My phone starts screaming before the sun has burned through the fog.
It’s not my usual gentle chime, the one that sounds like a polite robot tapping a teacup. It’s the full-blown emergency ringtone I assigned to only two people: Tessa and my editor. The sound slices through the house, bouncing off the empty picture frames on the wall and the neglected stack of laundry on the couch.
I stumble from the couch—I fell asleep there with my laptop half-shut on my stomach—and fumble for the phone on the coffee table. The screen glares up at me: RACHEL – NY.
My mouth tastes like old coffee and sleep. I swipe to answer. “Hey,” I croak. “Everything okay?”
“Mara.” Her voice is too loud and tinny in my ear, all Manhattan edge and no preamble. “What the hell did you just send me?”
The question hits before my brain catches up. “I didn’t send you anything. I mean, not since—what time is it?”
“It’s eight thirty here,” she says. “Five thirty your time. I opened my inbox and found forty pages of something called Glass Road. No subject line, no note, just a link to a folder on your cloud drive set to auto-share with me.” Paper rustles on her end. “It reads like a legal grenade with characters, Mara. Guardrails, memory tampering, a mother blaming a corporation for her kid’s crash. Tell me this is a joke draft you accidentally pushed.”
Embarrassment rushes up hot, prickling my scalp. I pace toward the front window, bare feet sticking slightly to the cool wood floor. Outside, Maple Hollow is still half-dark, fog clinging low across the cul-de-sac. One early commuter’s headlights smear across my glass, turning my reflection into a pale ghost layered over their car.
“I didn’t send it,” I say. “Those pages aren’t supposed to leave my hard drive yet.”
“Well, they left,” she snaps. “At three thirteen a.m., according to the timestamp. From your account. And, heads-up, my assistant flagged a thread on a reader forum that’s already posting screenshots. They’re calling it your ‘crash truthers’ manifesto.’”
My stomach drops. “What forum?”
“One of the snark boards. I’m not giving them oxygen by name,” she says. “Look, I don’t care if you write some ripped-from-your-life thing, you know that. But this—this is naming guardrail designs, referencing NDAs, hinting at real companies under thin fake names. Have you lost your mind? Legally, we can’t touch this.”
Heat crawls up my neck. I grip the curtains hard enough that my fingers cramp. “It’s a novel,” I say, hearing the defensive edge sharpen my words. “Names changed. Composite details. It’s my story to tell.”
“Your story is one thing,” she says. “Accusing a billion-dollar infrastructure manufacturer of staged crashes and memory manipulation, even under a coat of fiction, is another. Did you at least send this with a heads-up to your lawyer?”
I picture Jonah’s NDA in his drawer, his face when I confronted him. “Not yet.”
“Then pull it down,” she says. “Right now. Close whatever auto-sync crap you’ve got running and lock this thing up before their legal team finds it. And call me back when you can explain what you’re doing, because I can’t protect you from this, Mara. I’m not even sure I can be associated with it if it’s out there in this form.”
Her words land heavier than I want to admit. I hear her keyboard clicking, a muffled conversation in the background, the white noise of an office where people are already moving on to the next crisis.
“Rachel,” I say, cutting in. “I didn’t share it. I swear to you. Someone else must have—”
“Then you’ve got a bigger problem than me,” she says. “Figure out who’s in your house, because one way or another, this thing is now in the world.”
The line goes dead.
For a second, I stand there with the phone pressed to my ear long after the call ends, like if I hold the pose I can rewind to before her ringtone cut through my half-sleep. The fog outside thickens, blurring the edges of Liam’s house across the cul-de-sac so it looks like a smudged painting behind the glass.
Micro-hook: If someone got into my draft, what else did they climb through to get there?
I drop onto the dining chair in front of my laptop, heart jackhammering. The machine is still warm from last night, a faint whir under my palms. When I open it, Scrivener springs back to life, the GLASS ROAD project front and center, my last line still blinking. I hadn’t synced anything. I worked local, just like Tessa warned.
I quit out of Scrivener and open my browser. The cloud service login page looks aggressively neutral, all soft blues and reassuring padlock icons. I type my email and password, fingers suddenly clumsy, and hit enter.
