Morning in the bunker tastes like burnt toast and old coffee.
I stand at the kitchen sink, mug between my palms, watching fog crawl down Maple Hollow’s slope. Headlights smear across my window in pale ribbons, the glass turning each passing SUV into a streak of brightness and then nothing. My phone lies faceup on the counter, black for once, blessedly silent.
Tessa leans against the fridge in her scrub pants and an oversized hoodie, hair twisted into a knot. She scrolls through her phone with the grim focus she usually reserves for charting. The mechanical chime of a new notification punctures the quiet.
Her whole body flinches.
“Code three inbound,” she reads aloud, more to herself than to me. “Single-car MVC. High speed into guardrail. Twenty-six-year-old female, GCS six on scene.”
The words land heavy in the room. The familiar shorthand—mechanism, age, numbers—spreads a cold film over my skin. I picture Caleb’s chart, somewhere in some archive, reduced to abbreviations.
“They’re short-staffed again?” I ask.
“Yeah.” She keeps reading, lips moving silently. “Requesting extra coverage in the trauma bay.”
Her thumb hovers, then taps out a reply with quick, angry jabs. I hear the tiny plastic clicks of her nails on the screen.
“You’re off today,” I say. “You can say no.”
“I am saying no.” She drops the phone onto the counter. It skids, bumps my mug. Coffee sloshes, staining the rim. “I’m not putting you back in this house alone for a twelve-hour shift when some creep treats your dining room like a vision board.”
She tries to couch it in sarcasm, but her shoulders stay high and tight, breath shallow. The fog outside presses against the window like cotton, turning the cul-de-sac into a muted diorama.
Her phone buzzes again. She snatches it up.
“They’re routing her to my hospital,” she says. “She’s one of ours. Nurse.”
My chest squeezes. “Name?”
“They don’t say in texts.” Her eyes flick over the screen, then back up. “But if they’re pinging off-duty staff, she’s important.”
Micro-hook: The universe keeps sending me the same storyline with different cast lists, and I have no idea how many pages are left.
We wait without talking. Toast cools on the plate between us. From outside, the distant freeway hum threads through the walls, a low, constant reminder that cars are still moving, people still commuting, the world still hurtling forward no matter who crashes off-stage.
A few minutes later, her phone chimes again. The tone is the same, but the air in the room tightens before she even looks.
Her hand goes to her mouth. “Shit.”
“What?” My voice comes out thin.
She turns the screen toward me. The text is terse, clinical.
Patient coded in bay. Time of death 08:12.
Then another: Deceased is staff RN. Debrief to follow.
Tessa slides down the fridge until she’s crouched on the tile, shoulders braced hard against the metal, phone dangling from her fingers. I crouch too, my knees protesting, and rest a hand on her forearm. Her skin is cold.
“You don’t even know who yet,” I say.
“I know enough.” Her throat works around the words. “She went out for a drive last night and didn’t come back. That’s enough.”
The echo is sharp and merciless. Different age, different car, same shorthand: went out, didn’t come back. Somewhere, a mother is about to get a call that will rip her life in two.
My phone on the counter lights up, the mechanical chime slicing through the moment. Both of us freeze.
I stand and pick it up. A news alert fills the screen: SINGLE-VEHICLE FATALITY ON HWY 217 RAMP. WEATHER BLAMED. Below the headline sits a thumbnail photo.
It’s a wide shot, taken through a long lens: emergency lights, a smear of white fog, and in the center of the frame, a guardrail torn open like a can. The metal has folded into the car’s passenger compartment in a shape I know too well.
I click the alert. The larger image loads, pixels sharpening. For one second, my brain insists I’m looking at Caleb’s crash, recycled for a lazy news segment. Same brutal twist in the rail, same upward curl of metal, same spray of glass glittering on wet asphalt.
Different car. Different curve. Same design.
“Let me see,” Tessa says, standing again, wiping her face with the heel of her hand.
I hold the phone between us. Our reflections hover faintly on the glass screen, layered over the wreck.
“That’s the same model,” she says. No question, just a dull statement. “Same guardrail as Old Willow.”
The caption mentions the exit: a ramp off the freeway, twenty minutes from here. It notes in neutral language that the “vehicle impacted a safety barrier” and that the crash “remains under investigation, but wet conditions are believed to be a factor.”
“They’re already blaming the rain,” I say.
“Of course they are.” Tessa’s jaw works. “Drivers are always the problem. Rails are just victims.”
I scroll. At the bottom of the article, a spokesman for the guardrail manufacturer has already issued condolences and a promise to “work closely with authorities to ensure all safety standards were met.” The statement could swap names and dates and run on repeat.
