I start with the sentence I’ve been dodging for weeks.
My fingers hover over the keys while Maple Hollow sits under a lid of low fog outside my window, the cul-de-sac blurred into a watercolor of lawns and SUVs. The house smells like burnt toast—my fault—and coffee—Tessa’s mercy. The laptop fan whispers against my wrists.
On the screen, the document that ate my life waits with its polite, blinking cursor. The title at the top is still a working one, a file name that looks like something a lawyer would produce, not a novel. Beneath it, the last chapter is half a page of fragments and bracketed notes: [decide here], [too much?], [be honest].
I inhale, feel the air scratch my throat, and type:
Memory isn’t a courtroom transcript; it’s a neighborhood chat thread where every neighbor edits the story to protect their lawn.
I let the sentence sit for a second. The metaphor runs a little on-the-nose, but I’m past subtlety. I keep going.
I write about the night of the crash without naming the road, about headlights that turned the windshield into blind white, about how my brain stitched gaps with whatever story felt survivable. I write that the villain kept changing costumes because I needed someone to carry the weight I couldn’t bear to assign to my son, to myself, to the dull machinery of negligence.
While I type, my phone buzzes every few minutes on the table—news alerts, group texts, a Maple Hollow Facebook notification pinging through the quiet. The mechanical chime feels almost like a metronome, dividing the morning into units of distraction. I flip the phone face down so the glass shows only the ceiling light, fractured into thin white lines.
On the page, my narrator grapples with the same question that has kept me pacing for months: how do you tell a story where everyone is a little guilty and a little wounded and nobody gets the clean death-or-jail ending readers crave?
I let her say it directly:
If I give you a monster, you’ll sleep better. If I give you a hallway of cracked mirrors, you might stay awake with me.
My shoulders tighten while I re-read that line. Old Mara—the one who wrote twisty paperbacks on autopilot—would cut it for being too earnest, then replace it with a reveal, a dead body, a secret affair. New Mara leaves it, then adds a quieter line after it, an admission that my narrator once loved making monsters for a living.
The smell of pine and damp earth drifts in through the cracked window above the sink; someone’s sprinklers kicked on even though the sky has been dripping on us all morning. Maple Hollow will give a citation for dandelions but not for certain husbands yelling too loudly past midnight. Everyone here curates what counts as a violation.
I scroll back to the beginning of the chapter, skim for false comfort, for tidy arcs sneaking in. The last paragraph lands on the screen like a verdict: my narrator standing on an unnamed porch, hugging her arms around herself, promising to forgive everyone except the woman in her own skin.
I wince. Too neat. Too dramatic in a way that lets her off the hook.
Highlight. Delete. The text folds in on itself, gone in a blink.
The revenge chapter waits three sections up, like a loaded trap I wrote for myself in the early days. I scroll to it slowly, the way I used to walk down to Old Willow Road: not wanting to see the wreckage again, unable to stay away.
On the screen, there’s a version of Evelyn with sharper cheekbones and a different name, tied to a railway track of metaphors, ruined on the front page and ruined in court. There’s a version of Liam who is pure predator, no hesitation in his gaze, no late-night porch confessions softening the angles.
Most glaring is the version of the mother: stainless, righteous, never the one who raised her voice or pushed too hard or enjoyed a little bit of attention when her grief trended for a day. She never checked the comments under the memorial hashtag to see which neighbors performed concern the loudest.
“You’re lying,” I tell the screen under my breath.
My hand hovers over the trackpad. Deleting those scenes won’t change the drafts floating on anonymous forums, the gossip between neighbors, the smear blogs that already framed me as a crusading saint or unhinged opportunist, depending on the day. But this book is the one version I control from beginning to end.
I think about readers I’ll never meet, scrolling the way my neighbors scroll, looking for a villain they can retweet. I picture them meeting this pretend me, this unfailingly noble archetype, and feeling relief. Of course, they’ll think. Real mothers don’t get angry and petty and horny and wrong.
“No,” I say, louder this time.
I drag my cursor from the first sentence of the revenge chapter to the last. A block of text turns blue, then white when I stroke the delete key. The empty space it leaves behind makes my chest feel weirdly wide open.
I don’t remove accountability. I rewrite it.
