I don’t knock.
I cross the cul-de-sac with the documents pressed hard against my ribs, my jacket pulled tight against the damp. Fog clings low over Maple Hollow, swallowing the tops of the trimmed hedges the HOA loves more than people. Headlights smear across Liam’s windows as a car turns the corner, light dragging like a fingertip across glass, and for a second I taste exhaust and wet pine and the sweetness of someone grilling two streets over.
My phone vibrates with a neighborhood app alert—somebody complaining about kids at the reservoir again—and I thumb it away without looking. Parents here curate their outrage in hashtags and HOA posts; I carry mine across the asphalt like contraband.
Liam’s porch light clicks on automatically as I step onto his front path. His security camera blinks a tiny red LED at me. I stare straight into the lens, lift the manila envelope so it fills the frame, then jab his doorbell.
The chime inside his house is soft and expensive, the opposite of mine. For a moment I stand in the cold, listening to the distant freeway hum under the wet night, counting my breaths. One, two, three, four.
The lock clicks. The door opens.
“Mara?” Liam’s voice is rough, like I woke him or pulled him out of a screen trance. He wears a dark T-shirt and jeans, bare feet, hair pushed up on one side. Behind him, the house smells of coffee, electronics, and lemon cleaner.
“We’re having a meeting,” I say.
I shoulder past him before he can answer and head straight for the kitchen. The floors are cool under my boots, some engineered wood that never creaks. His fridge hums softly, the only sound until he closes the door and follows.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “You texted you had something, but—”
I slam the envelope down onto his kitchen island.
The sound cracks across the room, loud in the open-plan quiet. A glass on the counter shivers; a line of condensation runs down its side, leaving a clear track in the faint dust.
“You left something off your greatest-hits reel,” I say. “Right between ‘showing me bodycam footage’ and ‘coaching me on how to sound sane.’”
He glances from my face to the envelope, then back again. “Mara, you’re scaring me.”
“Good,” I say. “Open it.”
His fingers hesitate on the clasp. For a second I watch the small muscles in his forearm jump, a tremor he can’t control. Then he exhales through his nose and spills the photocopies out across the pale stone.
The top page shows his own name in dark, smudged letters. CONSULTANT: LIAM ROWE. PROJECT MN-07: POST-TRAUMATIC NARRATIVE STABILITY IN HIGH-VISIBILITY COLLISION EVENTS.
Color drains from his face so fast I feel the room tilt.
“Where did you get these?” he whispers.
“Let’s start with you confirming they’re real,” I say. “Then we can talk about the heroine in this chapter.”
His eyes dart over the pages, scanning the contract, the grant excerpt, Dana’s handwritten org chart with its neat arrows ending at Sentinel. His jaw clenches. A vein jumps near his temple.
“Jesus,” he breathes. “She actually—”
The breath breaks and reforms as anger.
“Dana,” he says. The name cuts out of him like glass. “Of course. That stupid, reckless—”
“Careful,” I say. “You’re talking about the woman who risks her career to slide me evidence while you hold my hand and ask me to trust the process.”
He looks up at me, eyes bright with fury.
“Do you have any idea what she’s done?” he snaps. “If these pages ever reach the wrong inbox, they don’t just bury me, they bury the only inside track we have on how Sentinel is structuring its defenses. She’s jeopardized months of work because you convinced her you’re starring in a conspiracy thriller and not real life.”
Heat flares up my neck. “Don’t you dare blame this on me.”
“You brought her into this,” he says. “You keep pulling civilians into the blast radius.”
“I’m the blast radius,” I say. My voice comes out too calm. “You made sure of that when you moved in across the street and started rewriting my memories for a living.”
The words hang between us, sharp and bright.
He flinches, just once.
Micro-hook: For one dangerous heartbeat, I enjoy the way the accusation lands, the way his composure fractures, because if he hurts then maybe I’m not the only one living inside the wreckage he helped design.
“That’s what this is to you?” he asks quietly. “Rewriting your memories for a living?”
I tap the grant abstract with my fingernail. The paper gives a little under the pressure, damp from the condensation circle.
“Memory reliability in post-crash trauma,” I read. “Family narratives and legal outcomes. With you listed right there on the team. ‘Independent forensic consultant.’”
“Read the rest,” he says, voice clipped. “Read the part about assessing malleability and suggestibility. About how courts misinterpret shifts in trauma narratives.”
“I did,” I say. “I also traced the money, courtesy of the woman you just called stupid and reckless. Sable Research. Aurora Public Interest Fund. Northline Holdings. Redwood Infrastructure. Sentinel Barrier Solutions. Sound familiar? Or did the zeros on the checks make the names blur?”
