[Edmund’s POV]
So here's the thing about being a rational adult man with a sleeping toddler at home and a perfectly good highway fifteen metres to my left—I should be on it. Mum texted the all-clear forty minutes ago, complete with the thermometer emoji she deploys when she thinks I don't own enough scarves.
And yet my hands are still on this wheel, engine running, parked in Kettleworth like some unhinged stalker who bills by the hour. The wing mirror shows nothing except dark pavement and a fox who clearly has better plans.
She asked me to stop two streets early—the exact distance between wherever she's going and whatever she thinks I can't handle seeing. The fact that she measured it so precisely should tell me everything.
One more minute. I'll give it one more minute and then I'll drive home like a normal person who respects boundaries and doesn't sit in parked cars having arguments with himself.
The glass shatters that plan along with whatever window it used to be—sharp, loud, the kind of sound that finds you through a closed car door like it was looking for you specifically. Then a man's voice, not words anymore, just volume, the ugly kind.
My seatbelt's off and my shoes hit pavement and my brain catches up about three steps later going oh, so we're doing this then. The sound pulls me left, past a wheelie bin and a window where the curtain's hanging on by a prayer.
Front door's unlocked—not open, just unlocked, the way a door is when someone came through it running. The hallway smells like something fermented, and the shouting funnels from the second door on the left.
I push through and the room hits me in pieces. A man—heavy, fifties, face like he's been pickling himself from the inside—gripping a broken bottle by the neck, jagged end first, glass all over the linoleum.
And Cora. Arms out, feet planted, standing between him and the girl behind her like she's done this a thousand times—because she has, I can see it in her stance, no hesitation, no scramble.
Blythe—has to be Blythe—is pressed against the counter holding her phone in both fists, knuckles bone-white. She looks exactly like the sister Cora mentioned once over Thai food.
Cora's face is what gets me. Not panic—something way past that, something practiced, like she knows every step of this choreography because she made them up herself to survive.
"Dennis, put it down." And there it is—that voice, flat and measured, the exact same tone she uses to tell me my four o'clock is holding. "You're drunk and you're done."
"Don't you tell me what to do in my own—" He lunges, bottle first, and behind Cora the girl makes a sound that goes straight through the back of my skull and stays there.
I cross the kitchen in three steps and grab his wrist, twisting until the bottle clatters to the linoleum. He swings wild with the other hand—sloppy, obvious, broadcasting from a mile away—and I hit him once, square on the jaw, everything behind it.
He drops. Just—down, like someone pulled a plug. The bottle neck rolls across the floor and taps my shoe, and the kitchen goes so quiet I can hear the fridge and Blythe's breathing coming in short little pulls like she's rationing air.
"Cora." My knuckles are throbbing and my voice sounds like someone ran it over gravel. "Are you alright?"
She nods—fast, automatic, the kind of nod you learn when people ask that question every time and the answer is always supposed to be yes. "Thank you. You really shouldn't have come in, but—thank you."
"Are you hurt?" I look at Blythe, who is shaking and gripping that phone like evidence she hasn't decided what to do with yet. "Either of you—hurt anywhere?"
"We're fine." Cora steps right over Dennis's legs (and I vaguely remember the name being mentioned as Cora’s father in her personal file, and it makes me nauseous) without looking down—casual, automatic, like stepping over furniture that's always been in the way. She gets to Blythe and her hand wraps around the girl's elbow.
"B, look at me." Her voice shifts into something softer, completely different from the woman who just stared down a broken bottle. "He's down and we're standing."
"He had a bottle, Cora." Blythe's voice is thin and furious and vibrating. "A broken bottle and you just stood there like—"
"Because standing there worked." Cora tucks Blythe's hair behind her ear, gentle, automatic—the gesture I watched her make on Friday. "It worked, and now it's done."
"It's never done." Blythe's chin is shaking but her eyes are completely dry and livid. "You keep saying that and it keeps happening."
"Not tonight." Cora's thumb moves slow across Blythe's cheek. "Not while I'm standing right here, B."
"Who even is he?" Blythe's gaze swings to me, sharp enough to cut through the shaking. "Why is your boss in our kitchen at midnight?"
"Because he doesn't know how to listen when someone tells him to drive home." Cora's voice cracks—just at the edge, just barely, the first fracture I've heard since I walked through that door. "Not now, B."
The siren finds us before the lights do—distant, then not distant, then very much here, someone in this building with thin walls and a phone they've clearly used before.
Cora's head snaps toward the window and every single thing I watched hold steady through a broken bottle goes rigid with something completely different. Her hand locks on Blythe's arm.
"Police will want statements." I keep my voice steady, the calm-room voice James says could talk a cat out of a tree. "Self-defence, I saw everything, this is straightforward."
"You need to go." Eyes fixed on the window, voice stripped bare. "You drove home after dropping me off and you never stepped foot in this building."
"Cora, I'm not leaving you here with him unconscious and the police thirty seconds out." My hand is throbbing and my jaw aches through my temples.
"Edmund, listen to me." She turns, and whatever is in her face kills every word I had queued up, dissolves them somewhere behind my ribs. She's not looking at Dennis, not the glass, not the blood.
She's staring at the door—at the hallway beyond it, at the sound of boots walking toward an apartment with a drunk man on the floor and a sixteen-year-old nobody's fit to claim.
"If they walk in and see this, they take her from me." Everything she's built—the composure, the deflection, that borrowed blazer holding the shape of a person who's fine, who’s not her—gone, all of it, stripped clean. "Tonight, Edmund."
Blue light hits the ceiling, then the walls, then her face—strobing, cold, turning this kitchen into something that belongs in a file and not in a life. Red follows half a beat later, painting the broken glass.
Blythe presses into Cora's side. Cora's arm goes around her—fast, tight, a barrier made from her own body because it's the only one she has left.
The siren cuts out. Car doors slam—one, two—and boots hit pavement right outside the building's entrance.
"Please." One word, and it costs her more than everything else in this room combined. I know because Cora Whitfield doesn't say that word—hasn't once, not in two weeks, not ever.
Radio static bleeds through the entrance and a voice calls out something official I can't hear over my own pulse. Blythe's fingers are white on Cora's sleeve, Cora's eyes haven't moved from mine, and the blue light turns everything the colour of something already decided.