I drop the box from Jonah on the coffee table and my living room exhales dust and stale air, the kind that settles when a house holds its breath too long. The cardboard scrapes wood, a dull sound under the steady drizzle hissing at the windows. My phone buzzes with a chime from the Maple Hollow parents’ group, another anniversary post—someone’s kid, a montage of filtered photos, angel emojis lined up like a vigil.
I jam the phone face-down on the cushion and grab the remote instead. I don’t want silence; I want noise that doesn’t demand anything from me.
“News, fine,” I mutter, clicking the TV on.
Blue light floods the room, washing over the framed school photos still on the wall, turning Caleb’s sixth-grade grin cold. A national cable channel pops up mid-commercial, a smiling couple driving through mountains in an SUV, safety features glowing in invisible graphics around them. The irony punches the back of my throat.
I flip the volume down to a murmur and sit on the floor by the coffee table. The box smells faintly of garage and Jonah’s detergent, a sharp-clean scent that clashes with the damp pine and distant freeway hum sneaking in through the window seals.
I peel back the flaps. Inside: Caleb’s hoodie with the frayed cuffs, a stack of composition notebooks, the cracked controller he insisted still “worked fine,” a glass jar of ticket stubs. My fingers find the hoodie first; I press it to my face. The ghost of his cologne clings to the fabric, mixed with sweat and deodorant and some teenage body spray he claimed he hated but kept using.
On the TV, the commercial ends. A cheery anchor voice cuts through.
“Up next,” she says, “we take a closer look at online rumors about dangerous highways and so-called ‘killer guardrails.’ Are you really at risk, or are you being misled by fringe bloggers?”
My hand freezes in the hoodie’s cotton. The words fringe bloggers tug my head toward the screen like a rope.
“Stay with us,” the anchor adds. “Corporate accountability or misinformation campaign? Our special report, right after the break.”
The screen cuts to a pharmaceutical ad, colors bright and empty. My heart slams hard enough that I feel it in my tongue.
I grab the remote and turn the volume up until the narrator’s list of potential side effects rattles in the glass of the front window. Maple Hollow outside is fading into gray—fog thickening along the slope of the street, porch lights blooming halos that smear across the glass whenever a car’s headlights swing past.
“Of course,” I whisper. “Of course they’re doing this.”
The break feels endless, a parade of smiling people in retirement, new phones promising better cameras, a food delivery app that shows a family gathered around a table. All the screens inside screens, all the glass framing curated lives.
Finally, the anchor returns, perched behind a sleek, curved desk. The studio backdrop glows in tasteful blues.
“Welcome back,” she says. “If you’ve been on social media lately, you may have seen alarming posts about so-called ‘killer guardrails’—highway safety hardware accused of turning routine crashes into deadly tragedies. But how much of that is fact, and how much is fear?”
A graphic flares over her shoulder: a blurred photo of a mangled car, the words HIGHWAY SAFETY FACT CHECK.
“Joining us tonight,” the anchor continues, “is Evelyn Hart, Vice President of Public Affairs for Northwest Infrastructure Safety Group, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of roadway protection systems.”
Evelyn appears in a split screen, then full-frame. She sits at a glass desk in a studio that might be in any city—floor-to-ceiling windows behind her, skyline softened by evening haze. Her dark hair is smoothed into a low knot, her blazer the exact corporate navy that feels designed to soothe regulators and juries. She smiles, small and professional.
“Thank you for having me,” she says. Her voice is calm, low, tuned to sound reasonable.
My skin crawls.
The anchor leans forward, faux-concerned. “Your company has been mentioned by name in some of these posts. Parents sharing photos of crash sites, saying the guardrail failed their children. Anonymous files circulating. What is going on here?”
Evelyn nods with measured gravity. “We take any incident on our roads very seriously,” she says. “Our number one priority is safety. But what we’re seeing right now is a wave of misinformation, driven by a handful of outside agitators who are exploiting grief and confusion for clicks.”
I grip the hoodie tighter. The word grief sits between my ribs like a rock.
“You’re saying these stories are false?” the anchor asks.
