The hose kinks near my wrist and sends a cold splash across my jeans.
I jump anyway, even though I’m the one holding the stupid thing. Water arcs in a clumsy fan over the row of terracotta pots lined along the porch rail. Damp soil darkens around the roots of the herbs Tessa bullied me into buying. The air carries that familiar Maple Hollow blend: wet earth, pine needles, a faint tang of asphalt warming under a break in the clouds.
Distant, the freeway hums like an enormous refrigerator that nobody ever unplugs.
I water the basil, then the thyme, pretending the extra care will make me less of a serial plant killer. The HOA likes when porches look tended, even if the people on them are in shambles. Across the cul-de-sac, a car door thumps shut, low and solid. I glance up.
Liam stands at the trunk of his dark sedan, arms looped around a cardboard box.
For a second I think he’s finally moving for good. My chest tightens, a reflex I’d love to blame on the chilly air. But there’s only the one box, and the blinds inside his front windows are still half-open, showing lit rectangles of bookshelves and wires.
He pauses, like he feels the weight of my stare from across the street, then turns his head.
Our eyes meet over the strip of asphalt where kids illegally skateboard when they’re bored. The fog sits low tonight, turning the slope of Maple Hollow into a gray bowl, but his face is clear enough: thinner than when he arrived, hair a little longer, jaw shadowed. The porch light above his door glows halo-bright on the security camera lens, a glass eye watching both of us.
I kill the hose spray with a twist and set it gently into the cradle, letting the last drips patter against the deck.
I could walk back inside. Close my door. Maintain the neat symmetry: we began with me spying on him through glass; we end with me choosing not to cross the distance. That would be one kind of story.
Instead, I raise a hand.
He hesitates, then lifts his elbow just enough in return. Not a wave, exactly. A truce-sign.
My bare feet slap against the damp wood as I step down onto the path. The concrete is cool under my skin, gritty from whatever the landscaping crew blew off the sidewalks earlier. Two houses down, a wind chime pings out an uneven scale. Somewhere out of sight, a phone dings with a notification; the sound bounces off the cul-de-sac like radar.
I walk halfway into the street and stop. He stays at the curb with the box in his arms, like we’re obeying some subconscious restraining order.
“You going somewhere?” I call.
My voice lands in the fog heavier than I intend.
He shifts the box higher against his chest. “Storage unit,” he answers. “Some files, old gear. Trying to make the house look less like a conspiracy bunker before the realtor walk-through.”
The word realtor hits with a small, clear click.
“So you are moving,” I say.
“Maybe.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Talking to a couple of cities. I’m not a hot get in the corporate intelligence circles right now. Turns out nobody wants the guy who testified against their favorite liability shield.”
I huff out something that’s not quite a laugh. A car passes on the cross street behind our lane, headlights smearing across Emma Patel’s front window, stretching her carefully curated gallery wall into streaks for a heartbeat.
“Welcome to the club,” I say. “The publishing board meeting notes on me weren’t thrilled either.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I saw some of the chatter.”
His gaze drops to the pavement for a second, then returns to my face. I read the familiarity there, the same way he used to track micro-expressions across the small gap between us and call it data.
“Banished pariahs anonymous,” I add. “We could start a support group.”
“We already did,” he says. “We just called it ‘hanging out in my living room while you insulted my coffee and went through my hard drives.’”
My mouth curves before I can stop it. The smile feels lopsided, like a frame hung by a distracted person.
“Your coffee deserved it,” I say. “It tasted like a crime scene.”
“Harsh, coming from the woman whose idea of a balanced diet was wine and string cheese.”
We stand there for a few breaths, old rhythms brushing against the new silence. A dog barks in a backyard behind us; the smell of someone grilling something drifts faintly through the wet air, charcoal and fat overlaid with the sharpness of rain.
“How’s the book?” he asks, finally. “Last I heard, you were arguing with marketing about not turning Caleb into a saint or a cautionary meme.”
The question lands softer than the ones he used to ask, the ones trying to pry open my memory like a stuck file.
“Edits,” I say. “Cover comps. They wanted broken glass on everything, surprise surprise. We compromised on something quieter. You can barely tell there’s a guardrail on it unless you squint.”
His mouth tightens, then eases. “I’m glad,” he says. “You didn’t flatten him.”
I swallow. The pine tree at the corner whispers in the faint wind, needles hissing against each other.
“I couldn’t,” I answer. “I couldn’t flatten any of it. Not you either.”
