Old Willow Road always smells the same in my memory: wet asphalt, pine sap, and the faint metallic tang of blood.
Today, it mostly smells like rain and exhaust, but my stomach reacts as if I’ve stepped back into the worst minute of my life. I park on the gravel shoulder a little past the curve, hands locked around the steering wheel until the engine ticks into silence. Tessa sits beside me in her navy scrubs, jacket zipped halfway, smartwatch already lighting up her wrist.
“You okay?” she asks.
I nod, because the word no would shatter something I need intact. “You can stay in the car if you want.”
“Nice try.” She blows out a breath and unclips her seat belt. “I’m not letting you do this solo field trip to Trauma Land.”
The roadside drops into a shallow ditch lined with mud and dead leaves. Above it, the guardrail runs along the outer edge of the curve—pitted metal, streaked with darker scrapes, patched in one bright segment. Just beyond, under the leaning concrete overpass, a small forest of memorials clusters around the post where Caleb’s car hit.
I walk toward them slowly. Gravel shifts under my sneakers, grinding. Each step feels too loud.
Up close, the offerings look tired. Rain has leached the color from the silk flowers. A stuffed bear with one missing eye slumps against the post, fur matted with grime. Handwritten notes in plastic sleeves curl at the edges, ink feathered into unreadable blurs, except for a few jagged words: brother, missed, forever.
My fingers hover over a little wooden cross with a blue ribbon tied around it. The ribbon used to be bright; now it hangs in a limp, grayish twist.
“They’re still bringing new stuff,” Tessa says behind me. Her voice carries a careful lightness. “Look.”
She nudges a newer bouquet with her shoe. The petals still hold some gloss, droplets clinging to the edges. A paper tag flaps in the breeze: a name I don’t recognize, another kid lost to this curve.
My throat tightens. I swallow against it and touch the top of the cross with one knuckle, just enough contact to ground myself without fully claiming the object. The wood feels damp, rough.
The distant hum of the freeway stretches like a low note above us, broken by the rush of occasional trucks overhead. Each one sends a small vibration through the ground, up through my soles. Glass used to glitter here—shards from Caleb’s windshield, tiny mirrors catching the red and blue of emergency lights. Now only a few pieces remain in the ditch, half-buried, winking when the clouds thin.
“You sure you’re good to be here?” Tessa asks.
I glance back. She stands a few feet away, arms folded, eyes flicking between me and the road. Her smartwatch lights her wrist again. The tiny chime blends with the far-off freeway noise and the rustle of wind in the trees.
“You have to go?” I ask.
“I’ve got another four hours before my shift,” she says. “I’m fine. Just triaging my bladder and my sanity.”
“You can pee in the ditch,” I say. “Very rustic.”
Her mouth twitches. “That’s your line of work, not mine. I’m more of an indoor plumbing girl.”
I turn back to the memorials. Waterlogged paper pulls at my attention, but my gaze keeps jumping to the metal behind them. The rail looms like a long scar following the curve. Caleb’s car hit right here; I remember the twisted shape, the way the front end wrapped around the post like tinfoil.
Wrapping. I heard that word a lot after the crash. People used it in hushed voices, wide eyes, like they were describing a horror movie scene.
“When the ambulance brought him in,” I say, “you were there.”
“I told you that,” Tessa answers carefully.
“You told me you were on duty.” I straighten and finally look at her. “You didn’t tell me what you heard.”
She stiffens, fingers pressing into her elbows. “Mara.”
“Don’t ‘Mara’ me,” I say. “You work in the ER. People talk. What did they say?”
Wind pushes a strand of hair across her face. She tucks it behind her ear and glances up the road, then down. Her jaw flexes.
“You’re going to take whatever I say and build a conspiracy board with string,” she mutters.
“I’m going to take whatever you say and add it to the gaping hole where sixteen minutes of my life should be,” I reply. “Big difference.”
Her gaze snaps to mine at the word sixteen. She heard the story; I called her after I did the therapy homework, voice shaking with the math.
“Fine,” she says softly. “Don’t hate me for not mentioning it before. I just…filed it under morbid shop talk.”
She steps closer to the rail, boots squishing slightly in the soggy shoulder, and taps the post with her knuckles.
“One of the paramedics said he’d never seen a rail crumple like that,” she says. “He was talking to another tech while they were handing off to us. I was charting. He said…hang on.”