“I’m saying they are distorted,” Evelyn replies. She folds her hands on the glass, fingers laced, nails pale and perfect. “There have been isolated crashes, tragic ones, where our hardware was involved. In each case, independent investigations and state agencies found no systemic defect. Our devices perform within federal guidelines in over ninety-nine-point-nine percent of impacts. But a few voices online are turning those isolated tragedies into a narrative of conspiracy.”
Narrative. The word makes my stomach roll. I watch my own reflection hover faintly over hers on the TV screen—my hair frizzy from drizzle, his hoodie bundled in my arms, her crisp image beneath.
“And who are these ‘outside agitators’?” the anchor asks.
Evelyn’s smile tightens a fraction. “In some cases, disgruntled former consultants. In others, fringe bloggers with histories of retracted stories. They are contacting vulnerable families, approaching therapists, even attempting to insert themselves into ongoing legal matters. They frame themselves as champions, but in reality they are deepening trauma.”
I feel my lungs forget how to work.
Micro-hook: For a second I’m not sure whether she’s talking about them or me, until I realize that’s the whole trick—she’s talking about both of us at once.
The report cuts to B-roll. Drone footage of a highway at dusk, the camera gliding above rows of cars. Then a quick montage of guardrails catching light—chrome gleaming wet, raindrops like tiny stars along the metal.
My eyes narrow.
The next shot hits like an impact.
A curve in the road, guardrail bent at a wrong angle, floral memorials stuck into the dirt. The image is blurred around the license plate area and the most twisted metal, but I know that leaning overpass, that shallow ditch. I know the way the pine trees crowd the edge and the exact stagger of reflectors.
Old Willow Road. Caleb’s curve.
I’m off the floor before I register moving, stumbling closer to the TV until the pixels show, tiny grids of color making up the bouquet. They blur the car, not the flowers. The flowers are allowed to be real.
“Some of the most emotional posts,” the anchor narrates over the clip, “come from parents who have lost children in single-vehicle crashes like this one. Understandably, they’re searching for answers. But experts warn that fringe websites and anonymous file dumps may be giving them someone convenient to blame—at the expense of the truth.”
A ticker crawls along the bottom now, white on red: HIGHWAY FEAR: FRINGE BLOGGERS STOKE PANIC, EXPERTS SAY.
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth buzz. I imagine Evelyn’s PR team sitting in some glass conference room, debating how much blur to apply, whether to crop the angle so my son’s nameplate doesn’t show.
The shot shifts to a still image: a hand-lit vigil photo I recognize instantly. A row of battery candles lined along the guardrail, rain caught mid-splash. I took that picture on the third “angelversary” month, posted it with a caption about listening to the freeway hum and trying to hear his laugh beneath it. The TV version is cropped, the username blurred, but I spot the crooked third candle, the one that kept refusing to stay upright.
“Parents perform their grief on social media,” a disembodied voice says—some “media expert” they’ve pulled in for sound bites. “Unfortunately, that visibility makes them targets for people with agendas.”
I taste bile. They lifted my grief off my feed and slotted it into their story about gullible, performative parents.
The studio returns. The anchor tilts her head sympathetically toward Evelyn. “You hear that criticism a lot—that companies like yours hide behind statistics while families are living these tragedies in real time. How do you respond to a mother who says, ‘This guardrail killed my son’?”
For a heartbeat, my living room muffles—the drizzle, the faint freezer hum, the distant freeway—everything receding before that sentence.
Evelyn’s voice cuts through, velvet smooth. “First, I would say how deeply sorry I am for their loss. I’m a mother myself. I cannot imagine that pain. But as hard as it is, we have to separate emotional truth from factual reality. Blaming the hardware in every case can prevent families from processing other contributing factors—speed, weather, impairment. And when outside actors encourage those families to fixate on our products, they are not helping them heal.”
Emotional truth. Factual reality. She drills wedges between them like she’s splitting logs.
I step even closer until my breath fogs the surface of the TV. My reflection swallows hers, only fragments of her face visible through the overlay of my own.
The anchor nods. “You mentioned fringe bloggers. One name that comes up is a former investigative journalist whose work on crash tests years ago was widely shared—before being discredited. Has he been involved in these recent rumors?”
My throat closes.
