Tessa shows up twenty minutes late, which means right on time for her.
I hear her before I see her—the rattle of a paper bag, the clink of plastic containers, and then her voice through the door. “Open up, hermit. I brought carbs and people who cry on television for a living.”
I peel myself away from the office chair and the frozen, grainy figure on my laptop screen. My eyes burn from staring. When I blink, the hooded silhouette prints itself on the inside of my lids.
The porch smells like wet pine when I open the door. Fog has rolled back into Maple Hollow, flattening the streetlights into pale smears against the glass of my neighbors’ windows. Behind Tessa, the cul-de-sac looks like one of those curated grief posts: tidy houses, glowing rectangles, everything soft and tasteful.
She blows past me in her navy scrubs, ponytail damp, cheeks flushed from the cold. “Thai or pizza?” she asks, lifting the paper bag. “I solved the trolley problem by choosing both.”
“You worked a double,” I say. “You should be asleep, not…” My hand flutters toward the bag.
“Sister night,” she says firmly. “You texted the skull emoji. That’s code for ‘come feed me before I start chewing on my own wrists.’”
I didn’t realize I had a code, but I don’t argue. The house smells faintly of old coffee and whatever chemical cleaner I used earlier to wipe down the counters. It never quite erases the underlying scent of boy—Caleb’s cologne soaked into the hallway rug, a ghost note of sweat and citrus and something I can’t name.
Tessa kicks off her shoes and pads toward the living room. “Go fire up the trash,” she calls over her shoulder. “I need a show where people scream about non-lethal problems.”
I stand in the entry for a second, fingers tracing the edge of one of Caleb’s photos on the wall. His smile stares back at me through glass, frozen mid-laugh on the beach. In the reflection, I see Tessa moving in the living room, dropping the bag on the coffee table, the gray flicker of my TV waking up.
Trashy distraction, sister night, normal. I could let it be that.
Instead, I hear my own voice say, “I want to show you something first.”
We end up in the living room anyway, only the TV isn’t the main screen.
Tessa cues up the reality show—some group of strangers trapped in a fake villa, already mid-fight—and wedges herself into the corner of the couch with a carton of pad thai. The smell of fish sauce and lime cuts through the drywall and dust that usually dominate this room.
I balance my laptop on my knees, cursor hovering over the security app icon. The mechanical chime of a phone alert somewhere in the neighborhood drifts in through the closed windows, then the low murmur of the freeway beyond the pines.
Tessa notices my silence halfway through her first bite. “You’re not even side-eyeing the confessionals,” she says with her mouth full. “That’s your favorite part. What’s wrong?”
“Watch this,” I say.
I tap the icon. The four camera thumbnails bloom on the screen like a cluster of small, accusing eyes.
Tessa groans. “Mara. No. No Ring cam true-crime hour tonight. I work in a place where real people bleed. I came here to watch attractive idiots throw drinks—”
“It’s mine,” I cut in. “From the night of the memorial.”
That gets her attention. Her chewing slows. She sets the carton on the table and leans over until our shoulders touch. Her scrub top is still cold where it brushes my arm.
“Okay,” she says reluctantly. “Show me the haunted doorbell.”
I pull up the Side Yard feed and scrub straight to the jump. The timeline sits at the bottom of the screen, the tiny blips of motion events spaced like a heartbeat. I talk as I maneuver, words coming out faster than I intend.
“Look. 10:14 p.m. Side yard is empty, right? Gravel, fence, nothing. Then, watch the timestamp.” I tap the arrow. “10:14:22 straight to 10:27:03. There’s thirteen minutes missing. No footage. The security guy blamed my Wi-Fi.”
I let it play from 10:27.
The black-and-white yard fills the screen: ghost-gray gravel, the wooden gate, the faint shimmer where raindrops catch distant light. A second later, the hooded figure strides into frame, carrying the long, oblong blur pressed against his body.
Tessa swallows audibly. “Okay,” she says. “That’s… a thing.”
Micro-hook: Tessa hasn’t rolled her eyes yet.
I pause it with the hand on the latch. “He comes in right after the blackout,” I say. “No hesitation. Straight to the gate. Like he’s been here before.”
“He?” she asks.
“Too tall for the neighbor kids,” I say. “Shoulders are—look, I know the pixelation is bad, but that’s an adult. And he’s carrying something. The system keeps calling it a compression artifact, but you can see the weight in the way he holds it.”
Tessa leans closer until her breath fogs a tiny patch of glass. “Could be a landscaper,” she says finally. “A contractor. The HOA loves surprise inspections. People freaked about those ring camera posts last summer, remember?”
