I stare at the white square in Scrivener until my eyes ache.
The rest of the screen is busy—sidebar folders labeled with dead projects, color-coded status dots from some past life where my biggest fear was missing a deadline. In the center, though, the new document waits, an empty page framed by neat margins, the cursor blinking like a tiny metronome tapping out my uselessness.
Outside the window, Maple Hollow is doing its choreographed nighttime performance. Fog clings low along the slope, pooling at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. Headlights smear across my front glass whenever a car turns the corner, briefly lighting up the peeling blue paint on the porch rail and the HOA violation notice still half-tucked in the mailbox because I can’t bring myself to pull it out. Somewhere beyond the houses, the freeway hums under the smell of wet pine and asphalt.
A phone alert chimes on the table—a mechanical little sound that could mean DoorDash coupons or another memorial hashtag post from a parent at the reservoir, staging their grief in soft filters. I flip the phone facedown without checking. Tonight I don’t want anyone else’s story.
I want mine back.
The words Evelyn used loop in my head: narrative volatility, context, unstable. She talked about my mind like a press kit she could edit. She has my therapy notes, my aunt’s file, my missing minutes lined up on some invisible storyboard. If she gets there first, the world will meet her version of me before they ever see mine.
The cursor blinks. I realize I’m not looking at an empty page; I’m looking at the last place they can’t redact.
My hands move before I talk myself out of it. I click into the binder panel, create a new folder, and name it: PROJECT: GLASS ROAD.
Not Caleb. Not Old Willow. Glass. Because every piece of this has been about what’s seen, what’s reflected, what’s broken—windshields, windows, camera lenses. Because Evelyn wants to frame me, and frames cut out whatever doesn’t fit.
In the blank document, I type the first line.
The night they told her it was her fault, the mother started rewriting the crash before the blood on the guardrail had dried.
Micro-hook: I read it three times, feeling the words settle inside my ribs like a bone that has finally snapped into place.
I don’t type my name. I don’t type Caleb’s. On the corkboard view, I add a second document and label it: Cast.
“Mother” becomes Nora Ellison. Close enough that the rhythm in my head doesn’t have to fight it, far enough that a lawyer can say fictional. The guardrail company becomes Aegis Safety Systems, a moniker ripped from a Greek shield they don’t deserve. Evelyn Hart turns into Catherine Hale, because I want something cold in her name that sounds like weather.
Liam is harder.
I type Noah Reed and stare at it. Delete. Type Rowan Lee. Delete. In the end, I leave the space blank and type only: Consultant.
“Earn the right to name him later,” I mutter.
I drag research files into the Scrivener project: PDFs from Dana, screenshots of the crash simulation graphs, notes from the engineer about torque specs and bolt patterns. I attach them to scenes instead of stacking them in a separate folder like I usually do. This isn’t background anymore. This is the book.
For years, I’ve used fiction to borrow other women’s tragedies, rearranging them into tidy arcs with thematic resonance and satisfying reveals. Now I flip that formula and press my real life into the template, keeping the edges sharp. No composite victims, no vague corporations. I can’t name Sentinel or Evelyn outright, but I can give my fictional company the same shell structure, the same press releases, the same hollow “commitment to safety” language.
I break the story into beats:
- Chapter 1: A mother at a memorial, watching a stranger at the edge of the yard.
- Chapter 2: Late-night windows, glowing screens.
- Chapter 3: Therapy homework and those missing ten minutes that won’t line up.
I keep going until the outline catches up to where I am now: a parking garage, a wired meeting, a threat to leak my mind to the world. On the corkboard, my life becomes a row of index cards. Each one is a fact with new names taped over the old ones.
The helpless rage that’s been sitting in my chest since Evelyn said intrusive crash imagery starts to thin, replaced by something tighter, cleaner. Not calm. Focus.
I don’t need a judge to admit evidence for a reader to feel it.
I’m halfway through mapping Chapter 12—my fictional version of the guardrail simulation—when I hear the front door open and close, followed by the thud of a bag hitting the hall table.
“Mara?” Tessa calls. Her voice carries the background buzz of the hospital, like the sound has seeped into her vocal cords.
“In here,” I answer.
She appears in the doorway with her scrubs half-covered by a gray hoodie, hair pulled into a lopsided bun skewered with two pens. The smell of antiseptic clings to her along with stale coffee and the faint metallic tang of the ER. She clocks the laptop, the empty mug, the mess of papers spread across the dining table that hasn’t seen a proper meal since before Caleb died.
“You’re upright,” she says. “And in front of Scrivener. I feel like I should alert the literary authorities.”
I tilt the screen so she can’t see the words yet. “You’re home early.”
