I keep my hands on the keyboard until my fingers stop being mine and turn into tools.
The house has settled into that late-night state where every creak sounds exaggerated, stagey. In the dining room, the only light comes from my laptop and the brass lamp with the crooked shade. The screen glows in the dark window beside me, turning the glass into a mirror. My face floats above the reflection of Maple Hollow, where fog lies low over the cul-de-sac and headlights smear across neighboring windows like wet paint.
The document at the top of the screen is no longer my novel. I saved that and closed it three hours ago, before I could gut it in a fury. The file open now has a different title: “The Guardrail Between My Son and the Truth.”
Not subtle. Good.
I touch my thumb to the spacebar just to feel the small give of it, then start typing.
I don’t write like a novelist. I write like a witness who ran out of time to organize her story.
I start with the night of the crash, not in scene, not dressed up, just facts and sensation: the way the phone rang with that polite, reasonable chime I set for unknown numbers, the flavor of old coffee in my mouth, the sound of my own voice when the officer said Caleb’s name. I write about reaching Old Willow Road, the smell of wet asphalt and pine and coolant, the way the guardrail curled around the car like a metal parent that had failed at its only job.
I leave out the part where a man I now refuse to name touched that metal before I did.
I write about memory. How mine split open in therapy. How images arrived late, out of order. I talk about the missing ten minutes not as a glitch in my brain but as a crime scene someone carefully edited. I pull phrases from Navarro’s handouts—“traumatic encoding,” “intrusion,” “protective narrative”—and turn them inside out.
“We talk about closure,” I type, “like grief is a door I can choose to shut. But my door has a corporation on the other side jamming it open with nondisclosure agreements and marketing copy.”
I pause, read that sentence twice, then leave it.
I keep corporate names out of it. No company logos, no legal citations. I write “a guardrail manufacturer,” “a state contract worth more than my son’s life,” “a pattern of ‘single-car accidents’ that look less lonely when you see the data.” I hint at documents, at a suppressed supplemental report that rebrands rear impact as tow damage for convenience.
Every time my fingers stray toward a specific name, I hit delete. I can honor Dana’s risk without handing her to them on a platter.
The clock above the doorway clicks past midnight, then one. The distant freeway hum presses through the walls, that low roar of other people leaving, arriving, moving on. My phone lies face down next to the keyboard, occasional vibrations skittering it across the table when another memorial tag pings or the neighborhood group complains about lawn length.
Micro-hook: Every vibration threatens to pull me back into private performance, but tonight I am writing for strangers who don’t know Caleb’s favorite playlist or my worst parenting decision—and that terrifies me more than losing them.
At some point, Tessa pads downstairs for water. I hear the cabinet open, the soft clink of glass, the rush of the tap. I don’t turn. I keep typing.
“Drink,” she says from the doorway.
I reach blindly for my mug. Cold coffee hits my tongue, bitter and thick. I swallow anyway.
“You’re not sleeping,” she adds.
“I’m working,” I answer, eyes on the screen.
Her hand lands briefly on my shoulder, warm, heavy. Then she goes back upstairs, the old wood complaining under her steps. I add a line about the way people touch you more after your child dies, like you’ve become a fragile object that needs steadying.
When my fingers cramp, I flex them until the joints crack. I describe Maple Hollow: the HOA emails about lawn height, the next-door fights heard through thin walls, the way parents curate #Angelversary posts while their surviving kids gather at the reservoir to drink in the dark. I describe the glass lenses everywhere—dashcams, Ring cameras, therapy office windows—promising objective truth and delivering framed, edited versions instead.
I keep myself out of the language tricks I know so well. No twisty foreshadowing, no artful withholding. When I don’t know, I say I don’t know. When I suspect, I label it suspicion. I refuse to let this become another story where I’m sneakily guiding the reader to a gotcha.
Instead, I drop them straight into the paradox that has taken up residence between my ears: I cannot live without a narrative, but my narrative keeps changing shape like something alive.
“My memories of that night are not reliable,” I write. “Neither are theirs. The difference is that my unreliability doesn’t come with a profit margin.”
Dawn starts to leak into the sky while I am still carving sentences. The fog outside the front window shifts from thick gray to a paler, bruised color. Birdsong cuts through the freeway roar. My eyes burn, grains of grit under my lids.