“At ten twenty-seven at night?” I ask. “Wearing a hood, walking through my yard during my son’s memorial?”
Her jaw tightens. She pushes back against the couch, grabs her pad thai again, uses the lidded container as a barrier between us. “Okay,” she says. “So you had a creeper. Did you call the non-emergency line?”
“I called HomeSentinel,” I say. “They told me the missing minutes are ‘just how the codec handles low bandwidth.’ And that I’m probably interpreting grainy footage through, quote, a heightened emotional lens.” I hear the customer service voice mimicked in my own and want to spit it out.
Tessa winces. “Oof. They actually said that?”
“Then I showed them this.” I click into my browser tabs, flipping past one article after another: PDFs of guardrail failure reports, screenshots of Liam’s old bylines, a grainy headshot from an exposé buried on page seven of a news archive.
I land on the one I keep returning to: Liam in a younger, sharper suit, standing outside a courthouse, quoted about manipulated crash-test data.
“This is him,” I say. “Liam Rowe. He didn’t just ‘work in journalism.’ He specialized in crashes, in ‘single-car accidents’ that pointed back to the same manufacturer. The same company that made the guardrail Caleb hit.”
Tessa stares at the screen, then at me. “You deep-dive Googled the neighbor,” she says slowly. “You’re building a murder corkboard in your browser.”
“I found a pattern,” I say. My voice edges higher. “Guardrails that fold wrong. Crash tests that get edited, just like my camera footage. A guy who moves into my cul-de-sac six months after my son dies on a model he’s already investigated. How is that nothing?”
She sets the food down again with exaggerated care. The reality show on TV swells behind us—someone shouting about loyalty, glasses clinking—but I feel farther from those fake lives than from the hooded figure on my laptop.
“Mara,” she says, “I’m glad you’re writing again. Truly. But you can’t keep mainlining this stuff.”
“This isn’t fiction,” I say.
“That’s exactly my point,” she says. “You’re taking true-crime and security feeds and turning them into a story you can live with. You always do that. It’s your job.”
My hands curl on the keyboard. “My job used to be making up stories. Now I’m trying to unmake one. The drunk, reckless boy who crashed his own car story. The grieving mom who needs to accept it.”
She rubs her forehead with the heel of her palm, leaving a faint red mark. “I’m not saying you imagined your kid,” she says. “I’m saying the part of your brain that writes twist endings doesn’t just turn off because you point it at your own life.”
We sit in a silence full of Thai spices and TV noise and the distant, steady freeway hum. The fog outside thickens against the living room windows, turning the glass into milky rectangles. Somewhere, a neighbor’s phone chimes—one of those default alerts the HOA uses for meeting reminders and lawn citations.
Tessa breaks first. She picks up one of the discarded controllers, mutes the show, and turns fully toward me, knee pressing into my thigh.
“Do you remember Aunt Elena at the end?” she asks.
Heat crawls up my neck. “No,” I say automatically. “I was in college.”
“You were home that Christmas,” she says quietly. “She called the cops three times in one week because she was convinced the people in the cul-de-sac were filming her through their windows. She had a notebook full of ‘evidence’—license plate numbers, what color shirts they wore the day the mail was late, that kind of thing.”
I swallow. The notebook flashes in my mind for a second: neat columns of numbers, her handwriting slanting harder as the pages went on.
“She had untreated psychosis,” I say. “And no one listened until she melted down in public.”
“Right,” Tessa says. “And every time we bring her up, Mom says our family ‘has a history.’ You know that. The nurses say it in charts. The psychiatrist mentioned it when he put you on the SSRI and the sleep meds. It’s a risk factor.”
The word wraps around my chest like a strap.
“So what?” I ask. “Any time I notice something off, I have to run it past the Crazy Filter? Make sure it isn’t genetic before I trust my own eyes?”
“I’m saying you have to be careful,” she says. “You’re dissociating, you’re not sleeping, you’re doing EMDR, which literally shakes up memory. That’s all volatile by itself. Add hours of security footage and a neighbor with a shady past and… yeah. Confirmation bias loves that cocktail.”
I laugh without humor. “Thank you, Doctor Kane. Did they teach you that phrase in nurse school, or did you pick it up from podcasts?”
She doesn’t rise to it. Her fingers pick at a splintering seam on the couch cushion between us, little flakes of foam collecting under her nails.
“I’m scared, okay?” she says, voice dropping. “Not of Liam. Not of your cameras. Of you. Of you disappearing into this until the only version of Caleb you can hold is the one where he’s a chess piece in a corporate conspiracy. ‘Crazy crash mom’ isn’t a fun nickname. People at work talk about women like that.”