“Shift got cut. Census is low.” She toes off her sneakers, walking barefoot across the creaky wood floor. “Either the world is briefly less deadly or everyone’s dying at home while doomscrolling. What are you working on?”
I swallow, tasting old coffee and the chalky residue of my afternoon anti-anxiety pill. “A book.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Like, your book? Suspense about the wife who fakes her own—”
“No,” I interrupt. “A new one.”
“You’re starting something new in the middle of a psychological breakdown,” she says. “Sure. That tracks.”
I spin the laptop back toward me, pulse ticking faster. “They’re going to write me anyway, Tess. In press releases, in ‘background context’ for reporters, in sealed court filings. Evelyn already has my therapy notes. My file. Our aunt’s diagnosis. She’s building a character called Unreliable Grieving Mother. I can’t stop her from pitching it, but I can at least make sure my version exists in the wild first.”
Tessa’s face softens at our aunt’s mention, then firms up again. “So you’re what—writing an op-ed? A Medium post? I have patients who send me those at three in the morning.”
“I’m writing a novel,” I say. The word lands heavier than I expect. “Thinly veiled. Meticulously researched. Everything I know about the guardrails, the NDAs, the memory study, the camera contractor. Wrapped in fiction so legal can’t shred it as easily.”
She pulls out a chair and drops into it, the wood groaning. “You’re serious.”
“They threatened to put my mind on record,” I say. “I’m putting theirs on record first.”
Micro-hook: The plan sounds reckless even inside my own head, but reckless beats waiting quietly while they sharpen my history into a weapon.
Tessa glances at the corkboard view. Her eyes skim the chapter titles—The Hidden Camera, Mock Depo, Simulation—and settle on the one at the end: Leak Threat.
“You’re just…putting it in?” she asks. “All of it? The bugs, the crash tests, the whisper campaigns?”
“Names changed,” I say. “Dates blurred. Anything that could identify real minors stripped out. But yes. Everything important stays.”
“You know they’ll still see themselves,” she says. “Even with the names changed. Evelyn won’t need a decoder ring to recognize Catherine Hale.”
“Good,” I say. “I want her to feel it.”
Tessa leans back, watching me with narrowed eyes. “Mara, think this through. You publish a book accusing a fictionalized corporation of manipulating crash-test data and weaponizing therapy records? They’ll sue. They’ll say you’re defaming them through an obvious roman à clef. They’ll point to your EMDR sessions and say you can’t distinguish between memory and imagination, and that bleeds over into your work.”
“They’ll do that anyway,” I counter. “Book or no book. Evelyn told Liam they’d give reporters my ‘full picture.’ Headline: Suspense Author’s Grief Spirals Into Conspiracy. At least if I write it, I control structure, emphasis, voice. I decide which pieces belong on stage and which stay backstage.”
Her mouth twists. “You’re trying to litigate in paperback.”
“Courts like clean evidence,” I say. “Do we have that yet? A camera feed the company didn’t touch? A guardrail bolt we can put in front of a jury? We have whispers and gaps and patterns. That’s not enough for a DA to risk their career. But it’s enough for story.”
I tap the screen. “Readers live in the gaps all the time. They know what subtext smells like. They can feel when a character is lying. If I can make them feel the wrongness of the crash, the way every official document slides off something solid, then even if no judge ever hears me, hundreds of thousands of people might.”
Tessa rubs her eyes with her knuckles, smudging the faint mascara she pretends she doesn’t wear. “Or they might think you’re exactly what Evelyn wants them to think you are,” she says quietly. “A woman who turned her trauma into content and lost the thread.”
The words sink claws into my chest, because they’re not wrong. For years I’ve mined other people’s pain for plot twists. Now I’m mining my own.
“Then I make sure the facts are sharper than the sentiment,” I say. “I double-check every medical detail, every injury description, every concussion symptom, so no one can poke holes in the basics. I show how memory works under trauma. I show what a guardrail failure does to a body and what it doesn’t. This is where you come in.”
She snorts. “Of course. The unpaid grief consultant becomes unpaid medical consultant.”
“You already fact-check my ER scenes,” I remind her. “I just never admitted what I’m really trying to save.”
Her gaze drops to my hands. I realize I’ve been worrying the edge of a Post-it into confetti. She plucks the scraps from my fingers, then sighs.
“Fine,” she says. “Show me what you have.”
Relief loosens something between my shoulder blades. I swivel the laptop so we can both see. The glow washes both our faces in cold light. Together, we read the first lines about Nora Ellison and the night she started rewriting the crash.
“Okay,” Tessa says slowly. “Medically, this tracks: the dissociation, the intrusive imagery, the way EMDR can surface symbolic stuff that feels realer than the original. But if you’re going to put this in front of readers, you need clarity about what memory can and can’t do. You don’t want them thinking therapy made you hallucinate a corporate conspiracy.”
