The food court smells like fryer oil, bleach, and sugar. I can taste all three on the back of my tongue every time I swallow.
I sit at a corner table under a skylight streaked with rain, watching drops slide down the glass in crooked paths. Noon crowds churn around me in noisy currents: office workers with badge lanyards, teenagers with bubble tea, a toddler dragging a helium balloon that keeps knocking against a plastic chair. The clatter of trays and the hiss of steamers blend into a roar that makes my skull buzz.
Perfect, Dana had texted. Crowds are better. Nobody is special in a crowd.
I picked a table with a good view of the whole space and the escalators. Old thriller habit. I angle my chair so I can watch the main entrance reflected in the glass storefront of a salad place. Every time the doors slide open, cold air and the smell of wet jackets drift in, prickling the sweat under my collar.
My hands won’t stop worrying the paper coffee cup. I’ve peeled the sleeve into a fringe. I keep hearing Tessa’s voice from last night, the word proud breaking in half, her shoulders shaking under my hands.
The dark sedan follows Caleb out of the neighborhood in my head, again and again, like a looping security clip. In every replay I stand somewhere different—on my porch in Maple Hollow watching headlights smear across the fog, in that driveway by the party, on the shoulder of Old Willow Road—but the car always passes, and I always do nothing.
“You’re early,” a voice says.
Dana drops into the chair opposite me, a gust of cold air and over-roasted coffee riding her. Her dark hair is twisted up in a claw clip, stray pieces frizzed from the weather. She’s in a navy blazer over a T-shirt with a faded band logo, jeans, sneakers. She looks less like Jonah’s associate and more like a grad student playing hooky.
“You’re late,” I say automatically, checking my phone. Eight minutes, not worth the accusation, but my nerves need somewhere to land.
“The elevator stopped for a full minute between floors,” she mutters, setting her tote bag between her feet. “I spent that entire minute imagining dying in a steel box with Todd from tax. So, you know, my fight-or-flight is warm.”
I let out a thin laugh that never makes it past my throat.
“You sure about this?” I ask.
Her eyes flick toward the security camera dome mounted near the ceiling, then back to me.
“No,” she says. “Which is why you’re getting paper, not pixels. I printed these on the firm’s dinosaur copier and then made copies of the copies at a FedEx on the way here. No digital trail I know of, unless someone’s bugged my lungs.”
“Comforting,” I say.
She reaches for the drink on my tray, takes a sip without asking, and grimaces. “You paid four dollars for that?”
“I needed something to hold,” I say. “Is this really safer than meeting in, say, a parking garage?”
“Parking garages echo,” she says. “And every true-crime podcast has ruined them for me. Food court is better. Everyone is busy pretending not to notice anyone else.”
She slides a folded stack of pages from inside her blazer and tucks it under the edge of my tray in one practiced motion. To anyone walking by, it looks like we’re rearranging napkins.
My hands hover over the paper, not touching yet. “What am I about to see?”
“Pieces,” she says. “Things I pulled while I was supposed to be doing billable work for people who can afford better enemies than me.”
Micro-hook: I press the tray down with one palm, pinning the papers like they might try to escape, and edge the stack toward me.
The top page is a photocopy of a consulting agreement. Grainy black-and-white, crooked on the page. I recognize the template style from Jonah’s NDAs; the boilerplate reads like a language I used to speak when our marriage still involved proofreading each other’s work.
CLIENT: SABLE RESEARCH INITIATIVE, LLC.
CONSULTANT: LIAM ROWE, ROWE INTELLIGENCE GROUP.
My chest seizes around his name. The font is ordinary, twelve-point, but I read it like a shout.
“That’s his current shell,” Dana says quietly, tapping the consultant line. “Rowe Intelligence. Cute, right? Humble.”
I drag my eyes to the header. PROJECT MN-07: POST-TRAUMATIC NARRATIVE STABILITY IN HIGH-VISIBILITY COLLISION EVENTS.
“Post-traumatic narrative stability,” I read aloud, slow. Each word tastes metallic. “Like… making sure the story stays put.”
“You said he used that phrase on you once,” she says. “In your kitchen. You told me he talked about stabilizing your narrative before anyone else weaponized it.”
I remember his voice, patient and grave, the night he sat at my table with a legal pad and turned my jagged memories into bullet points: We just need to give them a stable narrative, Mara. Something you can live with and they can’t easily pick apart.
My fingers curl until the paper crinkles.
“Sable Research Initiative?” I ask. “Never heard of them.”
“You’re not supposed to,” she says. “That’s page three.”
I flip. The next sheets are NDAs. Dense blocks of text, heavy redactions. PARTICIPANT CONFIDENTIALITY in bold, NO PUBLIC DISCLOSURE OF PROJECT PARAMETERS. A few signature lines are visible, names blacked out. A faint coffee ring mars the corner of one page, a ghost of somebody’s break room.
“These are for what, exactly?” I ask.
“That’s the fun part,” she says. “Keep going.”
