*
When Saffy finally reached the station, the sun had set, and she’d missed a full day of work. She straightened her blazer, familiar with this feeling from her days ditching class. A determined uncaring, laced with dread around the edges.
The station was oddly busy, the troopers humming with collective excitement. They hushed when they saw her, shirt wrinkled and untucked, jacket stained with coffee down the front. Saffy headed straight for the captain’s office door and pushed it open without knocking.
“Sergeant—”
The scene materialized, zooming slowly into focus: Moretti stumbled in her heels, gripping the mahogany desk for balance. She and the captain had sprung apart at Saffy’s entrance, awkward, red, and rattled.
“Where the hell have you been all day?” Moretti began.
“I found him,” Saffy said, a stammer, her resolve teetering. She had never seen Moretti like this, bumbling, embarrassed. The pieces of the scene were clicking into place. The shrewd slip of the captain’s hand when Saffy first walked in. His knuckles, cupping the curve of Moretti’s back pocket.
“Ansel Packer,” Saffy stuttered. “I found him. His fiancée was wearing Lila’s ring. The trinkets, Sergeant. He took them.”
A slow, blinking pause. The captain’s voice was low and raspy, his gaze leering as it stripped her down.
“Moretti, get a hold of your subordinate.”
“Wait,” Saffy said. “I found evidence. Actual evidence—”
“Singh,” Moretti interrupted, “if you had attended your own job today, or answered any of my pages, you would know that an arrest has been made. Nicholas Richards will be arraigned in the morning.”
The homeless man. The captain’s favorite suspect. The flood of the lights was oppressive, the room turned gauzy—Saffy’s exhaustion arrived, a single swoop landing heavy on her shoulders. Her own recklessness seemed to seep, wet from her body, chastising, like bloodstained underwear.
“You disobeyed me,” Moretti said. “My instructions were clear, and you explicitly ignored them. Kensington got us everything we needed.”
“I’m sorry, but I found—”
“This is not about you, Singh. This is not about some childhood grudge. This is police work. It’s about truth, about fact, and at the end of the day, it’s about this department.”
“So that’s it, then? That’s what you’re calling this?” She gestured to Moretti, the captain, both their faces still flushed raw. “The department?”
A vicious wind, shifting. Saffy had never before talked back to Moretti.
“Probation,” the captain said dismissively, stepping past them both. “Two weeks without pay. Singh, you’re dismissed.”
When he was gone, Moretti only stared at the tattered carpet. The shock of what she had just seen—what she’d just interrupted—whooshed through Saffy’s gut, delayed, like a punch. What had Moretti always told her? Less than ten percent of law enforcement is made up of women. You cannot succeed without sacrifice.
Saffy slunk from the office, disgraced. The troopers snickered as she slipped back into the crisp autumn night, certain she had witnessed a truth she was already supposed to know.
*
The nightmares came. Saffy woke, drenched and trembling, piles of laundry looming from the floor like childhood monsters as she gulped down the stale water on her nightstand.
Sometimes the nightmares featured the fox, hovering sickly around the corners of Saffy’s vision, a cloud of rotting flesh. More often, they featured Lila, standing in the door of Saffy’s studio apartment. Eleven-year-old Lila with her retainer, or teenage Lila with her nose ring, decomposed Lila with those clumps of hair still attached to her scalp. But on the worst nights, Lila was alive.
She would have been twenty-six years old. A yellow sundress, a green backyard. The Fourth of July. Lila would have glowed, all pollen and sunscreen, a crowd of friends in plastic chairs on the porch—she would have clasped her hands along her middle, that purple ring twinkling on the hump of her bulging stomach. Thirty-two weeks. Nauseous and anticipating, the morning sickness replaced with an ache in her spine. She would have been hungry, her giant belly growling with the smell of hickory meat; she would have been tired and ecstatic and anxious and thrilled. The pale ghost of the moon, the zap of a firefly. Her bare heels, sinking into the soft of the earth.
*
Near the end of her probation, Saffy went to the tavern alone.
She had not left her apartment in days. Twice, she’d driven out to Ansel Packer’s, sat in her car, and watched the house for any sign of movement. She knew it was not healthy. She knew it was not reasonable. But her failure with Moretti had only hardened her resolve.