I reach the end of the essay and stare at the blinking cursor. I add a final paragraph, shorter than it wants to be.
“I don’t have the whole story. I may never have it. But I know this: the version where my son died because he made a bad choice alone is too tidy for the evidence—and too convenient for the people who keep cashing checks.”
My hands hover. I want to end with a question, the way I do in fiction, but this isn’t fiction. So I give myself one last sentence.
“If you drive the roads in our state and trust the rails to catch you, you deserve to read the pages they keep redacting.”
I hit save. Then I open my email and attach the document.
Subject: New piece. Not fiction.
I send it to Kara, my longtime editor, the one who has been patiently waiting for chapters of a book I no longer recognize. My chest tightens while the little sending bar crawls across the screen, then disappears.
Micro-hook: For the first time since I started working with Kara, I’m more afraid she’ll say yes than no.
I don’t make it to the couch. I doze in the hard dining chair, cheek pressed to my folded arm, laptop fan whirring next to my ear. When the sound of an incoming call breaks through, my neck protests as I jerk upright.
Kara’s name fills the screen.
I answer on the second ring. “Tell me you’re calling to reject it.”
“Good morning to you too,” she says. Her voice has that Manhattan briskness even over a glitchy connection. “You wrote a grenade, Mara.”
“Is that a professional term?”
“It’s a compliment,” she says. “I barely touched it. We can’t run it in the form you sent, though.”
Panic kicks hard in my ribs. “Legal?”
“Partly,” she says. I hear keyboard clacks on her end, the muffled city sounds behind her—horns, footsteps, a distant espresso machine. “Mostly it’s about protecting you long enough to make noise. I took out the bits where you mention specific contract numbers, and I softened ‘cover-up’ to ‘pattern of decisions that prioritize liability optics over safety.’”
“That sounds like something Evelyn Hart’s PR team would write.”
“They wish,” she says. “Your voice still cuts through. Listen.”
I hear her scroll.
“I left this paragraph intact,” she says, then reads: “‘When a company spends more to shape its image as a guardian of families than to fix the rails that tore my son’s car in half, we all become extras in their marketing campaign.’”
Hearing my own words in someone else’s mouth sends a shiver up my back. “You’re sure we can publish that?”
“I ran it past legal just now,” she says. “They raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. No names, no direct claims of criminal behavior. It’s sharp, not defamatory.”
“What about Ruiz?” I ask. “The investigation is technically open again. Quietly. I don’t want to blow that up for him.”
“You don’t mention him anywhere,” she says. “You talk about documents, but you don’t specify the source. You talk about tests, but you say ‘independent facility,’ not ‘ex-corporate mole.’ It’s pointed without being a map.”
“You’re very proud of that balancing act.”
“I am,” she says. “Look, we’ve been selling invented pain together for ten years. This is the first time you sent me the real thing. I’m not going to varnish it beyond recognition.”
I swallow. My throat tastes like stale coffee and overnight breath.
“You really think anyone will care?” I ask. “People barely read the local obituaries. They scroll past our kids’ memorial posts between dog videos.”
“The algorithm loves a grieving mother with receipts,” Kara says bluntly. “Especially one who writes like this. I’m placing it with Vantage, front page for twenty-four hours. They want a line from you for the contributor bio. Something about your previous work.”
“Just say I write fiction about families who mistake lies for love,” I say.
She hums approval. “We’ll schedule it for later today. I’ll send you the proof in an hour. You can still back out.”
“I already hit send,” I say. “Backing out would require time travel.”
“Then brace yourself,” she says. “And for the love of your nervous system, do not read the comments.”
“You know I will.”
“I know,” she says, sighing. “That’s why I said it out loud. Consider this my attempt at counter-programming.”
We hang up. I stare at the window. Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s house sits with its blinds half-down. Our reflections sit layered in the glass: my face, his dark facade, Maple Hollow’s fog-thick air. For once, his windows look blank, no monitors flickering behind them.
By late afternoon, the proof hits my inbox. The essay lives in polished HTML now, my words set in a clean black font on white, framed by the Vantage logo at the top. I skim the edits—small, surgical cuts, a few added disclaimers about “ongoing investigations” and “no comment from the manufacturer.”