I keep the testimony, the documents, the guardrail models, but I soften the edges between hero and villain. I give the corporate lawyer a private doubt. I let the investigator do something kind without permission. I make the mother lash out when nobody deserves it, and also refuse to let the system write her off as hysterical.
I pull from my own ugliest moments—the night I scrolled through the second victim’s memorial page and counted which posts mentioned my essay, the spike of satisfaction I hated myself for. I translate that into a paragraph where my narrator recognizes that even grief can crave an audience. Then I leave it there, unredeemed.
The cursor blinks in the blank space where the fantasized downfall used to be. For a second, my fingers itch to tuck in something satisfying—a thrown drink, a job lost in public, a confessional monologue on live TV.
I close my eyes, listen to the distant hum of the freeway, the faint echo of kids down at the reservoir, their laughter carried up the slope. They’ll post pictures tonight: cans, reflections in water, filters smoothing their faces. Glass screens will hold the memory until the algorithm buries it.
“No monsters,” I whisper. “No saints either.”
I leave the space lean and a little unresolved.
My phone buzzes again, insistent this time, bouncing on the table. The screen flashes my agent’s name: KIRA, all caps from years ago when I wanted to see her messages immediately, when we were chasing lists instead of answers.
I answer on the third ring.
“Tell me you’re not still tinkering,” she says by way of hello. I hear midtown traffic in the background, horns and a distant siren, and the rustle of paper. “Please lie to me and say you hit send.”
“Hi, Kira,” I say. “Nice to hear your dulcet threats.”
“Mara.” She drops my name like she’s both exasperated and delighted. “You’re trending again. The state press conference, the hearing clips, the essay. A producer used the phrase ‘content universe’ in my presence. I’ve suffered, for you. Tell me I can at least tell them I have a finished manuscript.”
I glance at the word count in the corner of my document, the neat line of pages stacked in digital miniature.
“It’s finished,” I say. “I’m in cleanup. Last chapter, last lines.”
“Bless every god,” she says. “Because I have news, and it’s the kind that makes your student-loan trauma twitch.”
I straighten in the chair, the wood pressing into my shoulder blades. Coffee breath stands between me and her New York speakerphone crispness.
“How many zeros,” I ask, “and what do they want to do to it?”
She laughs, a little too high. “Straight to the point. I’ve missed you. Okay. Big Five house, crime imprint, editor who actually reads and doesn’t outsource taste to interns. They loved the leaked chapters and the essay, and they’re drooling over the word ‘exclusive.’ They’re talking six figures, fast-track publication, coordinated rollout with paperback of your backlist. Think subway ads, think airport bookstores, think true-crime podcasts asking you to cry on air.”
The room tilts for a second, then steadies. I look at my laptop screen, at the half-finished paragraph about memory being a joint project between fear and hindsight.
“What’s the catch,” I say.
I hear a pause where Kira probably arranges her face into neutral before speaking.
“They have… notes on positioning,” she says. “Working taglines, cover concepts, the usual. They’re very excited about the ‘ripped from the headlines’ angle. ‘A mother who wouldn’t stop digging.’ ‘The boy who paid the price.’ It’s all, you know. Marketing.”
A draft cover flashes in my imagination: a blurred car, a crash barrier, maybe a ghostly teenage silhouette. I taste metal on my tongue.
“No,” I say.
“No to which part?” she asks carefully.
“No to making Caleb into a prop,” I say. “No to ‘the boy who paid the price.’ No to angel wings on the cover, no to his school photo on a billboard. They don’t get to turn him into a mascot for their thriller quarter.”
Kira sighs softly. Paper shuffles. A keyboard clacks under her hand.
“They want to reach readers who don’t know your essay from your outline,” she says. “They need a shorthand. They’ll argue that this is fiction, not a memoir. They’ll argue that your protagonist isn’t literally you or your son.”
“And we’ll argue back,” I say. “We’ll tell them that fictionalizing doesn’t mean flattening. They can sell a ‘searing psychological thriller’ without hashtagging my kid’s headstone.”
Silence breathes down the line between us.
“You know they’re going to say the market wants a hook,” she says at last.
