[Cora’s POV]
The first officer through the door is a woman, and she takes one look at Dennis on the linoleum and reaches for her radio. The second steps past her and sweeps the kitchen the way someone reads a headline: glass, blood, unconscious man, two women.
I have approximately four seconds to build a version of tonight that keeps Blythe in this apartment.
"Officers, this is under control." I step forward, palms open—nothing to see, nothing worth paperwork. "My father had too much to drink. He dropped a bottle. It's been a long night, but everyone's fine."
The woman looks at the glass, then at Edmund's knuckles—split, swelling, smeared with something that isn't his. Her pen hovers over the clipboard, patient, like it already knows I'm lying and is giving me the courtesy of finishing.
"And the gentleman on the floor?" She crouches beside Dennis, two fingers to his neck. "He drop himself as well?"
My tongue stalls against the roof of my mouth because the answer that protects Blythe is yes, he fell, and the answer that's true is standing three feet to my left with blood on his hand.
"He was attacking them with a broken bottle." Edmund's voice cuts across the kitchen—clear, precise, the boardroom voice that handles quarterly reports. "I heard the disturbance from outside and intervened. He was advancing on both of them."
Every organ in my chest drops three inches. I turn to him and whatever he reads in my face makes something behind his expression fracture—but it's too late. The words are in the room, on the clipboard, becoming the official version of a night I needed to be nothing.
And I wasn’t—so now they’ll take Blythe, and I’ll have no control of it, no ability to help her or make sure she’s fine, because I’m not her legal guardian—
The female officer speaks into her radio. I catch it in fragments: domestic incident, minor present, custodial parent incapacitated. Each phrase is a brick being pulled from the floor beneath me.
"The girl." She turns back to me, pen finally touching paper, and the ink makes a small dark dot where it lands. "She's your...?"
"My sister. Blythe, sixteen." My voice is level, cooperative, the voice for managing situations and problems. "This looks worse than it is. Blythe is safe with me—she's always been safe with me."
"Is there another parent or guardian?" She glances between us, and the arithmetic I've been running from for years starts solving itself right here on our linoleum.
"I'm her guardian. Primary caretaker for years." The words leave smooth and whole, and behind them my molars grind hard enough to reach my temples.
"Legal guardian?" She glances up from the clipboard, and the two words are heavier than they have any right to be—heavy enough that I’m terrified to answer. "Court-appointed?"
The kitchen compresses—linoleum, glass, blue light pulsing through the curtain—all of it shrinking into the silence between her question and the answer I don't have. My nails carve crescents into my palms.
"I'm in the process of filing." Each syllable costs something I'll never get back. She writes, and the pen sounds like a verdict being scratched into stone.
Edmund gives his statement with the thoroughness, as if honesty is a strategy, and every detail—the bottle, the screaming, how Dennis lunged—tightens the wire around Blythe's name.
I answer everything they ask with a calm I've rehearsed in nightmares since Blythe turned thirteen. Yes, he drinks. No, not usually this bad.
Then the blue Vauxhall. A woman climbs out carrying a lanyard and a folder and the expression that tells me that she has sat in a hundred kitchens exactly like this one.
"Linda Marsh, emergency social services." She scans the apartment over my shoulder. "I understand there's a minor in the home without a legal guardian present."
"I'm right here." My hand grips the doorframe—not leaning, blocking. "I have stable employment. I can provide for her."
"I've reviewed the officers' report." She holds the folder against her hip the way Diane Pruitt held mine—gently, which is always the warning. "Without secondary legal standing, Blythe is classified as an unaccompanied minor."
"She's not unaccompanied—I'm standing in front of you." My knuckles on the doorframe have gone white, each tendon visible under the skin.
"I understand how this feels, Miss Whitfield." Her voice is steady and kind and I want to put my fist through the wall behind her. "But I need to arrange emergency placement tonight."
The floor shifts beneath me—two degrees, maybe three—and I wonder if this is what it felt like for my mother: the ground tilting while everyone else stands on solid tile.
"Cora?" Blythe's fingers close around my sleeve, each knuckle a separate pressure point against my arm. "What's happening?"
I turn to her. Her sketchbook is pressed under her arm—she grabbed it before anything else, same as always. I tuck the strand of hair behind her ear, my thumb brushing the birthmark, and the contact sends something through my chest that has no business existing in a room full of uniforms.
"It's temporary, B." My throat works twice before the rest comes. "A few days. I'm going to fix this."
"You keep saying that." Her grip on my sleeve could bend steel. "You keep saying that, Cora."
"Because I keep meaning it." I take her face in my hands, her skin cold under my palms. If I look at anything else—the officers, Edmund with his useless bloody honesty—I won't stay vertical.
The officers haul Dennis up and escort him to the vehicle. Linda walks Blythe to the car.
My sister doesn't cry. She learned that from me, and I'd give everything I own to undo it. At the kerb she turns once—green eyes, same shade as mine, same shade as a boy in a photograph six miles away—then the door closes and the taillights shrink to nothing.
The street goes quiet. Ordinary. Wet pavement, dead streetlight, as if no one who mattered ever stood on it.
"This is my fault." Edmund. Still here. "I should have driven away when you asked me. Tell me what—"
"You told them." I turn on him and my voice comes out stripped bare. "I was handling it. I had a version of tonight that kept her here, and you walked in and handed them every reason to take her."
"He had a weapon, Cora." His hand reaches for my arm and I step back, the space between us turning to glass. "I couldn't lie to the police."
"Then you should have been in your car." My hands are shaking—fine, rapid, unhideable. "I told you to leave. I begged you. And you stayed and told the truth and now she's in the back of that car."
"Let me help fix this." His voice cracks at the seam. "You can't do this alone—not tonight."
"I've been doing this alone since I was seventeen." I hold his gaze until something behind his eyes gives. "Go home to your son."
Three seconds on the pavement. Then he nods—one dip—and walks to his car. Headlights sweep the building, pull away around the same corner that took Blythe.
Inside, Blythe's room is exactly as she left it. Sheets twisted, lamp burning, pencil shavings on the carpet. Her sketchbook on the pillow, open to the half-finished bird—one wing complete, every feather precise, the other just an outline.
I pull it into my lap and sit on the bed that still holds the shape of her. My thumb traces the finished wing and graphite smudges against my skin.
The bird stares up from the page—half-done, grounded, waiting for a hand that isn't coming back.