The DOT website glows accusingly from my laptop screen when the doorbell rings.
I stare at the open tab—three different pages of traffic-camera procurement contracts, all jargon and PDF links—and pretend for a second that I didn’t hear anything. Outside, Maple Hollow hums in its late-afternoon performance of normal: the distant rush of the freeway, a garbage truck groaning somewhere down the hill, the occasional mechanical chime of a neighbor’s phone through an open window.
The bell rings again. Longer this time.
I push back from the dining table, my chair scraping over the hardwood, and rub the bridge of my nose. My eyes ache from squinting at legalese. I left my contacts in too long again; the world has a faint, grainy halo. When I cross the living room, my bare feet pick up crumbs and a bit of grit; I make a mental note to vacuum and immediately discard it.
Through the beveled glass of the front door, I see a tall, blurred shape topped with darker hair. Light blurs around his shoulders, the cul-de-sac breaking into prisms. I know that posture already, the slight hunch like he’s used to fitting himself into smaller spaces.
Liam.
My pulse jumps, stupidly. I lay a hand flat on the cool wood before unlocking the deadbolt.
When I open the door, damp air slips in, carrying the smell of rain and fresh-cut grass. The HOA must have sent its weekly reminder, because at least two neighbors have obediently scalped their lawns. Liam stands on the welcome mat that still says home sweet home in cheery cursive, holding a small cardboard box with my name on the label.
“Hi,” he says, that same almost-awkward voice from the memorial, careful and soft around the edges. “Package for you. They dropped it at my place.”
His hoodie is speckled with mist, darkening the fabric along the shoulders. Behind him, his house across the street watches with its big windows and clean lines, blinds half-lowered like eyelids.
“Thanks,” I say. My fingers brush the corner of the box as I take it.
It’s light. Something from a late-night order I don’t remember making—vitamins, maybe, or a replacement phone case. Grief comes with so many small, automated purchases to plug holes: melatonin, grief workbooks, blackout curtains.
“Sorry to bother you,” he adds. “The address numbers are tiny. I didn’t notice until I scanned the barcode.”
The word scan makes me glance instinctively toward the little black eye of my own doorbell camera, mounted just above his shoulder. A ring of reflected sky sits in its glass. I remember watching his front porch from my office window, my own screens framing his. Glass looking into glass.
“No bother,” I say tightly. “We pay the HOA for decorative, illegible house numbers, after all.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. Not a full smile—more like acknowledgment of a line he might have written himself.
“Can I—” He stops, and his eyebrows pull together. “I’m sorry. I should have just dropped it and gone.”
He doesn’t go. His gaze drifts sideways, past my shoulder.
I know exactly what he sees. The entryway wall to the left, lined with frames. Caleb at three, frosting on his cheek. Caleb at ten with a gap-toothed grin and a soccer ball. Caleb at sixteen, leaning against the hood of the Subaru, half-irritated, half amused by my insistence on photos.
The glass over each image catches light from the front door, layering faint reflections of me over his face.
Instinct kicks in. I angle my body, trying to block the wall without making it obvious. Of course that only draws more attention.
“I was about to get back to work,” I say. “Deadlines.”
“Right,” he says, but his eyes stay on the photos a beat too long. “You’re a writer.”
My jaw tightens. “You googled me.”
His focus returns to me, and for a second I’m pinned by it. Those eyes looked different on my laptop screen last night, grainier in a thumbnail beside an old article byline. Up close, they’re a flat, steady hazel, tiny green flecks near the pupil that catch the foyer light.
“The neighborhood Facebook group mentioned your books,” he says. “I wasn’t creeping. Just basic homework.”
Homework. My skin prickles.
“You do a lot of homework on your neighbors?” I ask.
His shoulders shift, a small, defensive roll. “I move around a lot. It pays to know the landscape.”
Micro-hook: men who study their neighbors and call it homework rarely come with no agenda.
Silence stretches between us, thin and taut. Behind him, fog clings to the dip of the cul-de-sac, softening the lines of parked cars. Headlights smear briefly across a distant window as someone turns the corner at the top of the hill. I can hear, faint but insistent, a phone chiming next door with the alert tone everyone in Maple Hollow pretends not to recognize: the HOA app.
“How’s the head?” he asks suddenly.
The question jars me. “Excuse me?”
“You fell,” he says. “That night. At the crash. They mentioned a concussion in the local write-ups.”
My grip tightens on the package until the cardboard edges bite the heel of my hand. “You read write-ups about my son’s death for fun?”
“No.” His answer is quick, firm. “Not for fun.”
I let out a short, sharp breath through my nose. “Right. Professional interest.”
I don’t know why I say it that way. A test, maybe. He watches me, and something there shifts—acceptance, resignation.
“I used to cover things like that,” he says. “Crashes. Infrastructure failures. Corporate safety claims. Old habits die hard.”