A grant application appears next. The photocopy quality is worse here, but the title still punches through: MEMORY RELIABILITY IN POST-CRASH TRAUMA: FAMILY NARRATIVES AND LEGAL OUTCOMES. Below that, a list.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: DR. ADRIAN GILL.
CO-INVESTIGATORS: DR. L. HSU, LIAM ROWE (INDEPENDENT FORENSIC CONSULTANT).
My vision tightens to a tunnel. I grip the plastic edge of the table to steady myself.
“He’s not even a scientist,” I say. “He’s a journalist who got kicked out of journalism. What is he doing listed on a research grant with people who have letters after their names?”
“Intelligence consultants get hired to do all kinds of things,” Dana says. “Dig background, design questionnaires, craft interview protocols, advise on ‘sensitive populations.’ That’s the phrasing in one of the addenda. I didn’t grab that one; too obvious in our system.”
“Sensitive populations,” I repeat. My tongue feels thick.
“Families of crash victims,” she says. “The participants. That’s my best read, piecing together the project summary language. They’re looking at how families’ stories about crashes shift over time, especially when there’s litigation or media coverage. Which stories juries believe. Which ones sound unstable.”
I flip back to the abstract on the grant. The text blurs for a second, then sharpens.
This study aims to assess the malleability of post-traumatic memory narratives in families affected by high-visibility roadway collisions, with particular attention to suggestibility, consistency over time, and responsiveness to structured interview techniques.
“Structured interview techniques,” I murmur.
My mind throws up images: Liam in my dining room, microphone on the table, saying, Let’s just walk through it again from the top; don’t worry if details shift, that’s normal. Liam on his couch, voice gentle, The brain likes a coherent arc, that’s all we’re trying to build.
Vindication floods me in a hot wave that borders on nausea. I wasn’t crazy to think he knew exactly which buttons to push in my head. He was paid to learn those buttons.
“You said this was funded by a shell company,” I manage.
“More than one,” she says. She digs into her tote and pulls out a notebook with a cracked spine, flipping to a page filled with her tight handwriting and a messy diagram of boxes and arrows. She turns it so it faces me. “Meet the family.”
At the top: SABLE RESEARCH INITIATIVE, LLC. An arrow leads down to AURORA PUBLIC INTEREST FUND. Another arrow drops to NORTHLINE HOLDINGS, INC.
“Aurora,” I say. “Sounds very altruistic.”
“That’s the idea,” she says. “On paper, it’s a nonprofit dedicated to ‘public-interest research in transportation safety and trauma recovery.’ Except the only grants I can find are this one and two others with the same small cluster of PIs. Now follow Northline.”
Northline Holdings has three arrows branching down. The third one makes my skin go cold.
NORTHLINE HOLDINGS, INC. → REDWOOD INFRASTRUCTURE PARTNERS → SENTINEL BARRIER SOLUTIONS.
I know that last name in my bones. Sentinel is the guardrail manufacturer from the news segment, from Jonah’s NDA, from Evelyn Hart’s rehearsed outrage.
I look up at Dana. Her expression is tight, jaw set.
Micro-hook: For a heartbeat, the food court noise drops out of my awareness and I hear only the scratch of her pen in my memory, tracing those arrows like arteries feeding my life into a machine.
“So the company whose guardrails fold like tinfoil is funding a study on how families of crash victims remember things,” I say. “Through two layers of expensive camouflage.”
“They’d say they’re funding research on how trauma affects memory,” she says. “Great PR, right? ‘We care so much about victims’ mental health.’”
“With Liam on the team,” I say. “Mr. ‘Let’s pressure-test your recall so nobody else misuses it.’”
My hands shake. I flatten them on the table, pressing my palms into the cheap laminate until the tacky surface grabs my skin.
“You’re sure about the link to Sentinel?” I ask. “Not a name coincidence?”
She snorts softly. “You sound like a partner. Yes, I’m sure. Jonah’s NDA references a confidential settlement between the state and a ‘transportation safety solutions provider’ represented by Redwood Infrastructure. I cross-checked Redwood’s corporate registrations. All roads lead to Sentinel. Same board members. Same PO box. Same woman signing half the compliance documents.”
“Evelyn Hart,” I say.
“Queen Spin herself,” Dana says. “Now imagine you’re in her position. You’ve got a product that keeps killing people in ways that are hard to prove in court. One problem is physical evidence. The other problem is witnesses who change their stories or sound ‘unstable.’ Perfect solution? Fund research on how to manage trauma narratives. Maybe even get a consultant whose specialty is controlling information and exploiting weak points in memory.”
The fluorescent lights press down on me. Somewhere nearby, a toddler starts wailing. Fryers hiss. Grease pops. I swear I can feel my heartbeat in my gums.
“Do you think they’re tampering?” I ask. “Suggesting false memories? Or just figuring out which families are easiest to discredit?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Legally, they’d call it ‘evaluating reliability.’ Ethically, that line gets slippery. I read one internal memo about ‘identifying candidates for therapeutic intervention to support narrative coherence.’ That phrasing gives me hives.”
“Therapeutic intervention,” I repeat. “Like EMDR sessions with a willing clinician? Or, say, informal debriefs with an investigative neighbor who happens to show up on your porch right after your son’s crash?”
