The parking garage tastes like old rain and exhaust.
I ease my car into a narrow space on the fourth level, concrete pillars hemming me in on both sides. The roof is low enough that the underside of the city feels close, pressed down over my head. In Maple Hollow, the night spreads out—fog hugging the slope, headlights smearing across my front windows, HOA-approved lawns glowing faintly under streetlamps. Here, the sky is a ceiling and the glass belongs to other people.
“Last chance to bail,” Liam says.
He stands in front of the car, framed by my windshield, a silhouette cut from the glare of the ramp light behind him. His tie is loose, his black coat open. He looks like someone’s idea of harmless—mild tech consultant, mid-level, compliant.
“We already crossed that line at the crash lab,” I say, killing the engine. The quiet rushes in, broken only by the ticking metal of the cooling car and the distant hum of the city. “Show me the thing.”
He scans the garage, then opens the passenger door and slides in, bringing cold air and the sharp smell of his soap with him. From his pocket, he pulls a tiny matte-black square on a flexible band.
“Buttoncam’s live,” he says, clipping it behind the knot of his tie, hidden in the shadow of the fabric. “Audio streams to this app.” He taps my phone screen, opening a dark interface with a single pulsing icon. “You’ll get everything in near real time. If they sweep for electronics, it looks like a dead RFID badge.”
“And if they strip-search you?” I ask.
“Then we both have bigger problems,” he says. His mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “She asked for this meeting in person. That’s leverage. She’s worried.”
“She’s cautious,” I correct. “I’m the one who’s worried.”
His eyes search my face. “You know you don’t have to listen,” he says quietly. “I can debrief you after.”
“You told Evelyn you speak fluent narrative,” I say. “Consider this a live translation.”
I don’t tell him that part of me is terrified of his version of the story and needs to hear hers raw, before he edits it into something he thinks I can survive.
He exhales through his nose, a tiny surrender. “Fine,” he says. “Once I’m in the elevator, give it thirty seconds, then hit connect. If you lose signal, don’t call. Don’t text. Just leave.”
“You think I’m going to rescue you from corporate counsel with my library card?” I ask.
“I think you underestimate how far people will go to shut down a vector of liability,” he says. “Stay small. Stay boring. Leave if your gut tells you to.”
Micro-hook: My gut has been a busted compass since the night of the crash; the idea of trusting it now feels like asking the guardrail to hold after watching it fail in slow-motion.
He reaches for the door handle, then stops, hand hovering. I notice the tiniest tremor in his fingers.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
“Adrenaline,” he answers. “Evelyn Hart doesn’t like surprises. Today, I am one.”
He steps out into the garage, straightens his coat, and walks toward the elevator bank. I watch him through the windshield, layers of glass stacking: my car, the lobby doors ahead, the glossy curtain wall of the tower where she’s waiting. Halfway to the doors, he pauses, lifts his hand, and adjusts his tie with a quick, precise tug.
The transmitter is live.
He goes through the sliding glass, swallowed by the building’s lobby light. For a second, his reflection hangs in the doors, doubled and distorted, then the panes close and give him back to them.
I pick up my phone.
The app’s icon pulses, waiting. I tap it. A little spinning wheel runs a tight circle, then brightens green. Static crackles in the car, a soft shhh that raises the fine hairs on my arms. I plug in a single earbud, leaving my other ear open to the concrete quiet.
For a moment, there’s only ambient noise: the hollow echo of footsteps, an elevator ding, the murmur of distant voices filtered by cloth and bone.
Then Liam’s voice, slightly tinny. “Liam Rowe for Evelyn Hart.”
A receptionist’s response blurs in the background. Doors open. The sound quality shifts, losing some echo as he steps into the elevator, then gaining a low mechanical thrum. My fingers clamp around the steering wheel, the leather pressing patterns into my palms.
“You’re early,” Evelyn’s voice says a minute later.
The words hit my ear like a slap. I’ve only heard her on that glossy news segment, her tone tailored for sympathy and control. In person—through Liam—there’s an edge under the smoothness, something stainless.
“Traffic cooperated,” Liam says. “I didn’t want to keep you.”
“Consideration,” she says lightly. “Nice to know it still exists.”
Chairs scrape. A door closes. The ambient hush thickens; they’re in her office now, insulated, while I sit in a concrete cave listening to every breath.
“Water?” she offers.
“No, thank you.”
“Suit yourself,” she says. Then, sharper: “You’ve had a busy week.”
Papers rustle. I imagine her sliding a folder across a table; I imagine my name on the tab.
“You read my memo,” Liam says. His voice holds that bland consultant cadence he used the first time he appeared at my door with a misdelivered package.
“I did,” she replies. “And then I read other things.”