There it is. Confirmed out loud instead of in cached pages and archived PDFs.
“Helios Rail Systems?” I say. “Ring any bells?”
His expression barely changes, but his eyes do. They sharpen, focusing the way a camera lens might when it trains on a smaller subject. “You’ve been busy.”
“Some of us have insomnia,” I say lightly. “What did you cover, exactly? Product launches? Charity donations? Or the part where guardrails turn into spears?”
I’m not sure whether I expect him to play dumb. He doesn’t.
“Helios did a controlled test series about five years ago,” he says. “New terminal design, the HRS-7. The company said it reduced fatalities. The independent data didn’t match their press release. I wrote about it. The story went away.”
He says all of that in a measured tone, nothing dramatic, but the words wedge under my ribs.
“Went away,” I repeat. “What, it packed a bag and left town?”
“It got buried,” he says. “Lawsuits, counter-studies, a PR campaign about misinterpreted data.” He makes air quotes with the hand not holding the package. “Comes with the territory.”
“Our territory,” I say.
His gaze drops briefly, then lifts again. “I looked up the details of the crash on Old Willow Road after the memorial,” he admits. “That guardrail uses a Helios terminal. Model 7. I checked the county records.”
The floor under me registers suddenly, the subtle give of old boards and cold creeping up through the crawl space. I tighten my arms around the package, a bad shield.
“Guardrails don’t just fail like that,” he says quietly. “Not in that pattern. Not without help.”
Micro-hook: the word help can mean a wrench turned too loose, a bolt swapped, a spec changed in a file no one reads.
My heart races, slamming against my sternum like it’s testing for weak points. I hear again Tessa’s voice at the curve: That barrier folded wrong. I see the patched rail, the layered skid marks, the dark eye of the new camera.
“You don’t know what pattern it was,” I say. “You weren’t there.”
“Crash geometry leaves fingerprints,” he replies. “The photos in the report were enough to see the signature. I’ve seen it before.”
My stomach flips. “Where.”
“Georgia. Texas. A case in Pennsylvania that never made it out of local news. Same manufacturer, same terminal model, same line about a drunk teen taking a curve too fast.” His jaw tightens for the first time, a muscle ticking. “Different families. Same legal boilerplate.”
Heat rushes up my neck. I can taste metal again, the kind from roadside air and dental fillings and words too sharp to swallow.
“So you moved in across the street,” I say. “What, you get an alert every time Helios racks up a new body? Now leasing in scenic Maple Hollow, come enjoy the fog and fresh tragedies?”
His shoulders pull back. “That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” My laugh scrapes out of me. “What’s your metric for fair exactly? Because from where I’m standing, you show up at my son’s memorial, ask weirdly specific questions about the guardrail, and now you’re in my doorway giving me your Greatest Hits of Corporate Malfeasance.”
“Do you want me to lie and say I’m just here to borrow sugar?” he asks. His voice stays low, but the words land heavy. “I moved here because I recognized the company and the pattern and I couldn’t ignore it.”
“You couldn’t ignore it,” I repeat. “How noble.”
He flinches; the first crack in his composure. “I know how that sounds.”
“You sound like every reporter I’ve ever written,” I say. “The crusading kind who gets in too deep, ruins people’s lives for a compelling narrative, then acts surprised when the people turn out to be tired and human instead of archetypes.”
“You write thrillers,” he says. “You know stories are the only thing that get people to care about what’s in the technical reports.”
“My kid isn’t a story,” I snap.
His gaze flicks to the photo wall again, then back. “No,” he says. “He’s why the story matters.”
The words hit some raw place in me I didn’t know was still exposed. My throat works around them, trying to reject them and keep them both.
“Do you hear yourself?” I ask. “You’re pitching. Right now. To me. The grieving mother who lives across from your new case study.”
“That’s not what this is,” he says.
“Then what is it?”
The question hangs in the air between us, thick and sour. Somewhere outside, a car door slams, followed by the high laughter of teenagers cutting through backyards toward the reservoir, their voices fading into the fog. Parents will post angel emojis and hashtags later and pretend those kids aren’t drinking where the cops can’t see.
“I know more than I should about Helios,” he says finally. “That part’s true. I also know what happens to people who go up against them without backup.”
“Backup,” I echo. “Is that what you’re auditioning to be?”
“I’m saying,” he answers carefully, “that if you start digging in official channels—public records, complaints, old contracts—you’re going to trip alarms. They’ll notice.”
My laugh feels brittle. “You assume I haven’t already.”
“Have you?” he asks.
Images flash in my mind: DOT forms, Dr. Navarro’s warm-toned office, Tessa’s tight mouth at the curve, the dark curve of the overpass camera. The ten empty minutes between 11:07 and 11:23 on my timeline.
“What happens when they notice?” I ask.