Dana watches my face carefully.
“I don’t know if you’re in the study,” she says. “Your name doesn’t appear in anything I’ve seen. But their sample description includes ‘families of single-vehicle collisions in the Pacific Northwest with associated legal claims.’ You fit the geography. You fit the type.”
Glass catches my eye—the skylight above, the security camera dome, the reflective panels on the juice bar kiosk. Every angle sends back a distorted version of me at this table, head bent over photocopies, lips moving around words I don’t want.
“So tell me the story you’re building,” she says quietly. “In your head. Right now.”
“Liam consults on a study funded by a shell company linked to Sentinel,” I say. “He specializes in memory and narrative. He moves into Maple Hollow right after my son’s crash, befriends me, encourages therapy techniques, records ‘interviews,’ drills me on my own timeline. Meanwhile Sentinel has every financial incentive to make sure any mother who questions their guardrail sounds confused.”
I stop, lungs burning. The words taste like tinfoil.
“That’s one story,” Dana says. “Another story is that Liam took the job to get close to Sentinel’s inner workings. Double agent. Rebel journalist still fighting the good fight in the only way he can.”
“That’s the story he’d write,” I say. “Redemptive arc. He loves those.”
“Both can be true in pieces,” she says. “He might have gone in thinking he’d use them, and they used him right back. That’s the thing about systems like this. They’re better at story than any of us.”
I picture Liam in his sterile living room, light from his monitors painting his profile. The way he said, You need a villain, Mara, turning the word into a lure.
What if he handed them the blueprint for my mind and they paid him handsomely for it? What if my grief is data in someone’s slide deck titled “Case Study: Narrative Stabilization Failure Risk”?
“Why are you showing me this?” I ask, voice rough. “Beyond general whistleblowing conscience.”
“Because I watched you doubt yourself across my conference room table for months,” she says. “I watched Jonah recite the firm’s line about liability and settlements while your hands shook in your lap. And I realized my paycheck depends on people like you believing your stories matter less than the company’s.”
She leans in, elbows on the table, lowering her voice.
“I can’t blow this up from inside,” she says. “I’m not the protagonist here. I’d be the cautionary tale associate who gets blackballed and sued into oblivion. But you…” She nods at the pages. “You already lost everything they can threaten. Career’s sideways, marriage is rubble, reputation in the cul-de-sac’s shot. You’re the one they’re most afraid of if you ever get receipts.”
“This counts as receipts?” I ask.
“It’s a start,” she says. “A consulting agreement, a grant, a funding chain. It’s enough to confront him. It’s enough to make Ruiz look twice when you’re ready. It’s enough that if anything happens to you now, there’s a paper trail showing motive.”
The idea of being more dangerous dead than alive settles over me like ice.
I slide the papers back into a neat stack and tuck them into my bag, between the worn leather and a paperback with my own name on the cover. The contrast makes my stomach lurch.
“You need to keep copies somewhere off-site,” Dana says. “Not cloud. Physical. Safety deposit box, maybe. Or with someone who doesn’t live under Sentinel’s shadow.”
“Tessa,” I say. “Or Ruiz.”
Or Liam, my brain offers, crazed, because there’s still a part of me that wants to slam these papers down on his desk and watch his face crack.
Micro-hook: The urge to see his reaction is so strong my fingers twitch toward my phone, already composing the text—We need to talk. Coffee?— before I curl my hand into a fist.
“I have to go,” Dana says, standing. “If I’m gone from my desk much longer, someone will start wondering who I’m sleeping with.”
I rise too. The chair legs scrape loud against the tile, turning a few heads. I lower my voice.
“Thank you,” I say. The words feel inadequate.
“Don’t thank me yet,” she says. “If I’m right, you just found out the man who’s been editing your memories does it for a living.”
She hesitates, then squeezes my shoulder once, quick and fierce, before turning away and vanishing into the stream of bodies.
I stand there for a moment, grip tight on my bag strap, listening to the food court roar rush back in. A blender whines. Somebody’s phone chimes with the exact mechanical alert that punctuates nights in Maple Hollow when parents post angelversary collages and kids organize reservoir parties in group chats.
On the bus ride home, rain streaks past my window in long silver threads. Each drop catches and bends the reflections of traffic lights and brake lamps, turning the world into a series of smeared frames. Glass on glass. Windshield over camera lens over phone screen.
In the distance, the low hum of the freeway wraps around the city, the same sound that cradles Maple Hollow at night while the HOA argues about lawn length and pretends not to hear the fights behind neighboring windows.
By the time the bus crests the hill toward my subdivision, my horror has cooled into something more precise. Liam can claim he’s on my side, that he’s infiltrating Sentinel to expose them, that he only ever wanted to help me survive the story. He can say he never meant to weaponize my grief.
I press my forehead lightly to the glass and watch my cul-de-sac swim into view, Liam’s house a dark rectangle across from mine.
Whatever he says next, I know one thing now with the clean certainty I lost months ago: he taught them how people like me bend. And I’m done letting him decide where I break.