“That’s her,” Tessa whispers. “Has to be. Single car into a rail this morning? That’s my nurse.”
My brain tries to slide off the thought, to preserve the story where this fight is still about my son and my guilt and my neighbor who may or may not be a saboteur. Extending the narrative outward feels too big, too dangerous.
“We need to go,” I say.
Tessa blinks. “Where? The hospital will be a grief circus. HR, chaplain, administrators pretending they’re not calculating risk.”
“The ramp.” I tap the photo. “They’ll have it taped off, but they can’t hide the rail yet. Not from the road. We can see how it failed.”
“Mara—”
“You think Ruiz isn’t going to hear about this?” I ask. “You think the company isn’t already coordinating their story? We need to see the scene before the narrative sets.”
Micro-hook: If I let them frame this crash the same way, I’m letting them write Caleb’s ending twice.
Fifteen minutes later, we’re in Tessa’s Civic, heading toward the freeway. Maple Hollow drops away behind us, the cute Craftsman porches and manicured lawns vanishing in the rearview mirror. Fog hugs the low points along the road, making every streetlight haloed, every windshield a smeared lens.
The interior of the car smells faintly of hospital and fast food—scrubs, coffee, fries. Wipers thump a slow rhythm against light drizzle. The guardrail company’s name pulses in my mind with every mile marker.
“We shouldn’t do this,” Tessa says, fingers tight on the wheel. “We are literally driving to someone else’s worst day like it’s a field trip.”
“We’re driving to evidence,” I say. “We’re not filming it for clicks. We’re trying to stop a third headline.”
She breathes out hard, a shaky exhale. “Her name is probably in my phone right now. I might have laughed with her in the break room last week. And you want me to stand ten feet from where she died and play detective.”
“I want you to stand ten feet from where she died and remember that this isn’t abstract,” I say. “Because that’s the only way I know to keep going when this feels enormous.”
She doesn’t answer. The freeway sign for the ramp appears ahead, green letters shining damply in the gray. Even from the main lanes, I can see flashing lights bleeding through fog—red, blue, white—bonding into a restless pulse.
We exit with the slow trickle of other curious drivers. A patrol car blocks the direct access to the ramp, so we park a little past the closure, on the shoulder of a frontage road that overlooks the curve. Pine trees line the slope, their needles dripping, the air thick with the smell of sap and exhaust.
From up here, the scene looks like a twisted diorama behind glass. Police tape flutters in the damp air. The car is a compressed shape at the curve, front end wrapped around the intrusion of metal. The guardrail has punched through the engine compartment and into the cabin, holding the vehicle on its spear.
The crunch of my boots on gravel sounds too loud. Tessa locks the car with a chirp and falls into step beside me.
“Stay behind the barrier,” a voice calls. A uniformed officer stands near a sawhorse, hand lifted. “Road’s closed.”
“We’re staying up here,” I say. “Just looking.”
He gives us one long, tired glance, reads something in our faces, and turns back to his colleagues. The air is wet enough that droplets collect on my eyelashes.
Closer now, I see them: two men and one woman in branded windbreakers, clipboards in hand, standing in a tight knot with Detective Ruiz. The jackets carry the logo I’ve been staring at for months in articles and NDAs. One of the reps holds a tablet out, scrolling with decisive flicks of his finger.
Ruiz stands with his hands in his coat pockets, shoulders hunched against the mist, his expression shuttered. His gaze slides up toward our vantage point for a brief second. Recognition clicks; his mouth tightens.
“Is that…?” Tessa starts.
“Ruiz,” I confirm. “I told you he’d hear before lunch.”
One of the company reps gestures toward the damaged rail, then toward the wet pavement. Their lips move in calm, practiced patterns. Weather, speed, human error. Ruiz listens, head angled, eyes betraying nothing.
“They got here fast,” I say.
“They always do,” Tessa mutters. “They probably have a van gassed up twenty-four-seven, ready to roll the second a notification hits whatever system they’ve got.”
Micro-hook: If they can arrive this quickly to control the story, what else can they control before anyone knows to look?
Light catches on something below us. I narrow my eyes. Shards of windshield glass litter the ditch, each piece reflecting a slice of clouded sky. The broken guardrail end shows the same ragged tear pattern I photographed at Old Willow Road: metal bent backward at a lethal angle, not away from the car but into it.
My stomach rolls. “Look at the fold,” I say. “Same failure. Same angle. The rail didn’t do what it was designed to do—it did what it did to Caleb.”
Tessa grips the barrier so hard her knuckles blanch. “For the record,” she says, voice low, “if I find out she worked the night shift, finished charting, drove home on autopilot, and hit this thing thinking it would save her, I might actually break something.”
