Annabel Lee ─ emily prentiss

thirteen

THE rest of the day was a lot of paperwork for Emily while Dani looked for an emergency foster home for Bel. Their Christmas plans were completely fucked; Emily needed to leave for D.C. first thing the next morning to handle home inspections and interviews and about eighty other steps in the approval process. They said a tearful goodbye right before Bel's temporary foster parents—people who seemed nice enough but utterly frazzled—came to pick her up.

Bel slept less than two hours that night. She always had trouble sleeping the first night in a new placement, but it was more than that. Now that her brain had processed what happened at the Howells', it could focus on the Emily situation, and her thoughts were moving so fast it made her sick to her stomach. Some of them were completely irrational. She knew that. That didn't mean she could stop it.

Her mind had two voices. One of them was distinctively Bel, the logical, down-to-earth voice that could analyze things realistically. It was the voice that knew how to size people up with decent accuracy after years of experience. That part of her trusted Emily not to hurt her the way people like the Howells had (when what happened to Bel happened to people she knew, she saw it for what it was: abuse. When it happened to her, she couldn't bring herself to call it that, because it felt like she deserved it).

The other voice was the self-preservation part of her that catastrophized and overthought and only saw the worst possible outcome of any decision. The worse things got for Bel, the louder that voice became. Sometimes it got so loud that she couldn't hear her own thoughts, like when she freaked out walking home. It screamed at her all night, trying to convince her that Emily would be no different than the Howells. Eventually, Bel would fuck up, and Emily would snap, and history would repeat itself, except it would be even worse than before because she trusted Emily. Foster parents she didn't trust could only hurt her so much. Someone she trusted and cared about hurting her would break her. She didn't think she had enough will left to survive that.

Emily went out of her way to be there for Bel when no one else was, taking time out of her day to help Bel out of a mental breakdown, even when she was at work. She used the little vacation time she had to take the five-hour drive up to New York and spent what was probably a considerable amount of money on a hotel reserved a week before Christmas just to see Bel. She could have left when things went to hell at the Howells' yesterday, but she didn't. She'd never given Bel a single reason not to trust her. Bel kept repeating that to herself trying to drown out the all-consuming anxiety. It worked for a little while, but never long enough for her to relax enough to fall asleep.

Eventually, not even her anxiety could overpower her fatigued body. Bel fell asleep at about 6 AM, then woke up at 7:30 to her foster mom arguing with her son about cleaning his room.

"Who is awake enough to argue before eight AM on winter break?" Mia, the family's other foster daughter, had muttered, rubbing her eyes. This bedroom had two twin beds on either side. She slept in the left one, and Bel slept in the right one. "I hope she punishes that creep."

According to her, the son, who was 17, had a thing for ogling girls. He stared at them constantly, "accidentally" brushed against their bodies, and occasionally cracked the bathroom or bedroom doors open to see them change. Mia said when she and other girls who came through here reported it, the parents basically just gave the boy a small slap on the wrist. They took away his CD player for a little while, grounded him for a day, other minimal punishments like that. Bel hadn't witnessed it yet, but she had enough experience with guys like that to believe Mia.

Bel got dressed with the bathroom door locked. After breakfast, she bent over to put her bowl in the dishwasher, and she felt someone's hand on her thigh. The boy was standing over her when she turned around. Suddenly, the walls were closing in, and she had the irrepressible urge to run. She bolted out of the kitchen and ran back upstairs into the room where she was staying, shutting the door behind herself. She pulled her phone off its charger and dialed Evelyn's number in desperation.