“People at work talk about me?” I ask.
She hesitates, and that’s answer enough.
Micro-hook: the “crazy” label is already floating out there, and I’m the last to hear.
“Tessa,” I say. “What are they saying?”
“They don’t use your name,” she says quickly. “It’s more like, ‘Did you see that post about the lady who keeps emailing the hospital about guardrails?’ Or ‘my sister’s friend’s aunt is convinced her kid’s accident was staged.’ That kind of thing. But I know how it goes. Once someone decides you’re that mom, it’s over. You lose credibility on everything else.”
“So I should shut up and be the right kind of grieving parent,” I say. “The one with angel hashtags and curated ‘angelversaries’ and quiet lawn compliance.”
“I’m not asking you to put wings on his senior photo,” she says. “I’m asking you to take your meds on schedule, see Navarro, and not give a stranger across the street the power to rewrite your entire life.”
Liam’s lit windows flash in my mind, monitors and glass, the way he watched my house the night of the memorial. “He’s already in it,” I say.
“Because you keep letting him in,” she says, sharper now. “You invite him into every conversation. Every theory. You call me to talk about guardrail patents and traffic cameras, and all I can think is that I helped pick out Caleb’s casket and now I’m supposed to learn metallurgy for extra credit.”
Her hands shake. She clamps them between her knees.
“You were the last person to text him that night,” I say, before I can stop myself. The words fly out, fast and hot. “You told me he was ‘just being a teenager.’ That he’d grow out of it. Maybe you need it to be simple. Caleb plus vodka plus bad luck. End of story. Otherwise you have to wonder what you didn’t do.”
The room goes silent in the way ERs do when a monitor flatlines.
Tessa’s face drains, then flushes back in patches. She stares at me like I’ve slapped her.
“That’s low,” she says. Her voice has gone thin and tight. “Even for you in novelist mode.”
I open my mouth to backpedal, to wrap the words in something gentler, but there it is on her face—the thing she never says: I could have stopped him. It hangs between us like a second hooded figure.
“You think I don’t replay that night every time I pour myself a drink?” she asks. “You think I don’t wonder what would’ve happened if I’d lied and told you he was with me? Or called the cops on my own nephew for driving tipsy? I don’t need your conspiracy to feel guilty, Mara. I do fine on my own.”
The pad thai on the table has gone cold. The reality show plays silently on the muted TV, contestants’ faces twisted in silent accusations that mirror ours.
“I’m sorry,” I say. My throat tightens on the words. “I didn’t mean—”
“You did,” she says. “That’s why it landed.”
She stands, smoothing her scrubs with quick, jerky movements. The fog outside presses thicker against the windows; headlights smear across the glass in slow motion as a car creeps up the slope of the cul-de-sac. For a second, I imagine every neighbor peering through their own panes, watching us fight in pantomime.
“You know what the difference is between Aunt Elena and you?” Tessa asks, grabbing her coat from the armchair.
“Please enlighten me,” I say hoarsely.
“She picked strangers,” Tessa says. “She pointed out the window and said, ‘They’re out to get me.’ You’re aiming at people who actually exist in your life. Your neighbor. Your husband’s job. Me. That makes it scarier, not safer.”
She shrugs into her coat and heads for the door, takeout bag abandoned on the table, reality show still paused on a woman mid-sob.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I have an early shift,” she says without looking back. “And I’m smart enough not to drink on top of Ativan and Ambien, so the wine I brought kind of lost its purpose.”
At the door, she hesitates. Her hand rests on the knob, fingers splayed, the same shape as the hooded figure’s hand frozen on my side gate latch.
“I love you,” she says. “I’m terrified for you. Both of those things are true. But I need you to hear this: once people decide you’re the crazy woman in the neighborhood, they stop listening long before you’ve lost your mind.”
“You think I’m crazy already,” I say.
“I think you’re in pain,” she answers. “And pain makes bad editors.”
Then she opens the door, steps into the cold, and pulls it shut behind her with more care than the moment deserves.
I stand in the entryway for a long time, watching her taillights drift down the hill through the rippled glass. Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s house sits dark, blinds down, its own cameras probably pointed outward, recording an image of me framed in my front door like a specimen.
In a story, this is where I would give my protagonist a choice: double down on the investigation or listen to the voice of reason and pull back.
I stay there, hand on the deadbolt, listening to the distant freeway and the faint ping of another phone alert somewhere in Maple Hollow, and realize I no longer know which voice belongs to reason—and which one is just the latest, loudest story I’m telling myself.