Hospitals always smell like bleach and microwaved leftovers to me, a weird mix of scrubbed and stale, like someone tried to erase life and only smeared it around.
I push through the automatic doors, into a blast of overconditioned air and fluorescent brightness. My eyes sting from the transition. Outside, Maple Hollow’s fog still hangs just low enough that every car in the parking lot has its headlights on, beams smearing across the glass like white paint; inside, everything is stainless steel and laminated posters about handwashing.
A group of parents waits by the elevators, scrolling their phones, lit by their screens. On one mother’s feed I catch a glimpse of a memorial post—balloons and angel emoji and #foreverfifteen—before the elevator dings and swallows them. Grief, curated in portrait mode.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with the same mechanical chime that rules the whole town. I thumb it open, expecting a text from Tessa about where to meet.
Unknown number: Stairwell by Radiology. Two minutes. Alone. – D
I know exactly one “D” who would summon me like that.
I glance toward the visitor directory, toward the path that would take me to Tessa’s floor, then toward the sign pointing to Radiology →. My chest tightens, half caution, half that thin thread of hope I don’t trust.
Micro-hook: I tell myself I’m going to the stairwell to protect Dana, not because part of me still expects the universe to hand me a missing puzzle piece on copier paper.
The stairwell door squeaks when I push it open. Inside, the air is cooler, concrete-scented, echoing; somewhere above, footsteps ring against metal. Sun filters through a square of wired glass, outlining flecks of dust in hard white lines. The distant hum of the freeway sneaks in through the window, a faint low growl under the hospital’s mechanical whir.
Dana stands on the landing between floors, suit jacket off, blouse sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her hair, usually smooth and perfectly parted, frizzes a little at the temples. She grips the rail with one hand like she expects the building to tilt.
“You came,” she says.
I pull the door closed behind me. It thuds shut, muting the hospital’s beeping chorus. “You texted from an unknown number to a mother whose kid died in a suspicious crash,” I say. “Do you really think I’m capable of ignoring that?”
Her mouth twitches. “Fair point.”
Up close, I see the tremor in the hand still on the rail, the smudge of ink near her thumb. Her other hand is in her bag, fingers worrying at something inside.
“Is Jonah with you?” she asks, lower.
“No. I’m here to see Tessa.” I squint. “Why? Is he supposed to be with me?”
“He’s not supposed to be anywhere near this,” she says, and there’s a flick of something like anger in her eyes. “I have, generously, two minutes before my calendar reminder dings and someone notices I’m not at my desk.”
She pulls her hand out of the bag. It holds a piece of paper, folded and refolded until the fibers fuzz at the edges. The black toner shows through the creases.
“I shouldn’t have this,” she says. “You didn’t get it from me. I was never in this stairwell. You were never here.”
“Is that the script they gave you,” I ask, “or the one you wrote?”
“Both.” She shoves the paper toward me. “You’ll want to read the middle paragraph, and the handwritten note at the bottom.”
The page crackles when I unfold it. Photocopy gray, not original. At the top: SUPPLEMENTAL VEHICULAR DAMAGE ASSESSMENT – UNIT 1. My lungs squeeze around the words.
Caleb’s car, reduced to “Unit 1.”
“Where did this come from?” I ask, eyes skimming even as I speak.
“Our litigation files,” Dana says. “Or, more accurately, from a box off-site that was supposed to stay off my search results.”
I skim down to the body of the report. Technical phrases jump out, jittery in the cheap toner:
“localized deformation to rear bumper assembly…”
“crush pattern not consistent with primary guardrail interaction…”
“potential secondary rear impact prior to or contemporaneous with barrier contact…”
My heart starts hammering so loud the words blur.
“Secondary rear impact,” I read aloud, then look up. “They wrote that.”
Micro-hook: The same day my brain gave me headlights in the mirror, some stranger with a clipboard wrote “secondary rear impact” and buried it where I would never see.
Dana nods once. “A contracted assessor took those photos and wrote that conclusion,” she says. “He’s not one of ours, strictly speaking. Or he wasn’t, then.”
I flip the page, then back again. “This wasn’t in the police file,” I say. “Ruiz never saw this. He would’ve told me.”
“I’d bet money he didn’t,” Dana says. “This was routed to counsel under a separate cover.” Her voice goes flat on the word counsel, like it tastes bad.
I look at the next line, where the assessor’s paragraph ends in midstream and another line intrudes, different font, smaller:
“Rear bumper deformation likely attributable to post-collision handling/towing, per client instruction; does not alter primary single-vehicle causation analysis.”