Her eyes unfocus for a second, scanning memory. I hold my breath.
“He said, ‘That barrier folded wrong,’” Tessa continues. “‘It hugged the car instead of bouncing it.’ They were surprised at how far it speared into the cabin.”
A chill runs down my arms, raising bumps on my skin despite my jacket. “And you didn’t think that was important?”
“I thought everything about that night was important,” she says, voice tight. “But paramedics comment on stuff all the time. Guardrails, airbags, drunk drivers, stupid mistakes. We’re not engineers. It sounded like venting, not whistleblowing.”
“Still,” I say. “They noticed.”
“Yeah,” she admits. “They noticed. They said something about ‘install specs’ and ‘wrong angle,’ but then the attending told them to shut up and let him work. We had an actual human bleeding on a stretcher. The rail wasn’t the priority.”
Micro-hook: if even exhausted paramedics noticed a wrong angle, what did the people paid to care about angles do with that information?
I walk past her, closer to the damaged section. The guardrail has been repaired since the crash—that much I can see even without specialized training. The metal where Caleb’s car hit no longer curls inward; instead, a new length of beam gleams a few shades brighter, bolted to older segments. The bolts themselves look fresher, less rust creeping around their edges.
I run my fingers just above the surface, not quite touching. Cold radiates off the steel.
“Was this replaced?” I ask, though I already know.
“They had to,” Tessa says. “The crash chewed through it. DOT probably came out once the investigation wrapped.”
My gaze follows the rail along the curve. The older sections are streaked with long, pale scrapes, rust bleeding from them like dried tears. As my eyes adjust, I notice something else: faint, grayish-black lines on the pavement beneath, curving in toward the barrier. Skid marks. They spiderweb under newer, darker streaks, different directions layered like palimpsest.
“Look,” I say. “There.”
I crouch, knees popping, and point. The smell of wet dirt rises, mixed with gasoline ghosts. Up close, the road texture becomes a mosaic of gravel and tar, pitted and patched.
Tessa joins me, one hand braced on her thigh. “Those could be from anything,” she says. “Weather, trucks, some kid spinning out—”
“They go right into the rail,” I cut in. I trace the arc in the air. “These are older. Faded. And the fresh ones—” I slide my gaze a few feet over, to the darker black lines that match photos from the police report “—are on top. Layer on layer.”
“So more than one crash,” she says. “Not shocking for a blind curve outside town. They call it Old Widow Road for a reason.”
“Funny,” I say, throat dry. “No one mentioned that at the memorial.”
A semi roars past overhead on the overpass, the echo booming through the concrete like a contained thunderclap. The guardrail trembles under my hand.
I stand, brushing grit from my jeans. Something tightens in my chest—not grief this time, but a dawning awareness of sequence. Old skid marks. Old damage. New patch. Then Caleb.
“If there were previous crashes,” I say slowly, “then they already knew this rail had issues.”
“Or they thought they fixed them,” Tessa counters. “Bad things still happen after upgrades.”
I stare at the bolts holding the bright section in place. The metal around them shows fine scratches, like a wrench slipped while tightening. I imagine a crew here at dawn, reflective vests blinking, replacing steel while commuters honked impatiently around their cones.
My mind jumps to Liam’s articles about guardrail manufacturers, their quiet settlements, their test data. Metal tested in one configuration, installed in another.
“You’re in your head,” Tessa says, watching me. “You’re connecting dots that might not belong together.”
“I’m noticing,” I answer. “There’s a difference.”
Micro-hook: how many wrong angles and faded skid marks does it take before coincidence starts to look like a design choice?
I step back to take in the whole curve. The road approaches straight, then bends left under the overpass, the outer lane edged by the rail and the ditch. Trees crowd the far side, dark trunks slick with moisture. Fog gathers in the low spots, thinning where headlights sweep through.
My own memories of that night jump around in fragments: the distant wail of sirens, the salt sting of tears, the blur of red and blue spinning across my windshield as I parked crooked in the gravel. The slip on glass, the sharp crack at the back of my skull. A paramedic’s hand on my shoulder, telling me to sit down.
My mind cut the film here once, censored the frame to keep me upright. Now the location itself feels edited too.
“Do you remember a camera?” I ask suddenly.
“What?” Tessa looks at me.
“That night.” I tilt my chin toward the overpass. “Do you remember any kind of traffic camera up there?”