The dashboard loads with its usual array of folders, most of them full of half-finished novels and tax documents and photos I can’t look at yet. One new folder at the top flashes a tiny green “shared” icon: Glass Road Draft.
“No,” I whisper.
I click into it. There they are: twelve documents matching my Scrivener chapter titles, exported to Word. A sharing banner at the top says: Shared with: Rachel Editor, 1 more.
One more?
I click the sharing settings. My own name. Rachel. And a generic address: legal-intake@harringtonstrategies.com.
Harrington Strategies.
I recognize the name from Evelyn’s TV segment, from the bottom corner of a press release: a crisis PR firm that “partners with Sentinel Infrastructure on safety communications.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I breathe.
My chest goes tight, like someone has cinched a belt inside my ribcage. I click the account activity tab, the one nobody ever checks until their life is on fire. A list of logins appears, each in neat rows: timestamps, locations, IP addresses.
Last night, 3:12 a.m.: Login – Portland, OR – Device: Web, Chrome on Mac. That’s me.
Then, 3:13 a.m.: File created – Glass Road Draft folder.
3:14 a.m.: File shared – legal-intake@harringtonstrategies.com. IP address: a string of numbers, registered location: New York, NY – Harrington Strategies Corporate Network.
My skin crawls. I taste metal, the phantom flavor of blood and adrenaline from the night of the crash. Whoever this is doesn’t just have my account password; they’ve had time to route access through a company network, to clean their steps until all that’s left is the fact that they were here.
“You wanted me to let it out,” I mutter to myself. “You just didn’t mention you’d be the one to walk it around.”
My phone buzzes on the table, vibrating against the wood in a rhythm that makes my teeth ache. Another call from Rachel, or Tessa, or—
No. A text, not a call. The preview shows from my editor’s assistant: Don’t go looking, but you should know there’s a thread—
Of course I go looking.
I copy my own name into the search bar of the browser and tack on the word forum. It’s like Googling an open wound, but I pry anyway. The top result is one of those notorious snark boards Rachel hates, the kind that lives on screenshots and speculation. A thread title leaps out:
“Midlist Thriller Author Goes Full Crash Truther???”
I click.
The thread is a river of text and memes, user names stacked like graffiti. Someone has posted screenshots of my first chapter, my words boxed in red with commentary snaking around them.
“The night they told her it was her fault, the mother started rewriting the crash before the blood on the guardrail had dried.”
A user with an avatar of a cartoon vulture has captioned it: Is this about her dead son??
Another: Dude, she’s literally weaponizing her grief for clout.
And: Mental illness as a marketing angle, bold strategy.
My hands shake as I scroll. But mixed into the dogpile of armchair psychologists and amateur lawyers, other comments cut sharper.
Some stories are closed for a reason. She should leave the dead where they are.
People who can’t accept reality make dangerous narrators. Maybe it’s better if she forgets. Permanently.
The word forgets glows on the screen, a neon echo of Evelyn’s threat to leak my mental health. Forgetting used as both mercy and punishment.
Another user posts a link to an article about EMDR with the caption: This woman literally pays someone to rewrite her memories, then writes “fiction” to match. How is anything she says about this crash reliable?
I taste bile. It’s one thing to suspect Evelyn has my therapy notes in a locked folder. It’s another to watch those notes weaponized in public, even through suggestion, by people who have turned my entire life into something bingeable between DoorDash deliveries.
Micro-hook: If strangers can read my memories on a gossip board, how long before they’re reading my police file too?
A fresh comment appears at the bottom as I watch:
User: SentinelWatcher88 – “She needs to stop rewriting the past before someone helps her forget the whole thing. Maybe then other people can finally move on.”
My lungs misfire. Sentinel. Someone is either trolling with a very bad joke or waving a little corporate flag right in my face. The profile is almost empty, nothing but an account created last month and a list of threads about infrastructure, lawsuits, and “fake victim narratives.”
I slam the laptop closed, the screen’s glow vanishing, leaving my reflection in the window alone with the gray morning. The house feels too quiet, the silence layered over the distant freeway hum and the occasional mechanical chime of a neighbor’s phone alert next door.