I open a new document and title it Author’s Notes – Brain Stuff.
“Talk,” I say.
She launches into a brisk explanation, hands moving as she talks. “Post-traumatic memory isn’t a video file. It’s more like fragments that get reassembled every time you recall them. Add in head injury, and you have disorganized encoding. You should show that in Nora’s internal monologue. Don’t make the recovered images too clean. Let them glitch. Show her doubting them.”
I type while she speaks, translating jargon into sentences a reader can swallow.
“And medically,” she continues, “if you’re describing the guardrail wound pattern, be specific. Where the metal entered. The angle. The way the torso injuries differ from classic frontal impact. That’s where your case is strong. That’s what I can help you nail down so no ER doc who reads this can roll their eyes and dismiss it.”
“You’ll be my beta reader with a stethoscope,” I say.
“With a blood pressure cuff,” she corrects. “Because yours is garbage.”
We work for an hour like that, Tessa pacing and correcting, me typing and reshaping. Outside, the fog in Maple Hollow thickens, turning the cul-de-sac into a bowl of diluted milk. A car’s headlights sweep across my front window, glass turning the beams into bright scars. Somewhere on the street, a neighbor’s phone alert chimes, a twin to the one I ignored earlier.
Micro-hook: I picture those phones lighting up in a not-so-distant future with a link to a book extract, my book, and wonder whether that notification will be a lifeline or the start of a public vivisection.
“You know you can’t send this to your editor in an email subject-lined New Book Idea!!!!!,” Tessa says, breaking my trance. “If you do this, you need to assume every communication channel is dirty. Cloud storage, email, Google Docs. All of it.”
“I’ll work local,” I say. “External hard drive. Maybe print pages and hide them under the HOA bylaws; no one ever opens that binder except to quote noise ordinances.”
She snorts. “You think those people wouldn’t crawl over each other to read a manuscript about their own neighborhood drama? Your cul-de-sac thrillers are their Super Bowl.”
“Then I give them something worth live-tweeting,” I say.
Tessa shakes her head, amusement and worry braided together. “Just promise me you’ll talk to a real lawyer before you show this to anyone who isn’t me or Dana or Ruiz.”
“Jonah is a real lawyer,” I say.
Her expression clouds. “Jonah is compromised. He signed their NDA. He’s bound. You need someone who doesn’t have guardrail blood money on their retainer.”
The reminder lands heavy. Jonah, Evelyn, Liam—the men orbiting this story are all entangled in contracts and guilt.
“Then for now,” I say, “it’s just us. And the page.”
Tessa stands, stretching until her spine pops. “I have to sleep if I want to keep pretending to function,” she says. She leans down, presses a quick kiss to the top of my head, and whispers, “Try not to burn down your life before morning, okay?”
“No promises,” I murmur.
She pads down the hall, her footsteps fading. The house settles into its late-night creaks. The hum of the distant freeway weaves with the faint whir of my laptop fan. In the window, my reflection overlays the dark glass, ghosted by the glow of the screen. For a second, my face and Nora’s title card line up, two women sharing one frame.
I scroll back to the first page.
The night they told her it was her fault…
I keep typing, pulling threads from every document I’ve hoarded, every conversation I’ve recorded, every threat whispered in polished offices. I twist them into scenes, chapters, arcs. It doesn’t fix the guardrail or resurrect my son. It doesn’t delete Evelyn’s files on me. But with every sentence, I drag a piece of their secret machinery into a form they can’t control without proving I’m right.
When my fingers finally still, the Scrivener binder holds twelve rough chapters and a dozen more empty placeholders waiting like open mouths.
I save the project, twice. Once to the hard drive under an innocuous working title my agent won’t blink at—Domestic Draft 2—and once to a thumb drive I dig out of a drawer, the plastic warm from my thumb.
The cursor blinks again in the next empty scene, hungry.
Even if no court listens, I think, readers might. Teenagers whose friends drive home drunk past guardrails like Caleb’s. Nurses like Tessa who know what metal does to bone. People who recognize the shape of a cover-up even when it’s hiding behind different names.
The thought is terrifying; handing my story to strangers always is. This time it feels like loading ammunition.
I close the laptop halfway, leaving a thin V of light cutting across the table.
Tomorrow, I’ll have to decide how to fire this shot. An anonymous leak? A proposal to my editor with a legal memo attached? A password-protected folder with select chapters ready to “accidentally” surface in the right inbox?
I rest my fingers on the laptop lid, feeling the faint hum of the sleeping machine, and know one thing with a clarity that scares me more than Evelyn’s threats:
for this story to do any good, I’m going to have to let it out of my house—and I have no idea who will get to it first.