I watch the three dots pulse on my phone like a tiny heart monitor measuring my career.
My agent’s name glows at the top of the screen. Underneath, my last message sits, still unread: Working again. New chapter underway. I’ll send pages by the end of the week.
The lie warms my palm more than the mug of coffee by my elbow. The coffee went cold twenty minutes ago; the lie keeps heating.
The dots vanish. Then her reply appears.
That’s great, Mara. I’m proud of you. Just get words down. We can fix later. One scene at a time, okay?
I snort under my breath. “You have no idea what one scene costs,” I tell the empty room.
I flip the phone face down on the dining table. The vibration hums against wood as another notification pops in—probably the Maple Hollow Facebook group, another neighbor posting about lawn lengths or angelversary candles. The mechanical chime echoes faintly through the wall from next door too; everyone’s phones nag at the same time in this cul-de-sac. Syncopated guilt.
I drag the laptop closer, the plastic edge digging into my forearms. The screen shows my Word document: Untitled_5.docx. Fifty-seven pages of stalled narrative and highlighted notes to myself.
I scroll to the end where the cursor blinks, a metronome of accusation. The last line reads: She thought the danger had passed once the cops left.
“She was wrong,” I murmur.
I backspace the sentence, letter by letter, until the page is blank again. My throat tightens. Dr. Navarro wants me to build a bridge between my writing and my real memory, but right now the bridge feels more like a plank.
“New scene,” I say out loud, like an incantation. “Mother at a crash. Fiction. Not me.”
I crack my knuckles, roll my shoulders, and start typing.
“I walk toward the guardrail with my hands empty, because no one hands a mother instructions at a scene like this.”
I pause, fingers hovering. That first-person slip lands on the page before I can stop it. My protagonist was third person yesterday. Today she speaks in my voice.
“Fine,” I tell the laptop. “We’ll do this your way.”
I keep going.
My hands settle into a rhythm, soft clacks filling the room. Outside the window, the light thins toward evening; fog gathers low on the slope of Maple Hollow, muffling the distant freeway until it turns into a soft, restless ocean.
I write the mother following cones and flares, stepping over broken glass that crunches under her flats. The smell of burned rubber mixes with pine and wet asphalt. A cop tries to intercept her, a hand out, palm up, but she slips past.
I barely think the sentences before they appear.
“I count the black arcs on the road,” I hear myself reading under my breath as I type. “One set curves toward the guardrail, wide and frantic. The other crosses it, thinner, darker, like a crossed-out sentence.”
My chest tightens, but my fingers do not stop.
I give her a son, older than Caleb, younger than me. I give her a broken guardrail that should have fed impact into the ground but instead folded, metal teeth kissing metal, wrapping the car like a trap sprung in reverse.
“There’s something wrong with the marks,” I whisper as I type it for her. “Two stories overlay each other. The skid that belongs to my boy, and another pair, narrower, that approaches, kisses his, then vanishes into the ditch.”
The words slide out with no effort, smooth and inevitable.
I see her kneeling, hands pressed to cold metal gleaming under the crash-site floodlights. Her fingertips find fresh scrapes on the rail where rust should live. Bolts on one section shine brighter than the rest, their edges unmarred by age. She looks up and notices the long neck of a traffic camera on the overpass, its lens pointed just past the worst of the damage.
Micro-hook: my protagonist lifts her hand and flips the camera off, because rage needs somewhere to go.
“Why that angle?” I mutter into the glow of the screen. “Who decided what that lens doesn’t see?”
I write her asking it out loud, yelling at the indifferent neck of metal, voice swallowed by passing trucks. I write the way the other parents stand back, phones already out, faces bathed in blue light as they post the first memorial hashtags.
The keys blur for a while. I lose track of how long my hands move. The physical world shrinks to the rectangle of text and the ache building between my shoulder blades. I smell old coffee and dish soap, hear the occasional wet rush of tires from the main road beyond our subdivision, but none of it fully registers.
Words do what they always used to do for me: they build a container, a frame, so the chaos stays inside.
When my fingers finally still, the touchpad burns under my wrist. My eyes sting. I blink and realize the window beside me has turned into a mirror; outside, the fog thickened into a pale sheet, and the houses across the street have their porch lights on, each behind glass, each casting yellow rectangles onto manicured lawns.
My phone vibrates again. My agent, probably. Instead, the preview shows Tessa’s name.
You home? Check in later. Don’t stay up doomscrolling. Heart emoji, syringe emoji for some reason, then jk.
I huff out a breath, half laugh, half exhale. “Writing,” I text back. Not doomscrolling. Miracles happen.
Then I add: You’d be proud. I made up a whole crash today.
I hit send before I realize how that reads. The typing dots appear, vanish, then no reply comes. She’s probably in the middle of a shift, hand-deep in real broken bodies, no time for my fictional ones.
The silence gives my brain room to catch up with what my hands did.
I scroll back to the top of the new pages and start reading.
The first line hits like a shove: I walk toward the guardrail with my hands empty, because no one hands a mother instructions at a scene like this.
My throat constricts. I remember my own hands that night, useless at my sides, until one of them slipped on wet grass and slammed against rock.
I keep going.