“Best case, nothing.” His fingers worry at the seam of the cardboard box in my arms, catching, releasing. “Worst case, you get discredited. They dig up every medical note about your concussion, every therapy record they can subpoena. You become the unreliable narrator in your own life.”
The phrase lands with a cold, awful logic. I write unreliable narrators. I make them interesting, flawed, entertaining. Turn them into tropes readers can enjoy at a safe distance.
I don’t want to be one.
“You talk like you’ve seen that play out,” I say.
“I have,” he says. “More than once.”
“Because you wrote the stories that made it possible?” I ask.
His eyes harden. “Because I poked at things that people with more money and better lawyers wanted left alone. They don’t need to kill you. They just need to fog the glass until no one trusts what you say.”
Fog the glass. I think of windshields, cameras, the reflection of my own face over Caleb’s in those framed photos.
“Why tell me any of this?” I ask. “You could watch from your windows, write your notes, send your anonymous tips to whichever client’s paying you now. Why walk across the street with a package and a lecture about guardrails?”
“Because you’re already asking questions,” he says. “I saw you at your window last night. You’re not going to let this go.”
Heat burns in my cheeks. I picture myself crouched below the sill after his camera turned, heart pounding like a caught trespasser.
“So I’m a risk to your investigation?” I ask. “A wildcard you need to manage?”
“You’re a person who deserves not to be gaslit by a company that cuts corners,” he says. “You also could blow any chance of proving what they did if you charge in without a plan.”
There it is again: ally and warning, woven into one sentence.
“Convenient that your plan involves you in the center,” I say.
A faint sigh escapes him. “You can shut the door in my face right now and pretend we never had this conversation,” he says. “I’d understand. But you’ll still be awake at 2 a.m. reading things that make your stomach drop, and you won’t know which links are planted garbage and which ones matter.”
Micro-hook: planted garbage is exactly what my brain specializes in—stories that feel true enough to hide in.
I imagine it: going back to my laptop, diving deeper into PDFs, chasing forum posts and obscure local news, building a case out of pixels and paranoia. I also imagine doors slamming behind me—police, lawyers, doctors—once my name gets tagged as unstable on the invisible bulletin boards of people who matter.
“What are you really offering?” I ask. “In plain English.”
“A filter,” he says. “Context. A way to look at what you find without handing them the tools to discredit you.” He hesitates, then adds, “And I want the truth about Helios. That’s my selfish part.”
“Only part?” I ask.
“For now,” he says, and the honesty of that bothers me more than a lie would have.
The weight of the box in my arms feels different now, too light for how heavy the conversation has become. My shoulders ache.
“I don’t trust you,” I say.
“Good,” he answers. “You shouldn’t.”
The words catch me off guard. My fingers tighten reflexively.
“Distrust keeps you careful,” he adds. “Just…aim it at the right targets.”
I let out a long breath I didn’t realize I was holding. The air in the foyer feels humid, carrying the scent of pine cleaner, old coffee from the kitchen, and that faint, stale teenage-boy smell that still clings to Caleb’s sneakers by the door.
“You can go now,” I say finally.
He nods once. “Fair.”
He steps back onto the mat, then hesitates and reaches toward the door. “Let me—”
We both reach for the knob at the same time. My fingers land on cool metal just as his do, and contact sparks along my skin. Not metaphorical sparks—literal static, sharp enough that I flinch.
Beneath the shock, there’s warmth. His hand is rougher than I expected, callused along the palm, the back scattered with faint, pale scars. I jerk my hand away like I’ve grabbed a live wire.
I hate that my breath catches. I hate the way my body registers the touch and files it away in a place reserved for things I used to want.
He feels the jolt too; his mouth twists, an aborted apology or a joke he edits before saying. Glass in the door pane reflects both of us in shaky, overlapping outlines.
“Be careful, Mara,” he says quietly. “With them. With me. With what you remember.”
My heart bangs against my ribs. “That sounds like a threat.”
“That’s a reality check,” he replies. “Threats come with letterhead.”
He opens the door wider, stepping onto the porch. Fog curls around his ankles, softening the edges of his jeans and shoes. Across the street, his house waits, rectangle windows dark against the gray sky, cameras and sensors hidden in their frames.
“If you decide you want context instead of chaos,” he says, “you know where I live.”
“Unfortunately,” I say.
His lips tilt again, barely, then flatten. He walks down my steps, hands sliding into his hoodie pockets, and crosses the cul-de-sac without looking back. Headlights from a neighbor’s SUV wash over him, turning him into a moving silhouette framed in glass before he reaches his own front door.
I stand there with my hand still on the knob, the package pressed against my ribs, and listen to the distant freeway hum.
I tell myself I’m not going to call him, not going to knock on his door, not going to let him rewrite my story.
Somewhere beneath that promise, another thought uncoils, uninvited and unbeaten: if guardrails don’t just fail like that, then neither do people.