At the bottom, my bio: Mara Ellison is a novelist and mother living in the Pacific Northwest. She writes about families, memory, and the stories we tell to survive.
My finger hovers over the approval button. Tessa texts me from the hospital: How’s your ‘setting everything on fire’ plan going?
I reply: About to strike the match.
Then I click Approve.
Forty minutes later, my phone buzzes with a push alert from Vantage: “New: A grieving mother on guardrails, grief, and the price of safety.” The headline uses my phrase “price of safety.” I can feel Kara’s hand in that.
I tell myself I’ll just look at the share count. I won’t click the comment icon.
That lasts ten minutes.
The first comments are from other parents. A woman with a candle emoji in her username writes, “Lost my son to a ‘single-car’ crash too. Thank you for saying what I can’t.” Another: “My husband works in DOT. There’s more truth here than you know.”
My chest loosens, then tightens again when the next wave arrives.
“So we’re blaming guardrails now instead of drunk teens?”
“She literally admits her memories are unreliable but wants us to take her word over the experts? Okay.”
“Isn’t this the same lady writing that ‘fiction’ everyone is talking about on the true crime forums? Free publicity, nice.”
The words sit on my screen like little shards of glass. I poke them anyway, scrolling down, hunger and nausea tangled.
Micro-hook: Every cruel line confirms exactly what Evelyn’s smear campaign will use—and every supportive one dares me not to run.
Notifications multiply. Someone posts the link in the Maple Hollow Facebook group. Within minutes, my phone rattles with local commentary.
“OMG, is this about OUR guardrail?”
“This is why our HOA fees are so high, we’re paying for people’s lawsuits.”
“I live on the same street, she walks around at night muttering to herself, I’m worried.”
I slam the app closed.
I pace from the dining room to the kitchen and back, socks sliding on the wood. The house smells like leftover takeout and detergent. Outside, the fog returns, pressed low, headlights slicing through in smudged lines. A delivery van slows in front of my house, phone camera up, the driver sneaking a shot of the Craftsman before rolling on.
My phone rings again. Kara.
“You’re trending,” she says without preamble. “Top three on Vantage, and a couple of smaller outlets already aggregated you. They’re calling you ‘the guardrail mom.’”
“Fantastic,” I say. “I always wanted a superhero name.”
“There are reporters asking for follow-up,” she continues. “And a podcast. And, um, the manufacturer just sent Vantage a statement.”
I stop pacing. “Already?”
“They move fast when their stock price is a little twitchy,” she says. “I’m emailing you a copy, but you’ll see it everywhere soon. They’re also circulating a more detailed version to some friendly outlets.”
The email lands before we hang up. I open it and read Evelyn Hart’s words framed in company letterhead, my own name tucked in the middle like a target.
We are aware of the recent personal essay by novelist Mara Ellison that contains speculative descriptions of our products and processes. While we sympathize deeply with Ms. Ellison’s loss, we categorically reject any implication that our guardrail systems are unsafe or that our company has engaged in misconduct. Independent investigations and certified crash tests have consistently validated the safety and reliability of our installations.
My jaw tightens. I scroll.
We are concerned about the potential harm caused when grief is amplified by online platforms without regard for facts. We encourage the public to seek information from qualified experts, not from individuals processing personal trauma through storytelling.
Storytelling. There it is.
I picture Evelyn dictating this to some communications team, each phrase weighed for maximum poison with minimum liability. Grief weaponized against me, turned into a flaw instead of a wound.
I read the statement again and feel something inside me tilt. Kara talks in my ear about right of reply and long-form follow-ups and why this response is proof the essay rattled them.
“They just painted a target on you,” she says, her voice tight. “But they also admitted they’re watching.”
I end the call and walk to the front window. Across the street, Liam’s blinds stay down. The glass reflects my face and, behind it, my laptop glowing on the table, the essay still open in another tab. Farther off, beyond Maple Hollow’s slope, the sky over the freeway throbs with headlights, tiny moving points of risk trusting metal and bolts not to fail.
My phone vibrates again with another alert, another comment, another ripple spreading out from my choice to speak. I rest my forehead against the cool glass, the chill sinking into my skin.
I wanted attention on the rails, on the pattern, on the edited reports. I have it now.
I have no idea whether that spotlight will keep the next crash from happening—or just make it easier for whoever comes next to aim at my door.