Down below, Ruiz moves away from the reps and speaks to a uniformed officer. Then he steps up the embankment toward us, his shoes slipping a little on the wet grass.
My heart kicks hard. I straighten, suddenly aware of my damp hair, my borrowed hoodie, the way my fingers shake around my phone.
“Ms. Ellison,” he says when he reaches us. His breath comes out in visible puffs. “I had a feeling.”
“That you’d run into me or into them first?” I nod toward the company trio.
The faintest flicker crosses his face. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Neither should they,” I say.
He follows my glance. “They’re here in an official capacity.”
“So am I,” I say. “Unofficially.”
Tessa snorts softly. “She made me come. You can yell at her, not me.”
Ruiz’s gaze lands on Tessa’s scrubs peeking under her coat. “You work with the victim?”
Tessa swallows. “I don’t know who yet. But she’s one of ours.”
Ruiz nods once, something respectful in the gesture. “I’m sorry.”
He turns back to me. “You reading this as a match.”
Not even a question. “Same rail model,” I say. “Same style of failure. Same quick corporate condolences. Tell me this is a coincidence with a straight face.”
His jaw tightens. “Right now, officially, I’m collecting information on an isolated incident in bad weather. Unofficially…” His eyes tick toward the reps again. “Unofficially, I’d prefer you not discuss this scene with anyone until I can review the data.”
“Including Liam?” I ask.
The corner of his mouth lifts without humor. “Especially him.”
A gust of wind sends a spray of water off the pine branches above us. Droplets hit my cheeks and glasses, dotting my view of the wreck with small distortions. The whole scene doubles and blurs through the lenses before I wipe them clear.
“They’re not reacting like people shocked by a tragedy,” I say quietly. “They’re reacting like people managing a project plan.”
“You’re not wrong,” Ruiz says. “I have to work with the evidence I can get my hands on, not just their behavior.”
“Evidence like repeating patterns of guardrail failure,” I say. “Evidence like the NDA Jonah signed, like the missing footage chain-of-custody you ‘mentioned’ to me.”
This time, he doesn’t hide his reaction. “Careful,” he warns. “You know more than you’re supposed to for someone watching from behind the tape.”
“You know more than you’re supposed to for someone calling this an isolated incident,” I say back.
Tessa shifts between us, voice raw. “While you two have a cryptic-off, can I remind you someone I might know is lying in that car? And that if this is the same problem that killed my nephew, we are at two bodies minimum?”
Ruiz’s shoulders drop a fraction. “I hear you,” he says. “I do.”
He takes a step closer to the barrier, lowering his voice. “Go home. Write down everything you notice. Don’t post, don’t email, don’t send any more pages to anyone you don’t trust with your life. Let me see what I can do from my side.”
“What you can do,” I say, “or what you’re allowed to admit you’re doing?”
His gaze cuts to mine. For a second, the official casing drops, and I see a man who looks tired and furious and afraid of the wrong people.
“Both,” he says. “For now.”
Micro-hook: When a detective tells a thriller writer to stay quiet while bodies stack up, every part of me that knows story structure starts screaming about the midpoint.
We watch as they begin the slow work of freeing the car from the metal that impaled it. Every crunch and groan of tools on steel vibrates in my teeth. I imagine the nurse’s last minutes, the sound of the impact, the sick fold of the rail. I imagine the company’s notification systems lighting up red, their reps pulling on those branded jackets with practiced hands.
“This isn’t about what happened to Caleb anymore,” I say, throat tight. “This is happening, present tense. They’re not covering up a mistake they made once. They’re managing an ongoing risk and counting on people like me to accept bad weather and bad luck as an ending.”
Tessa slips her arm through mine and squeezes hard. “So what’s our move?”
I lift my phone and snap one photo of the scene from up here, framing the twisted rail, the car, the cluster of reps with their tablets, Ruiz’s profile. The image appears on my screen, a frozen window of this moment. My reflection ghosts over it, pale and determined.
“Our move,” I say, “is to stop writing this as a closed case in my head and start treating it like what it is.”
“Which is?” she presses.
I watch another shard of windshield catch the light and know I won’t sleep until I turn this into something Ruiz can’t file away. “An active crime with a pattern,” I say. “And I’m done pretending my story is the only one that matters.”
The rain picks up, fine and relentless, turning the whole scene into a blurred painting behind a wet pane of glass. I tuck my phone into my pocket, the photo warm between my fingertips, and already begin composing the version I’ll put in front of Ruiz next—one he won’t be able to ignore without admitting how many more names he’s willing to add to that pattern.