His fingers flex against the cardboard edges. “I deserve some flattening.”
I step a little closer, just enough that I can see the small scar near his temple where a flying piece of glass from someone else’s crash once caught him. I remember him telling me that story on a different night, in a different mood, our confessions weaving into something dangerously tender.
“You deserve accuracy,” I say. “Which is not the same thing as forgiveness on tap.”
His eyes sharpen, then soften. “So how accurate did you make me?”
“Composite,” I say. “A man who profits off tragedy while wanting to dismantle the machine causing it. A man who tells himself the damage he does is collateral he’ll repair later. The woman in the book calls him out on that.”
“Does he help her anyway?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “And he hurts her anyway. Both stay true.”
He nods once, slowly, like I’ve handed him the results of a study he commissioned.
“That’s fair,” he says.
There’s a gull high above, invisible in the low clouds but audible in its single rough cry. The cul-de-sac smells temporarily like the coast when the wind shifts, salt muddled into the freeway fumes.
I could leave it at that: mutual literary acknowledgment, everyone reduced to characters.
Instead I take a breath that tastes like wet concrete and say, “Thank you.”
His eyebrows move. “For what?”
“For what you saved,” I answer. “You stepped into something you didn’t have to. You recorded when everyone else looked away. You kept copies when other people deleted. You pushed Ruiz when he might have let it drift to the back of the file cabinet.”
I keep my eyes on the box because they feel too bright. “Without that, Caleb would still officially be the drunk kid who wrapped his car around a perfectly functional guardrail on a lonely road. The second crash might have been written off the same way. Families would still be driving past those faulty installations, thinking they were safe.”
His throat works. The security camera above his door reflects on the trunk’s glossy paint, a tiny distorted version of us, hunched and facing each other across the short distance.
“You did most of that,” he says. “I just… provided some tools. And made a mess with them.”
“Which brings me to the second part,” I say.
I lift my gaze to his. “You hurt me.”
His jaw goes still. The street noise recedes for a moment, or maybe my brain turns down the volume.
“I know,” he says.
“You watched me through windows,” I say. “You tested ideas on me like I was a lab rat. You fed my doubt at exactly the speed that kept me hooked. You recorded interviews without telling me how they’d be used. You called it protection, but I lived inside the scrambled edits.”
He closes his eyes briefly, then opens them again, like he refuses to duck behind the lids.
“I did,” he says. “I told myself I was pushing you toward the truth. That if you trusted your instincts too cleanly, the company would crush you. That blurring things might keep you safer until I had enough proof.”
His mouth twists. “That story worked better in my head than in your life.”
A car door slams somewhere up the block; a teenager’s laugh snaps through the dusk, followed by the mechanical chime of a phone alert. I see, across another yard, a mother posing in front of a little memorial tree, her friend lifting a phone, capturing grief at the right angle for an “angelversary” post.
“I understand why you told yourself that story,” I say. “I don’t agree with your methods. I won’t ever love what you did to my mind. But I’m… done pretending you’re either my saboteur or my savior. That binary did more damage than you ever could.”
He studies me, some calculation running behind his eyes, then shorting out.
“So what am I?” he asks, and the question comes out quieter than his usual cross-exam tone. “To you. Now.”
The answer shifts in my chest like a handful of glass marbles.
“You’re the person across the street who knows exactly how the guardrail bent,” I say. “You’re the man who sat in a car with a camera and did not pull away fast enough, and also not early enough. You’re the only other person awake at three a.m. when the crash replay starts in my head.”
I lift one shoulder. “You’re… complicated. So am I.”
The corner of his mouth lifts, but it’s not his practiced smirk; it’s smaller, almost reluctant.
“Complicated neighbor,” he repeats. “We should get that printed on the mailbox.”
“HOA would object,” I say. “Too honest.”
We both glance around on instinct, checking who might be looking—habit from months of being talked about more than spoken to. The Patel kids chalked hopscotch squares near the curb earlier; the pastel numbers blur where the damp has softened their edges. Evidence, fading but not gone.
“You really might move?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “There’s a nonprofit in Denver that wants someone to help untangle data from old crash cases. Less money, fewer private jets, more public records. I’m considering it. Slowly.”
A thin needle of panic pricks my ribs, then dissolves into something less sharp.
“Denver,” I repeat.
“I haven’t signed anything,” he says quickly. “And if I do, I won’t ghost. I’ll say goodbye. I owe you at least that, bare minimum.”
