I wake up to light in my face and my name in Tessa’s voice, the two sensations colliding before my brain catches up.
“Mara. Hey. Wake up.” Her hand lands on my shoulder, fingertips cold from the kitchen tap. “You need to see this now.”
My eyelids drag open. The room carries that early-morning blur where everything looks slightly wrong: the window is too white, the shadows too sharp. The scent of rain-soaked pine lurks under the stale breath of last night’s coffee. My phone lies next to my pillow, screen black, mercifully silent.
Tessa’s phone, though, glows inches from my face. I squint. The image is a slightly tilted photo of my house, taken from the sidewalk: peeling blue paint, porch swing, the crooked porch rail Caleb used to vault over like it belonged to him.
Below the photo, text.
Guardrail Mom Lives Here
[my full address]
“Public record, sharing for awareness.”
The comments blur for a second while my pupils adjust. I roll onto an elbow, heart punching at my ribs.
“Who posted that?” My voice sounds like sandpaper.
“Account name is ‘SafetyRealist,’” Tessa says. “Brand-new, zero friends, joined yesterday. Location tag says Maple Hollow Community Chat and three other groups. People are sharing it.”
I take the phone fully and pinch the screen to zoom in. The house looks small and exposed, like someone lifted the roof and peeled back the walls. A Google Street View map thumbnail sits under the address, tidy little pin dropped right on my driveway.
My first thought is: at least they spelled my name right.
The second thought hits harder: anyone can match that photo to Evelyn’s statement. To my essay. To me.
I scroll.
“I knew she was in our neighborhood. Have you seen her walking at night?”
“She put that story out there. Public figure now.”
“If she’s so worried about safety she can move.”
One comment makes my stomach turn: “Somebody should go give her something real to worry about.” A laughing emoji, a flame.
I hand the phone back to Tessa before my fingers start shaking it.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. So the spotlight found the address. We knew they’d go after me online.”
Tessa looks at me, eyes searching my face like she’s checking pupils after a head injury. “Your address,” she says. “With a photo. That’s not ‘going after you online.’ That’s inviting people to show up.”
Micro-hook: For a second I picture my house on a listing site, except instead of square footage and school district the bullet points say Unstable mother, dead son, corporate liability.
“Maybe it stays at the comment level,” I say. “Keyboard courage.”
“Yeah,” she answers, voice flat. “Because no one ever follows through on threats they type.”
I swing my legs out of bed. The wood floor bites cold into my heels. My head throbs faintly, caffeine withdrawal and sleep loss tagging in together. I grab my own phone and wake it up. Notifications explode across the screen in a mechanical chime cascade—likes, retweets, tags, mentions.
For one breath, pride slides in. My essay mattered. People read it.
I open my main social app and search my name. The top trending tag is my essay’s headline, shortened into something sharp and digestible. The second is #GuardrailMom, which makes me want to throw up and laugh at the same time.
I tap one of the threads.
The first screenshot that loads isn’t from my essay. It’s from a document I never posted.
A block of text, black font on white, my name in the header, date stamped just after an EMDR session. The words are familiar and wrong all at once.
“Client reports intrusive images of being responsible for crash, describes ‘taking the wheel’ and ‘ruining things again.’ Insight: high rumination, significant guilt, possible dissociative episode during event, memory encoding compromised by trauma and concussion.”
Someone has highlighted “possible dissociative episode” in neon yellow.
The caption: “She literally admits her memories are broken, but sure, let’s rewrite physics together.”
My ears ring. I recognize Dr. Navarro’s phrasing, the clinic letterhead cropped just enough to remove the logo. In the comments, people quote phrases back at each other like lines from a favorite show.
“High rumination, significant guilt” with a clown emoji.
“This reads like my ex, lmao.”
“Plot twist: she DID cause the crash and this is all projection.”
Tessa leans closer, reading over my shoulder. I feel her inhale.
“Is that—Mara, are those your therapy notes?”
“Some of them,” I say. My voice lands too calm in my own ears. “Not the full file. Just the greatest hits.”
I scroll down. More screenshots, from different sessions. My phrases about Caleb and the night of the crash, Navarro’s observations in the margins. The little boxes where she ticked off “sleep disturbance,” “hypervigilance,” “passive suicidal ideation.” My eyes slide over those words and keep moving.
“Who could access this?” Tessa asks. “Navarro? Her staff?”
I shake my head. “She has a duty to protect these. She lectured me about boundaries every time I joked about stealing my file.”
“Then someone hacked the clinic?”
Or subpoenaed the records under the cover of some safety review. Or pulled them through an insurance portal with the right credentials. Or used one of those “mental health disclosures” Evelyn threatened in that conference room while I listened in through a stolen bug.
