The ping of a new email cuts through the house like a dropped glass.
I freeze in the hallway with my hand still on the deadbolt, Tessa’s words echoing in the quiet. Crazy woman. Risk factor. Bad editor. The front door vibrates faintly as the night air presses against it, carrying the wet smell of pine and exhaust from the distant freeway.
The notification chime repeats from my office—just the default tone, the same mechanical note everyone in Maple Hollow uses for HOA blasts and neighborhood Facebook drama. I tell myself to ignore it. I already know what waits in that inbox: overdue notices from my agent, coupons for grief retreats, an automated survey from HomeSentinel asking me to rate my “support experience.”
My feet move anyway.
I pad down the hallway, past the gallery of glass-framed photos. Caleb’s face flickers in each one, catching glints of light from the street. For a second I imagine the frames as tiny screens, each one buffering, waiting to load the real version of him.
In the office, the laptop sits exactly where I left it, lid open, screen casting a cold rectangle on the cluttered desk. The glow catches the rims of my coffee cups, the glossy covers of true-crime paperbacks, the pills lined up in their plastic organizer like tiny, obedient soldiers.
The new email sits at the top of my inbox.
FROM: no-reply@protonfile.safe
SUBJECT: For the mother on Old Willow Road
My stomach pulls tight. I haven’t written those words anywhere. Not in the memorial posts, not in the therapy homework, not in the emails I never send to the investigating officer because I rewrite them into fiction instead.
My hand hovers over the trackpad. I don’t click.
Every “don’t open unknown links” PSA I’ve ever scrolled past scrolls back through my mind. Malware. Ransomware. Identity theft. Maybe this is the most boring explanation of all: some bot scraped a news article, grabbed “Old Willow Road,” and decided I’m a mark.
“You’re not actually important enough to hack,” I mutter to myself.
My reflection quivers in the dark office window, a faint outline layered over the faint outline of Liam’s house across the cul-de-sac. His windows are dark tonight, blinds down. No helpful glow of monitors, no silhouette pacing with a phone.
I click the email open.
The text is short. No greeting, no sign-off. Just a few lines, the sort of thing someone types fast before they can second-guess.
You’re right about the guardrail.
They’ve done this before.
Start here: [link]
Beneath that, a single extra line, smaller, like an afterthought the sender couldn’t hold back:
Don’t trust anyone who profits from tragedy.
I tap the link without meaning to. My browser throws up a warning about leaving the safe zone of my usual sites. The URL is a string of nonsense on a cloud-sharing service I’ve never used. I close it before it finishes loading, heart thudding in my ears.
“No,” I say aloud, to the empty room. “Nope. We don’t open mystery doors in horror movies.”
I stand up so quickly the chair rolls back and thumps against the bookshelf. My legs feel unsteady, like I’ve been sitting longer than the actual time since Tessa left. The house creaks and settles around me. In the distance, a car climbs the hill through Maple Hollow; headlights smear across my living room windows, spreading white veins across the glass before sliding away.
I could delete the email. I could take the win that someone, somewhere, believes me and leave it at that.
I picture deleting it and spending the rest of the night wondering what was behind the closed door I chose not to open. I know myself. I write doors for a living. I’ve never once left one shut in a draft.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Fine. But we’re not doing this on the main machine.”
Micro-hook: I decide how paranoid to be before I let the paranoia in.
I dig my old laptop out from under a pile of manuscripts on the floor. The battery is nearly dead, the keys hairline-shiny from years of deadline nails. I plug it into the wall and flip it open. The fan whirs to life with a strained, dusty sound, like the wheeze of an asthmatic animal.
No banking apps. No saved passwords. Just a tired operating system and a browser. Good enough.
I forward the email to myself, to an account I never use anymore, and then log into that inbox on the old machine. My fingers move through the steps on muscle memory, like they’re entering a ritual.
When the message finally loads on the dim, lower-resolution screen, the words look grainier, less real. I click the link.
The cloud drive opens to a single folder labeled with a dry string of letters and numbers, boring enough to be sinister. Inside, there are more folders, stacked in neat little rows: state abbreviations, highway numbers, dates. Oregon, Washington, California, Texas. Each folder holds PDFs and MP4s, tiny icons lined up like evidence bags.
My mouth tastes like metal. I swallow and click the one labeled OR-17-OldWillow.