I nod. The idea of his house dark and permanently empty unsettles me, but the idea of him trapped here forever, orbiting my pain, feels wrong too.
“You don’t owe me permanence,” I say. “You owe me honesty. That’s different.”
“I can try,” he says.
The box in his arms tilts; a corner of a thick black cable peeks out from the top, along with a labeled folder: ROWE – EVIDENCE – OLD WILLOW. I notice it and feel my muscles clench.
“Keeping a copy?” I ask.
His gaze follows mine. “One,” he says. “Ruiz has his. The AG’s office has theirs. This is mine. Not for leverage. For… not forgetting.”
“Do you trust yourself with that?” I ask quietly.
He thinks about it, the way he used to think about risk matrices and chain-of-custody charts.
“Not completely,” he admits. “But I trust myself more than I did two years ago. And if I ever use it to rewrite what happened in a way that hurts you again, I give you permission to set my porch on fire.”
I snort. “Been there, done that.”
“Too soon?” he asks.
“Always,” I say.
We stand in the cooling air, the street between us no longer a chasm, not quite a simple sidewalk either. The sun has dropped low enough that the fog glows faintly, reflecting the first porch lights. Headlights smear along the curve at the top of Maple Hollow, then vanish.
“So,” he says. “What now for you? More books? Or do you retire on one morally responsible bestseller and open a bakery?”
“Terrible business plan,” I say. “But no. Another book, eventually. Maybe something that doesn’t involve anyone dying on a road. For now I’m teaching a workshop at the community college. ‘Narrative and Memory.’”
His eyes spark. “Of course you are.”
“What about you, besides hoarding evidence folders in Denver?” I ask.
“Maybe I try telling stories where I’m not hiding behind other people’s,” he says. “Maybe I write the article nobody would publish ten years ago, now that nobody’s paying me not to. Or I learn to fix bikes for a living. Low data risk.”
The image of Liam in a greasy apron, arguing with chains instead of lawyers, is unexpectedly comforting.
“You’re going to be terrible at small talk with normal customers,” I say.
“I’ll practice,” he replies. A small pause opens. “Coffee could help.”
The word hangs between us longer than it should for such an ordinary suggestion.
“Coffee,” I repeat. “Like neighbors. Not informant and handler. Not patient and fake therapist.”
“Like neighbors,” he agrees. “Sometime. No agenda. No recording devices. You can even make it, so it doesn’t taste like a crime.”
I roll my eyes, but my grip on the idea loosens. “Sometime,” I say. “I’m not promising a linear healing journey with montage music.”
“I wouldn’t recognize you if you did,” he says.
A car swings into the cul-de-sac, headlights sweeping over us. For a second we’re both lit starkly, caught like figures in a dashcam frame, then the beams move on, leaving afterimages on my retinas. I blink them away.
“I should get this to storage before they close,” he says, nodding at the box.
“And I should go finish murdering some basil with love,” I reply.
We stand there one second longer, letting whatever this is settle without naming it too aggressively.
“Goodnight, Mara,” he says.
“Goodnight, Liam.”
I turn first, barefoot on the cold concrete, and walk back toward my porch. The windows beside my front door throw my reflection back at me: a woman in a sweatshirt and damp jeans, hair frizzed by mist, hose coiled at her feet. No tragic heroine, no deranged vigilante, just a person who knows too many versions of one night and has chosen one to live with, for now.
Behind me, I hear his trunk thump shut, the car door open, then close. An engine turns over, low and steady. I don’t look back yet.
On the small table by my porch chair, my phone buzzes. Tessa’s name flashes across the glass with a text preview: HOW’S MY FAVORITE FAMOUS AUTHOR? A second later, another ping: ALSO YOUR PLANTS LOOK CUTE, DON’T LET THEM DIE.
I smile at the screen, then lift my gaze across the street.
Liam’s car rolls slowly down the cul-de-sac and disappears around the bend. His house remains lit, blinds half-open, cameras on. Not empty. Not permanent, either.
I sink onto the porch step, the wood cool against the back of my legs, and wrap my arms around my knees. The fog thickens, holding Maple Hollow in a hazy bowl where every window catches a different angle of the same shared life.
For the first time in a long time, I don’t try to decide which angle is the only true one.
I just sit there, breathing pine and rain and faint exhaust, watching the glass across the street, ready for whatever stories come next—mine, his, and the ones we will always, whether we like it or not, remember together.