Evelyn looks directly into the camera. “I prefer not to give him more attention by naming him,” she says. “But yes, we have seen that individual’s fingerprints on several of the most viral claims. He has a pattern of connecting unrelated incidents into grand conspiracies about our industry and encourages families to question law enforcement, medical professionals, even their own therapists.”
My knees weaken. I grip the edge of the TV stand to stay up. She’s laid out Liam’s whole method in three tidy sentences.
“Our research shows,” she continues, “that when vulnerable people are repeatedly told their memories can’t be trusted, they become more susceptible to suggestion. That’s exactly what these agitators rely on. They exploit the natural fog of trauma and rewrite the narrative.”
My hand spasms around the wood. Exploit. Fog. Rewrite. She’s using my vocabulary against me, straight from my own drafts.
A graphic pops up on the screen next to her. It’s a collage of headlines, blurred but legible enough for the point: GUARDRAIL SCANDAL? SLOW THE RUSH TO JUDGMENT; WHEN SAFETY DATA LIES; THE CRASH TESTS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE. Logos of outlets I half-recognize line the bottom.
For one flicker of a second, the camera lingers on a particular article image. The photo is a black-and-white shot of mangled crash-test dummies; beneath it, in small white text against dark, I catch a byline: BY LIAM ROWE.
The shot cuts back to Evelyn before my brain fully accepts what my eyes read.
“No,” I whisper. My thumb smacks the rewind button, overshooting. A different headline, a different blur. I inch forward, frame by frame, until the dummies reappear. I freeze the image.
There. Right there. Liam’s name in smaller type than the outlet logo, grainy but distinct.
“You son of a—” I breathe, words dying before they finish.
They are using him as Exhibit A, the scarecrow they can point to when they say “discredited.” He’s the bogeyman in their narrative, the proof that anyone who listens to him—and by extension, to me—is gullible, unwell, easily led.
My phone buzzes on the couch, the same chime as the parents’ group. I walk over on shaky legs and pick it up. New messages stack from Maple Hollow Moms, half of them about some raffle, one from a woman I barely know: Hey Mara, not sure if you’re watching Channel 7, but are they talking about your thing? Guardrails? Hope you’re okay ♥
My fingers curl around the phone until plastic creaks.
I stab Liam’s name on my contact list before I can talk myself out of it and hit call. The phone rings against my ear, tinny over the news segment I haven’t turned off.
“Pick up,” I say to the air. “Pick up, pick up, pick up.”
His voicemail kicks in. His recorded voice—cooler, flatter than in person—fills the room. I hang up before the beep. I don’t trust myself not to scream into it.
On the TV, the anchor wraps the segment. “So what should viewers believe,” she asks, “when they see alarming posts about these devices?”
“They should talk to actual experts,” Evelyn answers. “Engineers, regulators, not anonymous accounts or disgruntled ex-reporters. Grief deserves compassion, not weaponization. Our message to families is simple: you are not alone, and you are not crazy—but you are being targeted.”
The words lodge in my chest like shrapnel. You are not crazy, but you are being targeted. She reaches through the glass and pats the heads of families like mine while painting us with fluorescent bullseye paint.
The segment ends on a wide shot of her in the studio, the glass desk reflecting her folded hands, the skyline beyond. Then the show cuts to weather. A smiling meteorologist stands in front of a map, talking about low pressure and evening fog.
I grab the remote and mute him mid-sentence.
The room drops into a thick, humming quiet. In the window, fog clings low along the street; a pair of headlights climbs the slope, light streaking over the glass, smearing, then fading. The cul-de-sac feels tiny, a snow globe shaken by someone else’s hand.
I stare at the frozen frame on my paused TV—the collage of headlines, Liam’s name hovering like a watermark—and at my reflection so faint over it I almost disappear.
They already have a story for me, I think. The unstable mother led astray by the disgraced blogger, too fragile to accept “factual reality.”
For a long beat, I don’t move. The box on the coffee table stays open, Caleb’s hoodie folded on my lap, the NDA image from Jonah throbbing in my pocket, the playlist still waiting on his laptop upstairs.
I hold the remote in one hand and my phone in the other, glass screens facing up like two altars, and I wonder which story I’m willing to burn down to make another one visible—and whether, by the time I speak out loud, anyone will still be able to hear my version over hers.