The first file is a PDF. I skim the header: “Single-vehicle collision involving 2005 Honda Civic, southbound lane, result: fatality of driver.” The text blurs for a second, and I blink hard. I don’t need the summary; I already live with the ending.
I click on the MP4 instead.
The dashcam footage opens to black, then brightens into a windshield view of rain-slick asphalt. Wiper blades swoop across the frame in steady arcs, leaving transparent streaks in their wake. Headlights from oncoming traffic flare into the lens and smear against the glass, blooming and fading like ghosts.
I mute the sound at first. My chest tightens anyway. My hands press so hard against the sides of the laptop that my knuckles ache.
The car moves down a two-lane highway not unlike Old Willow Road, flanked by pine trees that flash in and out of the headlight cone. The date stamp in the corner marks this as two years before Caleb died. The name “ES-Guardrail Model 4B” sits on a small label when the driver passes a mile marker; the camera catches it for a heartbeat before it disappears.
Then the car rounds a curve, and the guardrail comes into view on the right. I don’t need color to recognize the shape of the metal, the way the posts lean, the shimmer where the bolts should hold tension.
On the screen, a pair of tail lights ahead sways. The dashcam car gains, the gap closing by inches. The leading vehicle kisses the shoulder, drifts back, kisses it again. Maybe the driver is texting. Maybe they’re drunk. Maybe the road just wanted someone that night.
I unmute.
Road noise fills the office—a steady roar undercut by the patter of rain. A song plays faintly, something poppy with too much bass. The dashcam driver doesn’t speak. Then, without warning, the leading car jerks hard right.
The impact is brutal and quick. Metal crumples in a way I’ve already seen in person, folding around the hood like tinfoil instead of deflecting it back. The guardrail spears into the chassis. The dashcam driver swears, slams the brakes; their car fishtails, the camera bouncing hard.
The footage freezes briefly, then resumes with the car stopped, hazard lights blinking red reflections off the warped rail.
I pause it. My breathing comes out in short, shallow pulls. The office air feels too thick, too still, the faint smell of old coffee turning sour in my nose.
“Okay,” I whisper to no one. “That’s one.”
I back out of the video and click the next.
This one is from Texas—flat terrain, broad sky, a different kind of wet shimmer on the road. Same guardrail model, same polite language in the attached report about “unexpected terminal performance.” The audio includes a panicked voice on the phone with dispatch, describing the rail going “through” the car.
I watch three, four, five more clips. Different states, different cars, same choreography: drift, contact, metal curling in on itself like a dying insect instead of springing the way the design drawings insist it should.
Hours tick away on the corner of my screen. Maple Hollow outside slides deeper into night. Fog hugs the slope of the street so tightly the headlights of occasional cars turn into floating orbs until they scrape past my windows. Every so often, a phone alert chimes from the living room—group chat, HOA reminder, some other life I’m not participating in.
Micro-hook: somewhere in this pattern of twisted metal, I know Caleb’s death is waiting for me.
The sixth video I open starts later in the sequence. The crash has already happened. The dashcam belonged to a car that arrived seconds after impact, and someone has trimmed out the drive up.
The first frame is pure chaos. Headlights glare directly into the camera, washing out the details of the wreck beyond. The injured car sits skewed at an angle against the rail, front end crumpled around the first post. The guardrail tongue has punched through the driver’s side, impaling the interior. Steam—or smoke—billows from under the hood.
I squint against the brightness. Whoever edited this didn’t adjust for the exposure. The scene looks overlit, like a stage with a spotlight too close.
And on that stage, off to the right, stands a figure in a hood.
I hit pause so hard I nearly crack the trackpad.
The man stands near the guardrail, a few feet from the ruined car. His hood is up, shadowing his face. He holds something in his hands that catches light—a phone, or a small camera, or some other glass-eyed device. His posture is relaxed in a way that doesn’t belong in a scene like this: shoulders slightly rounded, weight on one leg, head tilted.
My heart stutters.
Liam stands like that on his porch sometimes, when he thinks no one is watching—hip cocked, gaze locked on something across the street, attention narrowed. I have hours of that posture catalogued in my own personal surveillance archive.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no.”
I zoom as far as the grainy footage allows. The pixels dissolve into blocks, but the outline doesn’t vanish. Tall. Lean. Hands moving with a kind of practiced efficiency. Phone up, then down. A quick bend to inspect the point where metal meets post. The slightest flinch at a distant siren.