He closes his eyes for a second, palm flattening over one of the pages, like he’s pinning it down so it can’t fly away and incriminate him more.
“I told you they wouldn’t leave me alone after the last big story,” he says. “I told you they tried to hire me years ago.”
“And now they have,” I say. “Congratulations. You made it.”
He opens his eyes again. The fury hasn’t gone anywhere, but it’s tempered now by something tighter.
“It’s not what you think,” he says.
“Then tell me what I think,” I say. “Spell out the stupid, hysterical, grief-addled version so we can both admire how wrong I am.”
“You think I signed on to help them gaslight families,” he says. “To design ways of discrediting witnesses. To take your pain and turn it into strategy memos.”
I hold his gaze and say nothing.
He exhales, sharp. “Fine. Parts of that are true.”
The admission hits harder than denial. My fingers curl on the cool stone.
“Start over,” I say. “From the point where they first approached you about this study. No edits. No narrative massaging. Talk like you’re under oath.”
“I’m not under oath,” he says.
“Then imagine Ruiz is sitting in that chair,” I snap, pointing at a barstool. “Or Dana. Or my son. Pick your audience and stop wasting my time.”
His throat works. The kitchen feels too bright; the pendant lights over the island buzz faintly, a mosquito-whine at the edge of hearing.
“A year after your crash,” he says, “they reached out through a shell—Aurora. They pitched it as a public-interest study on trauma memory. They knew I’d done work on how crash-test data gets spun in court. They wanted my ‘expertise in narrative analysis.’”
“So far that matches the villain version,” I say.
He gives me a flat look. “I told them I’d do it on one condition: full access to their internal data around collisions and lawsuits. I wanted the black box, Mara. The back-end records nobody ever sees.”
“You expect me to believe they just handed that over,” I say.
“Of course they didn’t,” he says. “They gave me slices. Redacted sets. But slices are better than nothing. You know how investigative work goes. You take the crumbs. You build the pattern.”
“And the families?” I ask. “The ‘subjects’? What did they get, besides turned into bar charts?”
“Standard consent forms,” he says. “Therapy referrals. Travel reimbursements. I didn’t draft that part.”
“You advised on the interview protocols,” I say, voice low. “On the ‘structured techniques’ they used to test how easily stories change.”
“Yes,” he says. “Because I needed to understand how their lawyers plan to attack witnesses. I needed to see which prompts created the most confusion. Where their scripts intersect with trauma’s natural distortions.”
“You still sat in rooms with grieving people and took notes on how far you could pull them away from their original memories,” I say. The thought leaves a film on my tongue.
He shakes his head. “I didn’t touch most of the interviews. I designed the skeleton. I knew if I refused, they’d hire someone less conflicted who’d happily build a better machine. This way, at least I know where the hinges are.”
“You built the cage softer,” I say. “That’s your defense?”
Micro-hook: For the first time, I wonder if the version of him in my head—the tragic double agent, the self-loathing savior—is just one more story he helped me write because the truth has no satisfying protagonist at all.
“I built a map,” he says. “Of how they think. Of how they plan to tear people like you apart on the stand. Mara, I am not on their side.”
“You’re on both,” I say. “That’s the problem. You tell me you’re infiltrating, but your name is on the masthead. You take their money. You live in a house that probably got paid for by a study on how to make mothers doubt themselves.”
His gaze flicks briefly toward the wall of monitors off the kitchen, where blank screens reflect us back in ghost versions. Glass everywhere in this place; even his appliances shine.
“You know why I moved here,” he says.
“You told me,” I say. “Because my son’s crash fit a pattern. Because you wanted proximity. Because you needed a grieving mother to be your informant and didn’t mind if she mistook that for intimacy.”
He flinches again.
“You’re not my informant,” he says. “You’re the only reason I didn’t walk away when they dangled real money. I saw Caleb’s file cross my screen six months before I ever met you. I saw how fast they closed it. I saw the internal note about ‘no viable plaintiff narrative.’ That’s what they called you. Not viable. I wanted to fix that.”
“By fixing my narrative,” I say. “Tightening it up. Teaching me how to sound credible.”
“By making sure you survive long enough to get to a courtroom,” he says. “You’re not stupid. You’ve seen what they do online to people who push back. You know how they talk about ‘unstable mothers’ behind closed doors. I had to make you a harder target.”
“You had to make me useful,” I say.
We stare at each other across the smooth stone, papers between us like an autopsy report.
