we can engrave that on his headstone.”
He steps closer, palms out like he’s approaching a ledge. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying, Jonah? That you’re just a cog? That if you hadn’t written this, someone else would have, so your hands stay clean?”
His shoulders sag. The polished courtroom posture cracks, and underneath I see the man who sat on our bathroom floor the night we told Caleb Nana had died, holding his head in his hands because he couldn’t fix death with a spreadsheet.
“I’m saying,” he murmurs, “that I tried to work inside the system that exists. I pushed for better language, for audits. I lost more than I won. And I watched families get some measure of relief, which is more than they might have if the state dug in and fought every claim.”
“Did you watch them sign?” I ask. “Did you look them in the eye while they gave away their right to warn anyone else?”
He closes his eyes briefly. “Not my role.”
“But this was.” I tap his initials in the margin. “Exposure minimized.”
His eyes open again, tired and sharp. “Do you think I don’t hear that phrase in my head every time I drive?” he asks. “You think I haven’t replayed every mile Caleb took?”
Silence presses between us, thick as fog.
Down the hall, his fridge hums. A car passes outside, headlights striping the office windows. The light fractures across the glass, dividing the room into bright bands and shadow.
I pull my phone from my pocket. My thumb hovers over the camera icon.
“Don’t,” he says.
“You don’t get to say that to me anymore.” My voice is steady now, which scares me more than the shake. “You had your chance to protect us in secret. I’m done being edited.”
“Mara, if you photograph that, and it gets out, you could expose privileged documents,” he says. “You could tank cases, ruin my career. They will come after you for that, not for the truth you think you’re telling.”
“They’re already coming,” I say. “They just use different stationery.”
I raise my phone.
For a second I think he’ll lunge, grab it, rip the page. Instead he stands frozen, hands at his sides, watching.
I snap one photo of the NDA, the flash off, the lens catching the words, the red CONFIDENTIAL stamp, his initials in the corner. The screen shows a miniaturized version of the page framed between black bars, my reflection faint over the image.
I back away from the desk and gesture to the scattered papers. “Relax,” I say. “You can put your secrets back in order.”
He exhales like someone punched him. “Where are you going?”
I bend, lift the box of Caleb’s things. It’s heavier than he implied; something in it shifts with a dull thud—maybe a stack of notebooks, maybe the weight of our entire past.
“Home,” I say. “To figure out how to fight a company and a legal system that both live under my roof.”
“Mara.” His voice cracks on my name. “Please don’t turn this into you versus me. That’s not fair.”
I pause in the doorway and look back at him, standing behind his glass desk in a room full of framed achievements and neat stacks of paper that can erase lives with a clause.
“I didn’t turn it into that,” I say. “You signed it into that.”
The fog outside thickens, swallowing the view beyond the window until the glass reflects only the two of us and the empty space between.
I carry the box out to the car, the NDA image burning on my phone screen, wondering how many people I’ll have to break to pull the truth into the light—and whether Caleb would forgive me for adding his father to that list.