I shift in my seat. The parking garage smells of damp concrete and stale coffee from an abandoned paper cup near the wall. A car drives by on a lower level, its rumble reaching me in a low vibration through the floor.
“Let’s talk about Mara Ellison,” Evelyn says.
Hearing my name in her mouth steals the air from my lungs. My grip on the wheel tightens; my knuckles shine bone-white in the dark.
“She’s not your client,” Liam says evenly.
“She’s become everyone’s problem,” Evelyn answers. “Our problem, your problem, the state’s problem, the HOA’s problem. A woman like that can do a lot of damage with a smartphone and a sympathetic blog editor.”
A pulse of static rides over the next second. I swallow against the sudden dryness in my throat.
“She lost her son,” Liam says. “She has questions about a product with a documented failure history.”
“Don’t recite my own risk assessments to me,” Evelyn says. Ice creeps into her tone. “This isn’t about sympathy. This is about exposure. You were brought in to manage narrative volatility, not to incubate it.”
Narrative volatility. My life boiled down to a line in a slide deck.
“The narrative is volatile because the facts are,” Liam says. “Old Willow Road’s guardrail was misinstalled at best, sabotaged at worst. Your own engineer reports—”
“Are confidential work product,” she cuts in. “And will remain so.”
Micro-hook: Every time I wonder if I’m chasing ghosts, someone behind polished glass uses the exact language I’ve only dared to write in my drafts.
There’s a clink of glass on wood, the whisper of ice cubes. Evelyn pours herself water, or something clear enough to pretend.
“Liam,” she says, voice softening into something coaxing, “we’re both pragmatists. We both understand stories. The story right now is that a grieving mother is being goaded into self-harm by a man with a damaged reputation. It doesn’t have to be that story.”
My stomach flips. I press my forehead briefly to the steering wheel, inhaling the faint trace of pine-scented dash wipes from the last half-hearted cleaning Tessa bullied me into.
“Mara makes her own choices,” Liam replies.
“Mara is…fragile,” Evelyn says, savoring the word. “From what we’ve learned, she has a history of traumatic responses. Night terrors. Dissociation. Invasive imagery. There’s a family history piece as well, correct?”
The parking garage spins for a heartbeat.
“What exactly have you learned?” Liam asks. His tone loses a degree of polish.
“I’m not required to share sources,” she says. “But when someone goes on record, or may, we do due diligence. We speak to people. We obtain records when they are obtainable. Dr. Navarro’s notes were illuminating.”
My heart slams into my ribs so hard I hear my own pulse in my free ear.
Records.
Dr. Navarro’s notes.
“Those are privileged,” Liam says. “Protected.”
“There’s always a way,” Evelyn says, almost amused. “A sloppy admin, a subpoena with a broad enough net, a ‘concerned party’ with access. What matters is not how but what, and what we have is a pattern of…let me find the phrasing.” Pages flip. “Intrusive crash imagery, distorted self-blame, confusion around temporal order, occasional derealization. Does that sound familiar?”
Tears prick my eyes, hot and useless. I am alone in my car in a concrete box, listening to clinical words ripped from the private room where I told a stranger I sometimes felt time folding over itself, where I confessed that in my mind I might be driving the car that killed my son.
“You’re constructing a character sketch,” Liam says. “Not a factual rebuttal.”
“Perception is fact in the court of public opinion,” she answers. “If Ms. Ellison continues to escalate, if she works with you to disseminate partial data in a misleading way, we will have no choice but to correct the record.”
“Correct the record,” he repeats. “By declaring her unstable.”
“By providing context,” Evelyn says. “Imagine a headline: Local author struggling with grief exploited by activist consultant. Or, Trauma therapy gone wrong: how suggestion created a conspiracy. Reporters adore those narratives. They let readers feel compassionate and superior at the same time.”
I taste bile, thick and acidic at the back of my throat. I picture Maple Hollow’s Facebook moms group sharing that article, the same women who post angelversary hashtags under filtered photos of my kid’s memorial bench. I picture my HOA board using it to justify every side-eye, every whispered “she’s not well” behind hedges trimmed to regulation height.
“You’d leak protected health information,” Liam says. “You’d risk HIPAA violations to win a news cycle.”
“Careful,” she murmurs. “I never said I would leak anything. I said we would provide context, through appropriate channels. Third parties talk. Former friends. Extended family. Colleagues. An aunt with a documented psychotic break, for example; that’s a matter of record. Combine that with therapy notes acquired in litigation, and you have a composite. No one piece crosses a line. The pattern speaks for itself.”
My aunt. The one who started seeing shapes in the wallpaper and ended her life in a locked ward while my mother insisted genes are just one strand, not a destiny. I hear her name implied without being spoken, like Evelyn is stroking a bruise under my skin.