At the bottom, in darker ink, a scrawl: ‘OK to adopt “tow damage” characterization – EH / ext. 204.
My throat goes cold. “Evelyn,” I whisper. “Of course.”
“The original report didn’t say ‘tow damage,’” Dana says quickly, like she’s afraid I’ll miss that part. “He said ‘secondary impact with unknown object, probably another vehicle.’ That was the draft. Then there was a call. Then this version.”
“You saw the draft?” I ask.
“I saw the metadata,” she says. “And I saw the time stamps around when someone from the guardrail company logged into our shared portal, and when that note appeared.”
I run my finger over the toner line, smudging it slightly. “Rear bumper deformation,” I repeat. “Not consistent with primary guardrail interaction.”
In Navarro’s office, my hands were on the steering wheel. Caleb’s knees were shifting. Headlights flooded the rearview, too high, too bright. My body seized at the moment before impact and refused to cross it.
“You okay?” Dana asks, watching my face.
My laugh comes out thin. “Define ‘okay.’”
“Fair,” she says.
I brace the paper against the cool metal of the stair rail and read more carefully. The assessor describes “crush depth and directionality” on the rear bumper, “evidence of horizontal scuffing at a height inconsistent with guardrail contact profile,” and “localized paint transfer suggesting contact with painted surface, color undetermined.”
“Guardrails don’t have paint,” I say. “Not that kind.”
“They have galvanized coating,” Dana says. “Not a nice, neat color you can match to somebody’s car.”
“So he’s saying something hit the back of Caleb’s car,” I say. “Not the rail. Before or while it hit the rail.”
“He’s saying he found evidence he couldn’t explain with just the guardrail,” she says. “And then Evelyn told him what explanation to use.”
Micro-hook: I spent months questioning my own brain for daring to add another car to the story, while the company crossed out their own evidence of that same ghost and wrote “towing” over the body.
I look at her. “Why are you showing me this?”
Dana licks her lips, eyes flicking to the stairwell door as if expecting Jonah to burst through it with a cease-and-desist in his hand. “Because when I first contacted you, I told myself I was just…balancing scales,” she says. “Getting you enough information to stop you from being steamrolled while still keeping my job.”
“And now?” I ask.
“Now there’s a second crash,” she says. “Another family. Another ‘single-vehicle’ statistic with the same guardrail model, same corporate talking points, same ‘unfortunate but unavoidable’ language in the draft releases.” Her jaw tightens. “I stayed. I kept working the files. That’s on me. But I can’t keep pretending I don’t know what we did to your son’s case.”
The word we scrapes its way through my ribs. I grip the paper harder.
“Did Jonah see this?” I ask.
“He saw the summary,” she says. “He saw the version with ‘tow damage’ baked in. He’s an architect, not a crash engineer. They made sure it read clean for him.”
“So he could look me in the eye and say there was no evidence of another car without technically lying,” I say.
Dana’s gaze drops. “Yes.”
Heat rises up my neck, pooling behind my eyes. I stare at the wired-glass window. Outside, a car pulls into the circular drive, its headlights blurring through the security mesh. The glass turns the beams into a grid of light—truth refracted through the right frame until it looks tidy.
“Tow damage,” I say, tasting the phrase. “That’s very neat. Somebody had to tow the wreck out of the ditch anyway, right? Why not let the hook take the blame?”
“You should know something else,” Dana says. “The assessor pushed back. At least a little. There’s an email from him to an in-house counsel, asking if they wanted him to ‘amend his conclusions based on client’s causation theory.’ His words. Two days later, he got reclassified as a ‘non-testifying consultant’ and his original draft migrated to the shadow folder. This version replaced it.”
“Shadow folder,” I repeat. “That’s what you call it in the office?”
“Unofficially,” she says. “You’d call it something better in one of your books.”
“I don’t have to,” I say. “Reality’s doing pretty well on its own.”
Micro-hook: Every time I thought I was being paranoid about edited footage and missing reports, someone in a conference room was literally dragging files into a folder labeled with a euphemism and deciding which facts would count.
I fold the paper back along its worn creases, then flatten it again, buying my brain a few seconds.
“You’re sure this is legal for you to give me?” I ask.
Dana snorts softly. “Oh, it is absolutely not legal,” she says. “If they trace this copy back to me, I’m fired, disbarred, and very possibly sued into oblivion.”
“That’s not comforting,” I say.
“You wanted comfort, you’d have married an accountant,” she says. “You married Jonah.”