I press my palms into the table until the tacky ring of an old coffee mug presses into my skin. Embarrassment has drained out, leaving an icy hollow that feels a lot like dread.
They’re in my head. They’re in my draft. They’re in my search results.
I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until the next sound knifes through the room: another notification, this one the soft ping of email.
I open the laptop again, slower this time, like it might bite. The email client pops up with one new message at the top of the queue. No subject line. No sender name, just a string of characters: no-reply@memoryservice.net.
“Cute,” I mutter.
I click it.
There’s no text in the body, just an image attachment named oldwillow_today.jpg. My fingers leave little crescents on the trackpad as I open it.
The photo fills the screen.
Old Willow Road, under the leaning overpass. The guardrail, the curve, the patch of asphalt where Caleb’s car bled out. The angle is slightly different from the memorial photos I’ve seen online, closer to where I usually stand when I visit. Whoever took this was in my spot.
The sky in the picture is a low, colorless ceiling. The asphalt shines with fresh rain. The floral memorial is there—plastic flowers and a faded photo in a frame whose glass has cracked into a spiderweb. At the bottom of the frame, propped up against the post, someone has placed a piece of cardboard with today’s date scrawled across it in thick black marker.
Today.
Not the date of the crash. Not Caleb’s birthday. Today.
I zoom in until the pixels blur. I can see water beads on the guardrail, the warped reflection of the cardboard in the wet metal, the distorted miniature date repeating itself in jagged lines. Glass in the memorial frame catches the overcast sky, my son’s face fractured into shards.
My throat tightens. It’s not grief this time, not only. It’s the awareness of someone’s presence in that sacred space, someone standing where I stand, watching what I watch, and then sending the image back to me like a taunt.
At the bottom of the email, a single line of text blinks into view, delayed, like it was queued to appear after the image loaded:
Stop rewriting what happened, Mara. Some endings aren’t yours to change.
There’s no signature.
I sit very still, so still I can hear the refrigerator cycling on in the kitchen, the tiny crackle of the heater, the distant hiss of a car climbing the slope outside. Fog thickens against the front window, turning the cul-de-sac into an impressionist blur of houses, trimmed lawns, and secret screaming matches behind closed doors.
My hands want to move—forward, reply, delete, throw the laptop into the wall. Instead I rest them flat on the table, fingers spread, nails biting the wood.
Memory is a story I’ve been telling myself in different drafts for months. They’re telling me to stop. They want their version to be the only one left, the official edition, hardcover, laminated.
“No,” I whisper.
The word feels tiny in the room, but it’s the only thing in here that’s actually mine.
I forward the email to myself at a backup address, then again to an account no one knows about, one I created years ago to send myself snippets I was too embarrassed to show my agent. I take screenshots of the cloud activity log, of the Harrington IP, of the forum posts. Each image is another shard of glass, each saved copy another frame they’ll have to smash if they want to erase me.
My cursor hovers over Liam’s name in my contacts, then over Detective Ruiz’s. If I send this to either of them, I invite a whole new layer of scrutiny I’m not ready for. If I don’t, I stay alone with people who have already climbed through my digital windows.
Micro-hook: I realize there’s no version of this story where I stay untouched; there’s only the question of who I trust to hold the pages while they’re still bleeding.
I close my email and reopen Scrivener. The GLASS ROAD project unfolds like a map, chapter titles lined up on the left, last night’s work waiting on the right. My fingers find the keys of their own accord.
At the top of a new chapter, I type:
They told her to stop rewriting, but by then the past was the only place left where she hadn’t already been hacked.
I save the sentence to the hard drive, to the thumb drive, to the hidden folder buried under boring tax files. Outside, another pair of headlights drags across my front window, the glass catching and warping the light into something that looks almost beautiful before it slides away.
Somewhere between my house and Old Willow Road, someone is out there with their own camera, their own narrative, their own idea of what I owe them.
I stare at the blinking cursor and know I have to choose my next move carefully—who to show, who to trust, who to risk dragging directly into this.
I don’t know yet which name I’m going to click first.