I rewind. Watch the same few seconds again. And again. Each time, I fill in a little more detail that might not actually be there: the set of his jaw, the angle of his nose, the worn line of a jacket like the one that hung by my front door earlier this week when he brought over that misdelivered package.
Adrenaline prickles in my fingertips. My leg bounces against the desk until a pen rolls off and hits the floor.
“Why are you here?” I ask the blurred figure on the screen. “Are you helping or checking your work?”
The dashcam driver never addresses him. The person holding the camera breathes in wet gasps, talking to dispatch, voice high with panic. No one yells at the hooded man to get back. No one questions why he knows exactly where to stand to inspect the damage without blocking the camera.
Sirens wail louder. The hooded man takes two steps back, then slips out of frame, leaving the ruined rail centered, the crumpled car and glinting metal now the stars of the show. For the rest of the clip, paramedics and firefighters move in and out of view, headlights painting their reflective stripes in jerky bands of white.
I scrub through, searching for even a hint of the hooded figure’s return. Nothing.
Outside my office window, my own side yard lies in darkness, fence and gravel and the closed gate guarding secrets I know were violated. The echo between that blurred silhouette and this one vibrates in my bones.
“Caleb,” I whisper, before I can stop myself. “What did they do to you?”
When I finally tear my eyes away from the videos, my neck burns from hunching. My tongue feels coated, my mouth dry. I stumble to the kitchen and drink cold tap water straight from a chipped glass, the rim clinking against my teeth.
Rain taps at the back windows, softer now. Somewhere down the slope, a group of kids whoop and laugh, their voices carrying up from the reservoir trail where they drink at picnic tables lit by phone flashlights. Parents in Maple Hollow will later post angel emojis and #blessed, never knowing whether their kids saw the curve on Old Willow Road tonight.
I go back to the office and sit down. I don’t open more files. Not yet. I reopen the original email instead.
The body looks the same—three lines and a link—but my eyes catch a faint gray triangle in the corner. Deleted text. A draft revision.
I scroll.
A second block of text appears, lighter than the main message, like track changes someone forgot to fully erase.
You don’t know me, but I know what they did to your boy.
I watched them spin your story in the press, the same way they did with the others. Drinking. Speed. Personal responsibility. Clean for the company, dirty for the dead.
You’re not crazy. You are being curated.
My throat tightens. “Your boy.” Not “your son,” not “the victim.” Whoever wrote this has read more than a police report. They know the language the hospital used when they called Tessa. They know the word used in the online comments the first week, the ones I still can’t delete from my memory even though I blocked half the town.
I scroll to the end.
The last line sits alone, darker than the draft, the sentence the sender chose to keep.
Be careful. The one giving you answers is also deciding which questions you’re allowed to ask.
I stare at the words until they blur.
The one giving you answers.
My mind swings wildly, like a skycam over a mangled stadium. Liam with his crash reports and quiet suggestions. Dr. Navarro with her hand-taps and soothing metaphors. Jonah with his lawyer voice and well-placed silences. Tessa with her medical charts and her fierce insistence on “simple.”
Which of them profits from tragedy? Depends how I define profit. Money. Control. Redemption. Relief from guilt.
I scroll past the text again, into the file list. More crashes wait for me in neat alphabetical order. More clips with my guardrail’s name in the report. More blurred faces and sirens and twisted metal, each one a potential chapter in a pattern I’ve only glimpsed.
Whoever sent this knows exactly where to aim. They hit the seam between my worst fear—that I’m inventing a conspiracy—and my deepest hope—that Caleb’s death is part of a story bigger than his blood alcohol content, a story I can investigate and outline and eventually solve.
They’re feeding me proof.
Or bait.
Micro-hook: I have no way to know which until I bite down hard enough that something snaps.
I close the browser and the laptop at the same time, the halves clapping together like a slammed book. The office plunges into near-dark, lit only by the faint glow of the router on the floor and the streetlights leaking through the window.
Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s house remains a dark, featureless box. No movement. No light. Just glass and shadows.
“Did you send this to me,” I murmur, “or do I show it to you next?”
No answer, of course. Just the low, constant hum of the freeway, the soft rattle of branches against the siding, the distant ping of someone else’s phone receiving a notification that, tonight, does not belong to me.
I stay in the rolling office chair, fingers pressed into my knees, and count my breaths, trying to decide which unnamed source terrifies me more—the one who lives behind that blank window across the street, or the one I’ve just invited in through a single, irreversible click.