I scroll faster, thumb jittering. The freeway hum presses through the walls, louder than usual, a box of bees under the floor. Maple Hollow wakes up in the distance—garbage truck brakes, a car door slam, the faint bark of a neighbor’s dog. On the street, the fog lies low, turning headlights into smeared streaks against windows.
One thread catches my eye because it includes a picture of me.
The photo is from Caleb’s backyard memorial. I know that instantly by the string lights and the row of folding chairs, by the outline of the maple tree we planted when he was five. I’m standing near the patio table, wineglass in hand, looking off to the side. Original photo: one glass, half-full, same one I nursed for hours.
In this version, my face has a reddish tinge, like I’m flushed. The glass in my hand is slightly larger, the wine darker. Two more glasses sit on the table near my elbow, cloned in with lazy precision. A blur effect smears the people behind me, leaving me sharp and centered.
Caption: “Mom of the year. Maybe the guardrail wasn’t the only thing drunk that night.”
My thumb smears against the screen; I realize my grip has tightened, skin sweating.
Another edited photo appears in the replies. Same night, different angle: I hug one of Caleb’s friends, the boy’s shoulders shaking. In the manipulated version, my eyes are half-closed, mouth open in a weird freeze-frame. They’ve added a cartoon bottle near my hand.
Tessa curses under her breath. “Jesus. They’re not even good at Photoshop.”
“They don’t need to be good,” I say. “They just need repetition.”
Micro-hook: I used to think the worst thing that could happen to a photo was a cracked frame; now I watch my life get re-captioned in real time by strangers who will never smell pine wet from the crash site.
I click into my notifications tab. DMs from unknown accounts stack on top of each other.
“Stop using your dead kid for clout.”
“My cousin died on that model of guardrail too, thanks for speaking out.”
“Liar liar guardrail on fire.”
“We know where you live now.”
One message includes a screenshot from a different part of my therapy file. I recognize Navarro’s notes about my aunt’s psychotic break, my family history, my fear of following that path. Someone has underlined “family history of psychosis” in red and added: “And we’re supposed to trust HER version of events?”
Tessa squeezes my wrist. “Okay. Phone down.”
I pull away without meaning to. “They got my medical history, Tess. Not just my ranting on a couch. The paperwork. That doesn’t live on my laptop.”
“So they reached into systems you don’t control,” she says. Her ER voice surfaces, the one that cuts through chaos in the waiting room. “Which means this isn’t some basement troll who got bored. This is funded.”
She’s right. I hear Evelyn’s statement in my head: concerned about the potential harm when grief is amplified by online platforms. Concerned enough to weaponize my brain chemistry.
A new notification pops up at the top of the screen: I’ve been tagged in a thread on the Maple Hollow HOA page.
“Maybe the board should reconsider letting a person with ‘dissociative episodes’ be in charge of neighborhood safety complaints. Next she’ll say the hedges attacked her.”
I bark out a laugh that vibrates wrong in my chest. “And here I thought my greatest crime was my lawn length.”
“Mara.” Tessa’s voice rises. “This is not a joke.”
“I know.” My throat tightens around the words.
I flip into settings and start toggling things off. Public comments to followers-only. DMs from non-mutuals disabled. Location services off. I change passwords, hands clumsy, saving long strings I’ll never remember without the manager app Liam bullied me into downloading months ago.
Liam. I force the thought away before it can take a fuller shape. I cut him off. I do not get to want his skills now.
Tessa moves to the window and peels the curtain back an inch. Outside, Maple Hollow looks the same: wet driveways, recycling bins at the curb, fog hugging the slope. A car rolls slowly past our house, headlights streaking the glass. The driver glances toward the porch.
“You don’t know that person, right?” she asks.
“I barely know the people on this block,” I answer. “Half of them only spoke to me on Facebook when they needed medical advice from you. Now they have my diagnosis for free.”
She lets the curtain fall. “We should call Ruiz.”
“He warned me this would happen,” I say. “Congratulations to him.”
“You warned people about the guardrails and they drove on those roads anyway,” she counters. “We do things even when we know the risk. Call him.”
I scroll past another message while I punch in his number. This one reads: “Truth or fiction, lady? Pick a lane before we pick for you.” The profile picture is an American flag and a car grille.
Ruiz picks up on the third ring. “Ellison. I just read your essay.”
“Let me guess,” I say. “You called to critique my structure.”
“I called to say you lit a bonfire and my inbox is smoke,” he answers. Paper rustles on his end, and I hear a distant TV murmur cut off, like he just muted the news. “What’s going on there?”