“You’d go after her career,” Liam says.
“Her publisher might be interested in knowing that their suspense author’s grasp on reality is…flexible,” Evelyn replies. “Any pieces she places, any book she sells with defamatory innuendo, becomes discoverable. We point out her history, the EMDR imagery, the self-induced trances. Jurors understand that memory is a tricky thing. They like experts who tell them which parts to discount.”
Micro-hook: For months I’ve been terrified my memory will betray me; it never occurred to me that the bigger danger is someone else convincing the world it already has.
A car door slams somewhere on the level below; the echo rides up through the concrete and into my bones. I drag my nails across the steering wheel stitching, needing some other sensation to anchor me.
“This is your leak threat,” Liam says. “Reel in my neighbor or you’ll smear her into irrelevance.”
“I prefer to think of it as a wellness intervention,” Evelyn says dryly. “Someone needs to help her accept the official findings and move forward. You were supposed to be that someone, Liam. Instead, I’m hearing you’ve been indulging her fixation. Encouraging it.”
“My work has always involved listening to victims,” he says. “Their families.”
“Your work now involves managing exposure,” she counters. “Sentinel doesn’t pay you to indulge personal crusades. We pay you to understand how narratives form and to prevent them from becoming dangerous. Ms. Ellison’s narrative is approaching dangerous.”
“Dangerous to whom?” he asks.
“To everyone,” she says. “To the families whose settlements could be jeopardized if the state reopens cases. To our employees, whose pensions depend on this company’s stability. To you, frankly, if your prior…issues are dragged back into the spotlight. There’s more than one unstable journalist story floating out there.”
The jab lands; I hear it in the momentary silence on the line. Liam’s history, his buried bylines, the campaign that dismantled him—she’s reminding him of how easily a reputation can be shattered on the internet’s glass surface.
“What exactly do you want from me?” he asks at last.
“Two things,” Evelyn says. “One, you stop feeding Ms. Ellison documents you’re not authorized to share. Two, you steer her away from external channels. No more appeals to regulators, no more informal leaks to muckraker blogs, no sympathetic op-eds about guardrails and grief. You encourage her to focus on personal healing. Books. Therapy. Private memorialization. You do that, and we have no interest in her medical history. Or yours.”
I press the heel of my hand against my mouth to keep sound from leaking out. She has drawn a circle around my life—writing, therapy, memorial hashtags—and offered to let me stay inside it, safely contained, as long as I stop reaching beyond.
“And if she doesn’t cooperate?” Liam asks.
“Then we respond,” Evelyn says. Her voice smooths back into PR silk. “We emphasize our concern for her wellbeing. We share what we know with reputable outlets. We let the public draw its own conclusions. People are very reasonable when presented with the full picture.”
Full picture. I think of the edited bodycam footage, the missing minutes. Of the guardrail simulation where the car lived. Of my therapy notes, now weaponized, turned into footnotes in someone else’s legal strategy.
“I can’t promise I’ll make her compliant,” Liam says.
“I’m not asking for a promise,” Evelyn answers. “I’m asking for effort. For alignment. Decide which side of the glass you want to be on when this breaks. The safe side, or the side catching shards.”
A silence stretches long enough for me to count four slow breaths.
“I’ll talk to her,” he finally says.
My fingers loosen on the wheel, then tighten again. The words are a rope and a noose at the same time.
Chairs move. Paper slides into a folder. The meeting dissolves into small sounds—door, hallway, elevator chime—until the app emits a soft tone and the connection drops. The icon on my screen goes from green to gray.
I sit in the dim car, surrounded by concrete and the faint echo of tires on distant ramps, listening to the absence of her voice.
In my mind, the smear campaign blooms fully formed: a headline about an unstable crash mom, a podcast episode dissecting my EMDR sessions, readers in Maple Hollow sharing links they claim they can’t bear to look at while scrolling through comments. My editor’s terse email asking whether there’s “anything I want to tell her before this gets bigger.” An acquisition board deciding my next book is too risky.
The worst part is how plausible that story sounds. Not because it’s true, but because it uses truths—my terror, my fragmented recollections, my aunt’s illness—and arranges them in an order designed to erase everything else.
Micro-hook: For the first time, I understand that the real battle isn’t over what happened on Old Willow Road, but over who gets to arrange the footage and voice-over into something the world will call reality.
My hands stop shaking.
I open my Notes app, the familiar blank page glowing up at me. The keys under my thumbs are tiny glass tiles, waiting.
If they intend to publish a version of my mind to bury me, I need a stronger draft on record.
I type the first sentence, not of an affidavit or a police report, but of a story that refuses to forget, and I don’t know yet whether I’m saving myself or loading their gun for them.