Chapter Eleven

Fay was lying in bed with her blanket pulled over her. She slept a lot, but she hadn’t done it in her bed in months. Ms. Montgomery offered it to her when she moved in, but it seemed like a luxury that she didn’t deserve. The couch or carpet in the corner usually sufficed, but since Edward reminded her of the possibility of visits, she had new motivation to keep up appearances. The bottles and cans were piled up in the closet and a few spots on the carpet had been cleaned up. She had slept a little easier since the idea. It was only seven o’clock in the evening, but she was tired and hadn’t closed her eyes in days. She had been blinking in and out of consciousness since that morning.

The doorbell rang, but she assumed that it was someone selling something or just someone from church handing out pamphlets. Inside of the minute, it rang once again, but Fay just guessed that if it was important, Ms. Montgomery would take it. Then again, she was most likely asleep.

Fay had almost fallen asleep herself for second when the doorbell rang again, making it three times. A man’s voice yelled from the other side, but she wasn’t in a state to be able to understand it. There was heavy knocking, and Fay concluded that whoever it was wasn’t going to leave. Ms. Montgomery was just coming up the stairs when the knocking turned into urgent pounding and the yelling grew into a stream of white noise.

She heard the door finally opening and Ms. Montgomery saying something in a hurried, high-pitched voice. Fay’s eyes flit open when she heard Fenella Burgess being demanded for from whoever was in the doorway. She hadn’t heard anyone say that name in an eternity. Fay threw the blanket off of herself upon the sight of movement obscuring the light from the glaze over her eyes.

All of the blood in her body rushed to her face. The policeman that stood in front of her was a few inches above six feet with somewhat of a pot-belly and a bushy, black beard. He must have been in his late forties. And his fists wrapped around the baton and the gun on his belt�"that was what terrified her.

“Fenella Burgess,” he said, in a nightmarishly deep voice. “We have grounds to search your house under suspicion for possession of illegal narcotics.”

Finally, her vision became clear, and she felt something in her chest give in as her ribs collapsed around her heart. Her first instinct was to swing at the air in front of her as hard as she could hoping that somehow she would hit Edward and make him bleed. The b*****d was standing behind the cop, eyeing her up and down. It was hard to tell, but it looked like he was trembling. For everything that he had just done, he wasn’t even looking her in the eye. Ms. Montgomery came into view, hiding helplessly and silently in the background as two more cops burst into the room to raid cabinets and throw pillows to the ground. They were tearing apart her home.

“I told you not to tell anyone,” she said. She was desperately trying to stare at him, but he refused to pick his eyes up the floor. He couldn't even be bothered to help the cops pillage the house. He just stood with his arms dangling uselessly by his side, not able to look at anything now but the floor inches in front of his feet.

The cop in front of her started rattling off protocol. It all never got past her skull. She was as fixated on him as he was on keeping her eyes out of his line of sight.

“God damn it, look at me!” she screamed. The cop gave up on patience and reached for her wrist. Fay could feel the moment that the synapse fired in her brain and she realized that it was all going to be over, so she leapt to her feet and dove towards Edward. She was going to have him face what he'd done if she had to tear his head off his neck.

The cop grabbed her arms before she could and held them behind her in a way that stopped her from feeling her fingers. She kicked and screamed, and Edward had begun to walk away down the stairs and out of sight. If the cop wasn’t holding her up, she would have fallen on her face. Her knees had given out from under her, and the cop was essentially keeping her upright with his arm. She felt his grip on her arm in her bones.

“Caden,” said one of the other cops�"a thin, lanky man with short, red hair. From Fay’s peripheral vision, she saw him holding up a large plastic bag, and she just assumed what was inside. “Must be from the Spartans.”

“One step closer to booking Pluto.” said the cop holding Fay. He waited until her knees had stopped shaking to start pushing her forward. She tried to make her steps as small as she could, just in case something would happen and she wouldn’t be taken in. No such luck, and it just made the cop grow more impatient. He started pushing her along quicker, holding her arm above the wrist.

She didn’t see Ms. Montgomery, but she guessed that she was watching from some sort of shadowy spot where she’d hopefully be glanced over. She would be taken in after for questioning too, but she wasn’t the one who looked like death and could barely stand. Besides�"Edward wouldn’t do that to his mother. He was fine doing it to her, though. The only time that Fay and Edward made eye contact for a fraction of a second was when Fay had been shoved into the police car. He had been waiting by the door the entire time. The car windows were tinted, so Edward looked up, but he sensed her looking back through the glass as soon as he did and avoided the car like the plague after. He stayed by the door for a few moments after talking to a cop, but Fay was driven down the street inside of the hour. She knew that the jail time was bound to be three or four years. The drive itself lasted an eternity. The sentence was going to be torture, and unlike Edward, she couldn’t run from her problems.