I push the phone to speaker and set it on the bed. Tessa perches beside me, knees bouncing.
“They posted my address,” I say. “Photo of the house. Comments suggesting someone should ‘give me something to worry about.’ And—” I swallow. “And they leaked parts of my therapy file. Screenshots. EMDR notes. Family history.”
Silence hums for a second. The faint scratch of his pen filters through.
“Okay,” Ruiz says finally. “First, I’m sorry. That’s a violation on top of everything else. Second, I need you to send me screenshots. All of it. Doxxing, threats, the medical stuff.”
“Do you think it’s the company?” I ask. “Or their lawyers? Or Jonah’s firm?” The last name tastes metallic.
“I can’t speculate on the record,” he says. “Off the record, your timing with that essay, plus the language in their statement, plus the kind of data they pulled? I don’t see a bored neighbor doing that.”
Tessa leans toward the phone. “Could they get her therapy notes legally?”
“There are ways,” he says. “Insurance, subpoenas, internal ‘risk assessments.’ Sometimes lines blur. Whether any method they used holds up when I start asking questions is another story.”
“So you’re going to ask,” I say.
“I already flagged this to our cyber unit,” he answers. “Informally. They owe me from a favor last year. I’ll also file an official report about the doxxing and threats. In the meantime, lock down everything you can.”
“Doing that,” I say. “The essay stays up.”
There’s a pause. “I wasn’t going to tell you to pull it,” he says. “But you need to know, visibility cuts both ways. Public sympathy can make it harder for them to disappear you in the paperwork. It also makes you a bright, convenient distraction when they need a target.”
Micro-hook: I picture myself stapled to a bulletin board in some crisis PR office, red string running from my photo to budget lines and news headlines.
“What about physical danger?” Tessa asks. “People have her address. There are comments talking about fire and ‘teaching her a lesson.’ Can you put a car on the street?”
Ruiz exhales. “We’re short-staffed, you know that. I can ask for extra patrols through your block. No guarantees. If anything escalates—any suspicious car hanging around, any vandalism, anything—you call 911 first, then me. Do not talk yourself out of it because you’re worried about wasting time.”
“That a dig at me or your entire female caseload?” I ask.
“Both,” he says. “Mara, listen to me. They’re trying to make you doubt your perception again. ‘Unreliable narrator’ plays well in court and online. You ground yourself with evidence, not comments. Screenshots, logs, real-world witnesses.”
“They’re using my own therapy words against me,” I say. “My doubts, my fragmented images. They’re taking all the ways I already question myself and pinning them to my forehead.”
“Then we document how they got that file,” he replies. “And we show a pattern. You’re good with patterns.”
Tessa mouths, Do we tell him about Liam? I shake my head once. I am not ready to add that thread back into this tangle.
“One more thing,” Ruiz says. “You may want to consider staying somewhere else for a few days. At least until this initial wave dies down.”
I look toward the doorway, toward the hall that leads to Caleb’s room, to the dining table where my essay still glows on the laptop screen. “I already had one home invaded,” I say. “I’m not letting them push me out of this one through a comment section.”
“Stubborn,” he says. There’s grudging respect in the word. “Then tighten the perimeter. Curtains closed at night. Lights on a schedule. Don’t open the door to anyone you’re not expecting. And tell your sister to keep her car in the driveway so it looks like someone’s around.”
“My sister is right here,” Tessa snaps. “And my bat is in the hall closet.”
Ruiz laughs once, humorless. “Good. Use the bat on windows if you need to get out fast.”
The line clicks quiet after we hang up. The house absorbs the silence for a beat, then fills it with small sounds: the fridge cycling on, the heater ticking, a neighbor’s mower coughing awake outside despite the wet lawn and HOA rules about optimal trimming schedules.
I stand and cross to the window. The glass is cool against the back of my hand. Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s blinds hang closed, his house a dark rectangle. No monitors flicker there, no evidence he’s watching the same storm he helped forecast.
On my phone, another notification blooms.
This one is a DM from a new account, egg avatar, no posts.
“Fire fixes faulty guardrails and broken memories. Might do your story a favor.”
Tessa reads it over my shoulder and goes pale.
“Send that to Ruiz,” she says. “Right now.”
I forward the screenshot, fingers moving faster than my breath. The freeway hum swells outside, blending with the patter of rain picking up on the porch roof. Headlights streak across the fog again, warping in the windowpane, turning my reflection into something distorted and unfamiliar.
I wanted my words to pry their story open. Now their story has reached through screens and glass into my house, rewriting me pixel by pixel.
I stand there, phone in hand, and I have no idea whether the next edit will hit my reputation, my medical file, or the wood of my front door.