I huff out a short, startled laugh. The sound bounces off the concrete.
“You’re not doing this for me,” I say slowly. “Not only for me.”
“I’m doing it because I don’t want to end up like some of the partners,” she says. “People who look at that phrase—‘per client instruction’—and sleep fine. And because if there was a rear impact on your son’s car, then a whole line of ‘single-vehicle’ cases might not be single anything.”
I picture the anonymous dashcam clips, the scattered news articles, the pattern of guardrail failures. The second crash we just watched get swallowed by the media cycle. The clinical phrasing: driver lost control…weather conditions…possible intoxication.
“If I give this to Ruiz,” I say, lifting the page, “it could help him justify going on record. But if it leaks before he’s ready—”
“It could also tell the company exactly which part of their story you’re coming for,” Dana finishes. “Yes.”
We stand in silence while a gurney rattles past on the floor above, the sound filtered through concrete into something metallic and distant.
“Do you trust your new memory fragment?” she asks quietly. “The one with the headlights.”
The question lands like a pebble in my gut, making ripples. “I trust that my body thinks something was behind us,” I say. “I trust that the timing of this report is either the worst coincidence in the world or…not that.”
“I can’t tell you what’s real,” Dana says. “I can tell you that an outside expert looked at physical metal and wrote ‘secondary impact’ before someone told him what story we needed.”
I fold the paper carefully this time, aligning the edges like a prayer, and slide it into the inner pocket of my jacket. The toner crinkles against the lining, a small, solid weight over my heart.
“What are you going to do with it?” she asks.
“Send a scan to Ruiz from my burner email,” I say. “Drop a hard copy in his hand when he’s ready. Lock the original in a safe. Maybe sleep with it under my pillow.”
“And Jonah?” she asks.
“Jonah gets to find out later that he built their cover story without seeing the load-bearing beams,” I say. “Right now, he’s still part of the structure I’m trying to pry open.”
Micro-hook: The urge to forward this to Liam, to shove it in his face and say see, I’m not crazy, pulses under my skin, but right behind it is the knowledge that he may already know exactly what this page used to say.
Dana nods once, jaw clenched. “I should go,” she says. “Before my Outlook starts tattling.”
“Dana,” I say, stopping her with her name. “Why meet me here? Why not another parking lot, another burner email?”
She glances toward the window, to the faint line of pine trees visible beyond the parking lot, where the slope drops toward the freeway. Headlights slide past in the distance, tiny and constant.
“Because hospitals are where the stories land,” she says. “Where they call it ‘accident’ or ‘incident’ or ‘fatality’ and move the chart into the right bin. Because I needed to hand this to you in a place where you can feel what’s at stake.”
Her knuckles go white on the rail. “And because if they’re watching your house, they probably aren’t wasting a tail on a weekday stairwell outside Radiology.”
She releases the railing and heads up the stairs, heels clicking, then pauses one step above me.
“Try not to get me indicted,” she says over her shoulder.
“No promises,” I answer.
The door above her opens with a squeak, swallows her, and closes. The stairwell hums again with distant HVAC and my own breathing.
I lean back against the cool concrete wall, feeling the photocopy press into my ribs through my jacket. In Navarro’s office, the headlights in the mirror were a terrifying maybe. On this page, “secondary rear impact” is a sentence someone risked their professional credibility to write.
Together, they start to look less like illusion and more like a story someone else tried to erase.
Through the wired glass, a car swings into the drop-off lane below, white beams smearing into a grid across my vision. I remember the dark sedan in the gas station footage, the anonymous dashcam clips, the fact that Liam has always been too sure there was no proof of another car—just theories.
Proof has weight. It creases. It smudges when touched.
I pull out my phone, the cracked glass reflecting my face in fractured shards, and snap a photo of the report. The camera shutter clicks, tiny and clean, capturing the words Evelyn signed off on: OK to adopt “tow damage” characterization.
Ruiz needs this.
So does the man across the cul-de-sac who built a career on seeing patterns in wreckage and still let me doubt my own.
My thumb hovers over Liam’s contact, over the little call icon that could drag him into this stairwell with nothing but a ringtone and a lie about coffee. The paper in my pocket rustles when I breathe.
If another vehicle hit Caleb’s car, then every person who called it “tow damage” helped aim that impact at us.
I lock my phone without dialing, push off the wall, and start down toward Tessa’s floor, carrying the rear-impact report like a shard of glass that can cut in any direction—and not knowing yet whose story I’m going to slice open first.