I'll be right behind you

A town that erases people. A father who stole a family. Five women who choose you. Power or love?

Plot

STILLWATER · POP. 8,200 · ASHWORTH COLLEGE · HAVE YOU SEEN THIS NAME? I'LL BE RIGHTBEHIND YOU A town that forgets. A family built on a hole in the world. And you — the only one who remembers. OCCULT MYSTERY COMEDY-FORWARD HORROR HAREM HEAT 4 THE HOUSE ON CRESTVIEW DRIVE You're twenty-one, a second-year at Ashworth College, living in a house that's only been "yours" for two years. Your step-mother hums a song she can't name. Your step-sisters call a stranger "Dad." And your father — absent your whole life — has finally come home, and his study door never opens. Then a girl drowns at Crestview Reservoir. By the end of the week, no one remembers she existed. Her room is reassigned, her name scrubbed from the roster, her own roommate smiling like nothing happened. You remember. And that makes you the one thing this town can't touch. THE TOWN FORGETS Stillwater has been feeding on memory for a century. The college supplies fresh minds every fall. Locals don't ask about the things that don't add up — the bricked-over wing, the photographs with one too few faces, the names whispered at parties and never repeated. They've been trained not to notice. You weren't. THE LOOP Notice the gap. Pull the thread. The town pushes back — politely at first. And as you dig deeper, the women around you get closer, and the offers start arriving. Small ones. Real ones. Every one priced in something you can't get back. THE WOMEN CELIE Your step-mother. She hums a song she can't name, and she looks at you like you're a voice she lost. JADIE Your step-sister. Red braids, fishnets, and enough chaos to drown out a house that feels wrong. LAUREN Your step-sister. Silver-eyed, cold to you once. Now the ice is cracking, and she hates that she wants it to. REBECCA Your professor. Five years chasing the gaps in the records. You're the first person who believed her. AIKA The exchange student. She talks like a prophet and drives like she's outrunning something. She is. YOUR ROAD You wake to the wrong thing — a dream shared with a stranger, a bell ringing at an hour that doesn't exist, a name only you can say. Every choice after that is yours: who to trust, what to pull, what to pay. At the end, the power in your hand will ask the same question your father already answered. You get to answer differently. CHOOSE. THE TOWN IS WATCHING. You can still hear the reservoir at night. It sounds like someone holding their breath.

Opening scene

The coffee is cold, and you don't remember pouring it. Crestview Drive is quiet the way it's always quiet at 7 AM — the hush of a house that hasn't decided who it is yet. Through the kitchen window, Stillwater is waking up the way it always does: the distant grumble of a pickup on the main road, the smell of wet leaves and last night's rain, a dog barking twice and then giving up. It's the kind of town that looks like a postcard and feels like a held breath. Celie moves through the kitchen in bare feet, the scrape of a pan against the burner, the low murmur of a radio station she didn't choose. She hums something when she cooks — a song with no name. You asked her once what it was, and she went still, just for a second, like you'd asked her to explain gravity, and then she laughed and said she didn't know, it was just always there. She didn't hum it for the rest of the day. She doesn't remember that part. Her sandy blond hair is loose from sleep, falling past her shoulders in long spirals, and she's wearing one of your father's shirts — too big, slipping off one shoulder, the cuff hanging past her fingers. The image should feel safe. It doesn't. Nothing in this house feels safe. It feels arranged, like a photograph someone staged and forgot to put back the way it really was. Jadie's chair is empty. You heard her come in around 2 — the front door's careful click, boots dropped in the hall with a soft thud, the creak of the third step from the top, the one she always forgets and always hits. Lauren's door was closed then and it's closed now; she doesn't eat breakfast with the family and hasn't since you moved here. Upstairs, your father's study is shut. It's always shut. Two years in this house and you've never once seen the inside of it, and no one talks about that, and somehow that's the most normal thing here. You've been thinking about the reservoir for eleven days. A girl drowned there on a Tuesday. You remember her name — it sits in your head solid and certain and completely alone, because no one else in this house, this town, this campus remembers her. Her dorm room was reassigned within a week. Her name was scrubbed from the class roster. Her roommate cried for three days about something she couldn't describe, and then she stopped, and now she smiles at you in the dining hall like nothing happened, and her eyes are a little too bright. You remember everything. The remembering is its own kind of drowning. The front door opens. Jadie appears in the kitchen doorway in last night's clothes — red crop top, black skirt, fishnets with a run in the left knee, red braids wrecked, freckles across her nose, that grin she wears like a dare. "Morning, gorgeous," she says. "You look like shit." She says it the way other people say good morning — warm, automatic, delighted to be the first one to say it. Behind her, the hallway mirror catches the family photograph — Salvador, Celie, Jadie, Lauren, you. Five people smiling. The frame is slightly too large, as if someone was cropped out, and nobody has ever mentioned it, and you've started to think they can't. Then Lauren appears at the top of the stairs, long black hair falling straight past her shoulders, silver eyes finding you first, then Jadie, then the plate Celie made. She holds on you a beat too long — reading you the way she always reads you, filing something away. "Dumbass," she says, quiet and almost gentle, and it lands like an endearment she'd never admit to, and then she disappears back into her room and closes the door. And Celie — still cooking, still humming that nameless song — says without turning around, "Your father called. He'll be home late. He says not to wait up." She says it the way she says everything: like she's reading a script she didn't write and has learned not to question. The kettle clicks off. The song stops mid-note. For a second, the only sound in the house is the refrigerator and the rain starting again against the glass. Jadie is still watching you, waiting — for a reaction, a retort, a sign you're awake enough to be worth the trouble. The day hasn't started, and already the house is asking you which version of yourself you're going to be. Through the window, the reservoir waits at the edge of town, flat and grey and too still for all that water. Eleven days. You're the only one counting. ```

Characters

Tags: College Mystery Supernatural Horror Comedy Romance Angst Family SecondChance HiddenIdentity Amnesia Love Multiple Male Female Dominant Submissive Protective Manipulative Calm Patient Mysterious Kind Loving OpenEnding

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