[Cora’s POV]
Four legal aid numbers, three voicemails, one human being who answered at eleven p.m. and told me appeals take six weeks minimum. The appeal draft is in my bag, twelve pages, rewritten twice, my handwriting gone to ruin by the final paragraph.
I pass the third-floor corridor on autopilot—badge, desk, coffee, survive—and my legs stop working outside the conference room. Blythe is sitting at the long table.
My vision narrows to a pinhole. Sketchbook open, takeaway hot chocolate steaming beside her elbow, and Oliver's red toy car parked beside her arm like someone placed it there with ceremony.
My bag slides off my shoulder and hits the floor. My lungs forget the mechanics of breathing—in, out, the whole system offline, rebooting, failing the reboot.
She's here. In this building, on this floor, in a chair six feet from me with graphite on her fingers and a pencil cocked at the angle that used to get her yelled at by every art teacher in Kettleworth.
Blythe looks up. Green eyes—mine, Mum's—and she says "Cora" in a voice that cracks the last seventy-two hours wide open, every sleepless minute, every unanswered call.
I cross the room in four steps. I pull her out of the chair and into me so hard the hot chocolate rocks on its base, and her arms go around my neck and her face buries into my shoulder.
She's taller than I remember. Or I'm smaller. This week has compressed me into something held together by caffeine and the stubbornness, the refusal to sit down when the floor drops out.
My hand finds the back of her head and holds it there, fingers tangled in her hair, and a sound comes out of my chest that I will deny under oath until the day I die.
She smells like someone else's laundry detergent, like a house that isn't ours, and that detail finds a nerve I wasn't braced for. Someone else washed her clothes. Someone else kept her fed and sleeping while I sat on hold with legal aid.
"You're here." My voice is wrecked—two octaves lower than professional, scraping against my throat like it's dragging itself up from somewhere I buried it. "How are you here?"
"Your boss kidnapped me." Muffled against my collarbone. "Showed up this morning with a car and a hot chocolate like some kind of corporate social worker."
A laugh scrapes out of me, raw and involuntary—the kind that lives next door to something much worse. Then Edmund is in the doorway, and the laugh dies in my mouth.
He's leaning against the frame, jacket off, sleeves at the forearms. "I applied for emergency foster placement," he says, each word measured. "The morning after that night. Charlotte Webb handled the paperwork."
The conference room tilts two degrees left. My fingers are still gripping Blythe's sleeve, knuckles bone-white. "You applied—eleven days ago, and you said nothing?"
"Emergency placements are provisional." He doesn't come closer. "If the applicant discloses before the panel finalises, they revoke approval. I wasn't allowed to tell you, Cora."
Eleven days. He sat across from me for eleven days—passing me coffee, reviewing my spreadsheets, watching me fall apart in his office chair—with my sister's address in his pocket.
His thumb presses hard against his index finger. "I tried. Thursday, at your desk—I said I needed to talk to you about something important. You walked out to call the caseworker."
The memory detonates behind my ribs: his face in the corridor, mouth open around a word, the lift doors closing. I was dialling with shaking hands while he held the one answer that mattered.
"And yesterday? While I sat in your chair telling you about the—” No, I can’t invite questions from Blythe, she doesn’t know about my apparently relevant criminal record. “Everything—you already knew."
"Yes." No deflection. "I made the call that telling you mid-breakdown would turn the conversation into something about power and overreach instead of what it actually was."
My jaw is doing something I can't control—working sideways, grinding, a war between thank you and how dare you being fought entirely in my molars.
"What it actually was." I taste every syllable. "A man I work for, filing legal guardianship over my sister without telling me."
"A man who watched your father hold a bottle to your face and couldn't do nothing." His voice drops low enough to change the pressure in the room. "Paperwork cleared this morning. I picked her up at seven-thirty."
The sentence sits between us. He drove to a stranger's house at dawn and brought my sister back, and I wasn't even awake to know it was happening.
Blythe shifts beside me and nudges my elbow, her timing impeccable as always. "He brought pastries too. In case that helps his case."
My throat works twice around nothing. Edmund Hale—my boss, Oliver's father—now carries more legal authority over Blythe than I do. The man who saved her and the man who holds the leash are the same person.
"Thank you." I mean every letter. My back teeth press together hard enough to send a line of tension from my jaw to my temples. "Edmund—thank you for keeping her safe."
He nods once, reading everything my body is broadcasting. Blythe picks up her hot chocolate and watches us over the rim with devastating patience.
"So I'm living with your boss." She sets the cup down. "That's the current arrangement everyone's comfortable with."
"It's temporary." Edmund's gaze moves to her. "Until things are sorted and Cora's appeal goes through."
Blythe looks between us—him in the doorway, me with my bag on the floor and my hands unable to settle—and says absolutely nothing. From a sixteen-year-old, silence is a scalpel.
A small body barrels past Edmund's legs wielding paper like a battle flag. "Blythe! I drawed a dinosaur—it's a T-Rex but Daddy says it looks like a potato—again."
Blythe takes the paper with both hands and studies it with the gravity of a curator evaluating a masterwork. "This is clearly a T-Rex. Your dad doesn't know what he's talking about."
Oliver beams, and Blythe laughs—short, real, the first one since before the broken glass. The sound reaches somewhere behind my sternum and cracks it along a seam I didn't know existed.
Edmund crouches beside Oliver, one hand on the boy's back, and the room rearranges itself into a shape I never authorized. Blythe sketches teeth on Oliver's drawing while he bounces on Edmund's knee.
My sister. My son. The man who ended up holding both of them while I stood in stairwells and slept in hostels and wrote appeal letters until my pen ran dry. I am standing at the edge of a life that assembled itself without my permission.
Then Edmund looks up at me from the floor—Oliver curled in his lap, Blythe drawing beside them—and his face is completely bare. No performance. No agenda.
Just a man holding his child and looking at me as if the empty space in this room has always been shaped like me. My hands find the back of the nearest chair and grip until my knuckles ache.
Every future I'd planned just rearranged itself around a man on the floor who is looking at me like I belong in a frame I have no right to enter. And the worst part—the part I will deal with never—is that my body is leaning toward it.