She squints at the structure. Streaks of water have stained the concrete darker in long vertical lines. At first, all I see are brackets for old signage, a rusted metal plate, and a patch of darker gray where something was repainted. Then a small, boxy shape registers at the top of one pillar, aimed down at the curve.
The housing is clean, uncorroded. Wires snake back into the concrete. A dark glass dome in the center reflects a warped piece of sky.
“That,” I say. “Right there. Was that here?”
Tessa chews her lip. “I don’t remember one in the footage on the news,” she says. “But camera angles can hide stuff.”
“You were on the scene,” I remind her. “You saw more than I did.”
She winces. “I saw a lot of blood and metal. Not exactly scanning for security gear.”
I take a few steps closer until I’m directly beneath the camera. My neck tightens as I crane my head back. Wind brushes cold fingers along my jaw.
The lens—if that dark glass hides a lens—faces the road, not the shoulder where I stand. It probably did the night of the crash too, capturing the curve, the approach, the impact. Maybe the minutes before, when Caleb’s headlights cut through the fog, when another car followed, when something changed.
“That looks new,” I say. “The housing doesn’t match the age of everything else.”
“DOT upgrades stuff all the time,” Tessa says. “Everyone wants more data about traffic patterns. Insurance claims. Toll enforcement. Whatever.”
“Convenient timing,” I murmur.
“You don’t know when they put it up,” she replies. “Could’ve been before. Could’ve been last week.”
My mind races through possibilities: city department, state transportation board, private contractor. Who installed this, who maintains it, who stores the footage, who decides how long to keep it before overwriting?
I imagine a server room miles away, rows of drives humming, each one full of silent crashes and near-misses, every frame framed in glass and pixel, waiting for someone to care enough to press play.
“If it was here that night,” I say, “there’s video.”
“Maybe,” Tessa says. “Maybe it was angled wrong. Maybe the glare was bad in the rain. Maybe it glitched.” She lifts both hands, surrendering to my stare. “I’m not trying to crush your theory. I’m just…reminding you that tech fails.”
“Tech fails,” I echo. “So do guardrails. So do parents. Everyone gets to shrug and say ‘we tried’ and go home.”
Her expression softens. “Mara.”
I take a step back from the camera’s shadow, inhale the cold air until it burns my lungs, and focus on the sensory details Dr. Navarro keeps asking for. The rumble of an approaching truck. The tick of Tessa’s smartwatch. The distant, tinny sound of somebody’s phone ringtone drifting from a car pulled over farther up the road. The slap of tires on wet pavement.
My memory is unreliable; I know that now. It edits, protects, rearranges. But metal does not misremember. Concrete does not embellish. Cameras do not grieve.
“I need to know who owns that thing,” I say.
“You could call the city,” Tessa suggests. “Or Detective Ruiz, if you want him to put a ‘crazy grieving mother’ note in your file.”
I let the jab slide; the fear beneath it is too obvious. “I’ll start with public records,” I say. “Permits. Install dates. Maybe there was a maintenance log.”
“You sound like Liam,” she says quietly.
The name lands between us like a dropped wrench. I ignore the small jolt in my chest and keep my eyes on the dark glass dome.
Micro-hook: if the camera saw my son die, what else did it witness that night—and who already watched it before me?
“You ready to go?” Tessa asks after a moment. “My watch is nagging me to stand. Apparently, I’ve been ‘inactive’ for too long.”
“You and your app.” I tear my gaze away from the lens and nod. “Yeah. For now.”
We walk back toward the car, gravel crunching under our feet. Behind us, the memorial leans against the patched rail, colors dull under the low sky. The camera above the curve keeps its unblinking vigil, recording or not recording, storing or erasing, obeying settings I haven’t seen.
I slide into the driver’s seat and grip the wheel again. Before I start the engine, I glance in the rearview mirror. The curve of Old Willow Road frames the guardrail in the glass, a tiny, distorted stage. At the top edge of the reflection, I catch the faint glint of the camera’s housing.
Glass reflecting glass, lens watching lens.
“If they tried to fix this road and failed,” I say under my breath, “they’re not the only ones allowed to revise.”
The engine turns over. As I pull away, the memorial shrinks in the mirror, but the knowledge does not. Somewhere in a system I haven’t touched yet, the road’s version of that night exists—or used to. Before anyone else edits this scene, I intend to read it.