“Then let the hook be: ‘Nothing here is simple,’” I reply. “Or, I don’t know, ‘A mother who might be wrong.’ Something that warns people this is messy, not a Netflix true-crime binge they can forget by morning.”
The dishwasher beeps in the kitchen, done with its cycle. Steam fogs the glass front for a second, then clears. Every surface in this house turns into a screen eventually.
“I can push,” Kira says slowly. “I’m not promising a miracle. But I can make the non-negotiables clear: no real photos, no sensationalizing the boy, no framing the company as one cartoon villain when your whole point undercuts that.”
“Then I’ll say yes,” I tell her. “If they agree, I’m in.”
“You realize this is the part of the movie where the agent warns the difficult author she might be killing the deal,” she says, but there’s a smile in it.
“I’m okay with a smaller check,” I answer. “I’m not okay with strangers using my son’s death for cover design inspiration.”
Another pause. Then: “God, I missed the part of you that doesn’t flinch when money walks in.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “That part has flinched a lot,” I say. “She just learned to flinch in the other direction.”
“Fine,” Kira says. “Send me the manuscript in the next hour. I’ll print it, kill a small forest, and call you after I’ve bled all over it. And I’ll go back to them with your conditions before we sign anything.”
“Deal,” I say.
“Mara?” she adds.
“Yeah?”
“This book is more than publicity,” she says quietly. “It’s good. Ugly in spots. Braver than your early stuff. Don’t let the circus convince you it’s just grist for their feed.”
Heat rises behind my eyes. I pinch the bridge of my nose, press until the sting settles.
“Thanks,” I say.
When we hang up, the house falls back into the hum of fridge and distant freeway and the occasional distant yell from the kids who use the reservoir as their secret bar.
I scroll to the top of the manuscript and skim down, the way a driver might double-check a route they already know by heart. The story bends and doubles back, refuses to hand out clean epiphanies. My narrator ends on a porch, not enlightened, just willing to live with unanswered questions.
It bothers me, the lack of closure, in the same place it comforts me.
I lingeringly re-read a scene where she acknowledges the damage she did by needing an enemy, the way she let her own brain cherry-pick footage and therapy transcripts to backfill her favorite version of events. I don’t let her fix it with one apology; I just let her notice.
Glass shows up everywhere once I start looking: phone screens, dashcams, windows, lenses. The book is packed with them now, each one a reminder that every frame is a choice. I could still change the ending, tip the scales toward satisfying justice or total despair.
Instead, I do something smaller.
I go back to the last line of the last chapter and delete the period. Then I rewrite it so it doesn’t promise anything more than continued movement.
She walks to the door, not to close the story, but to see who might be waiting on the other side of the glass.
I stare at it. It’s not flashy. It’s not the kind of line people underline on Bookstagram. But it feels true in my bones.
Outside, the fog thickens again, turning the cul-de-sac into a contained little universe of halos and silhouettes. Headlights glide past, smear across my windows, then vanish. Somewhere across the way, in a house full of quiet monitors, a man I’m not done being angry with and not done caring about might be looking back at my lit panes.
I save the document.
The file icon on my desktop is a tiny rectangle of faux paper, a piece of digital glass holding 400 pages of curated pain. It will travel through cables and servers and printers, will be bound in boards and displayed in windows where strangers can choose it or ignore it. They’ll bring their own memories to it and let it rewrite their own stories a fraction of an inch.
My cursor hovers over the email draft addressed to Kira. Attachment added. Subject line: FINAL MANUSCRIPT (FOR NOW).
I don’t click send yet.
Instead, I glance at the blank email below it, the one addressed to Liam, subject line still empty. No attachment, just a blinking body field waiting for whatever version of the truth I decide to share with the man across the street.
I close his draft without saving, for now.
Then I go back to Kira’s email, take one more breath that tastes like coffee and rain and printer ink, and let my finger drop onto the trackpad.
The whoosh sound of sending cuts through the quiet, too soft to match the weight of what I’ve just fixed in place. On the screen, my words vanish into the outgoing folder, tiny ghosts beginning their climb into all the other people’s glass.
I sit there in the dim dining room, laptop glow washing my hands, and wonder what kind of ending I’ll choose in the story I can’t edit alone: the one where I finally step out onto the porch and look straight across the street.