“I count the black arcs on the road,” my narrator says again from the screen. “One set curves toward the guardrail, wide and frantic. The other crosses it, thinner, darker, like a crossed-out sentence.”
I do not remember phrasing it like that.
I don’t just mean the crossed-out sentence bit; that sounds like me on a good day, sure. I mean the exact geometry: one set curving, the other crossing. Thinner. Darker. Vanishing into the ditch.
“Did I write two sets?” I whisper.
The room feels smaller. I can hear the neighbor kids yelling in the distance, their voices sliding downhill toward the reservoir. Somewhere a dog barks, sharp and restless.
I scroll further. The mother kneels, fingers tracing scrapes that sit at hip height on the rail, not bumper height. Fresh metal streaks along one section, bright under the lights. Four bolts catch the glare, silver and smug while the others sulk in rust.
“No,” I say out loud. “That’s not… I didn’t… think about that.”
My finger hovers over the trackpad. I scroll up, then down again, rereading the same paragraph until the letters try to separate from their meanings.
I close my eyes and for a moment let the images in my head stand alone.
The night Caleb died lives in a series of frozen photographs inside my mind. Headlights turning the fog white. Red and blue strobes painting the trees. The curved guardrail, wrong in a way I could never fully name. My own body tipping sideways and the jolt of my skull meeting earth.
But in that mental slideshow, the road surface below my feet looks like one blur of black. I never consciously separated one track from another.
“Did I see two sets there?” I ask the empty house. “Did my brain tuck it away while the rest of me broke?”
Micro-hook: if my memory edits for survival, my fingers may be rewriting the director’s cut.
My heart thuds faster. I stand up too quickly, the chair legs screeching against the floor, and pace to the kitchen and back. The smell of garlic from last night lingers near the stove. I grab a glass, fill it with tap water, and drink half in a few gulps. The water is cold enough to shock my teeth.
“Okay,” I tell myself, planting my palms on the edge of the table. “Evidence, not vibes.”
I minimize the manuscript and open the folder on my desktop labeled TAXES.
Inside, buried between W2s and receipts, sits another folder named MISC. Inside that, another called donotopen. Very subtle. Past-me was dramatic.
I click it.
Thumbnails bloom across the screen: photos Tessa took for me when I couldn’t bring myself to go back to Old Willow Road in daylight, screenshots from the online article about the crash, a PDF of the police report someone emailed me. Glass and metal and asphalt, frozen and flattened.
My skin prickles, but I force my hand steady as I double-click the first image.
The crash site fills the screen. Even months later, my lungs forget how air works for a second.
I see Caleb’s car, or what’s left of it, folded around the guardrail. Flowers wilt in the foreground. A flimsy plastic cross leans against the posts. In this shot, the road is partially visible behind the wreck, dark lines burned into the asphalt.
“Zoom,” I whisper.
I pinch the trackpad and drag the image larger until the pixels start to show. Two arcs of rubber streak stand out. One thick, sweeping in from the lane like a desperate hand dragging a pen too wide. The other is narrower, darker, slicing across the first then breaking off toward the ditch.
My tongue goes dry.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I say.
I grab a pen from the table, the same one I use when I edit, and hold it against the screen where the marks intersect. The angle matches what I typed. The second line undercuts the first, then drops away.
I flick to the next photo. Different angle, same story. In this one, the guardrail shows clearly. Most of the bolts and joints wear a coating of orange and brown. One section, about three feet long, looks newer. The bolts reflect sunlight, sharp and clean, four metal circles in a neat row.
My manuscript waits in the background on another tab, those same four bolts already immortalized in fiction.
My knees wobble. I sink back into the chair and it creaks in protest. My hands feel far away, floating at the ends of my arms.
“Okay,” I tell myself again, this time softer. “I saw those pictures before. You saw them. Of course you did. Tessa showed you. Detective Ruiz had them. Your brain borrowed details. Normal.”
The words sound like a script. Dr. Navarro’s voice threads through them: Trauma brain is a collage artist. It repurposes images. That doesn’t make you dishonest.
“Sure,” I say to the laptop. “But if I can’t tell which pieces are collage and which belong to the actual night, what am I building?”
I click back and forth between the manuscript and the photos, like a deranged spot-the-difference game. The fictional mother presses her hand to cold metal at hip height; the real guardrail bears impact marks right where my hand would land if I stood in front of it. The fictional second track vanishes into the ditch; the real one grows faint and disappears near a patch of disturbed gravel.
I crane my neck toward the window. Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s house glows in slices through the blinds, screens flickering blue beyond the glass. A camera lens sits above his garage, tiny red light dormant for now, pointed at the same street where mothers drive home and pretend their kids will always return.
“Did you feed this to me?” I ask the dark glass between us, not sure if I mean Liam, or my own brain, or something more diffuse, like story itself.
The laptop fan whirs harder, a low, insistent rush. The house answers with creaks and the distant hum of the freeway. Outside, fog presses close to the windows, turning my reflection into a ghost superimposed over the street.
I rest my fingertips on the keys and hover there, caught between deleting and doubling down.
Either my subconscious is finally coughing up real fragments of that night.
Or I just proved to myself how easy it is to write a lie detailed enough to believe.