“Do you regret any of it?” I ask finally. “The study. The interviews. The part where you treated me like a data point in the same system that killed my son.”
His jaw works. He looks down at his hands, then back up.
“I regret that you found out this way,” he says. “Without context. Without the rest of the files.”
“Not good enough,” I say.
He exhales, a rough sound. “I regret underestimating how much damage the methods do even when they’re used with good intentions. I watched people twist themselves into shapes they thought the interviewer wanted. I saw the light go out of a few faces when they realized they weren’t believed. That’s on me.”
The admission is smaller than I want and bigger than I expected.
“Then here’s where we are,” I say. “I have copies of your contract and the funding chain. I have the NDA Jonah signed. I have kids from the party and a dark sedan on grainy video. I have a cop who is starting to sweat. I can go to Ruiz, to the press, to whoever will listen, and I can do it without you.”
“And they’ll eat you alive,” he says, no heat now, just iron. “They’ll pull your therapy notes. They’ll subpoena Dr. Navarro. They’ll leak your EMDR transcripts. They’ll play that bodycam footage on repeat and smile while commentators pick apart every inconsistency in your story. They have a whole study about exactly how to do that, and I helped write the manual.”
“Which doesn’t exactly boost your job application,” I say.
“Or,” he continues, “you let me give you the rest. Every file I’ve pulled. The raw accident data. Internal emails. Notes from the study. You let me use the access I still have before they realize Dana is leaking and slam every door.”
“On what terms?” I ask. “Because we’re done with the ones where you get to be Dungeon Master of my brain.”
His mouth twists.
“No more ‘interviews’,” I say. “No more memory drills. No more nudging my story into the shape that plays best on a screen. You want to work together, it’s information only. I see everything. You don’t get to decide which pieces I’m ready for.”
“That’s not safe,” he says. “There are things in those files that will—”
“I am already living inside the worst thing that happened to me,” I cut in. “You do not get to dangle ‘protection’ over me again. Full access or nothing. Pick.”
Micro-hook: In the silence that follows, the hum of his refrigerator booms in my ears, and I realize I am holding my breath, waiting to find out whether I just cut off my best lead or finally stepped out of his shadow.
Liam presses his tongue against his teeth, thinking. Outside, a car rolls by; its headlights smear across his glass like twin comets, then vanish into the fog at the bottom of the Maple Hollow slope.
“You’re asking me to burn years of work,” he says. “If I give you everything, there’s no walking this back. For me.”
“I buried my child,” I say. “We’re past the point of no return.”
His eyes close briefly. When he opens them, they’re steady.
“I can get you into a place you’ll never reach alone,” he says. “A crash-test facility. Off-the-books work they’re doing with guardrail models. You want to see the physics behind what happened to Caleb? You want proof the barrier was wrong before his car ever touched it? I can give you that. But only if we go together.”
The image hits me in a rush: a sterile hangar, bright lights, a silver car slammed into metal while sensors blink. My stomach lurches.
“And the files?” I ask.
“You come with me to the facility,” he says. “You watch what they’ve been hiding. After that, I hand over everything. No redactions. You can copy it, give it to Ruiz, tattoo it on your skin. But you have to let me manage the timing until then, or it all goes dark.”
It’s a trap and a lifeline in one offer.
My hand strays to the nearest page, the grant title under my fingertips. The paper feels thin and fragile, but the words on it hold more weight than half the memorial hashtags in this neighborhood.
“You’re asking me to trust you one more time,” I say.
“I’m asking you to decide what’s worse,” he says. “Working with someone you don’t fully trust, or fighting a system built to erase you without the one person who knows where the cracks are.”
I look past him, through his spotless windows, at my own house across the street—peeling paint, dark porch, a faint blue glow from the room where Caleb’s trophies gather dust. The glass between us warps the view just enough that my house looks narrower, off-kilter, like a memory I’ve replayed too many times.
“Text me the details,” I say at last. “Time. Place. Who else will be there. If you hold anything back, I walk, and I take Dana and Ruiz and every scrap of paper with me.”
“You’ll get everything,” he says.
“You’d better,” I say.
I gather the copies into a stack, edges no longer perfectly aligned, and slide them back into the envelope. The cardboard is warm from the heat of our argument. I tuck it under my arm.
At the doorway to his kitchen I pause, glancing back. He’s still at the island, palms pressed flat to the stone, head bowed between his shoulders.
Between us on the tabletop, the originals lie in a neat, accusing fan—his name, their study, my life—forming a thin line of paper I don’t know yet which side of to stand on.