Her hands were spread in an even distance away from the center scratch. She studied the dirt under her nails. Under most of them. When they pulled her in here, they took a wooden skewer and ungracefully dug the mix of blood and black from under them before placing them into little plastic bags stretched with orange biohazard symbols.

She felt her pulse throbbing against them now. They had nearly taken her nails off entirely and she winced as the female officer gave her a stare colder than the room. They took her shoes and socks too, her jacket. She sat in this room in nothing but a loose-fitting pair of scrub pants that had drawstrings sewn into the waistband. She wore a tank top stained yellow with sweat that had dried and made her skintight.

The door was loud. She didn’t know if that was part of the interrogation technique or the archaic structure of the same station that had stood in the same spot for a millennium. Poor architecture, she guessed.

Detective Lawson was a tired-looking man. He was the stereotypical kind of man who had served overseas, two tours, at least. He had become a cop to ward off long and sleepless nights and slowly worked his way up to detective by putting in the work and filling out the correct forms.

He held a Styrofoam cup that reflected against the overhead light. It reminded her of a pool in a cheap motel smelling of chlorine mixed with sweet smoke from cheap cigarettes. It was only half full and he threw it down hard enough for two good sips to remain. She swallowed her own dryness and didn’t’ move for the drink.

Lawson pulled the metal chair out with a screech and sat down. His body groaned in natural response. She hadn’t noticed the file he carried. She was focused on the greying of his mustache and the dullness of his eyes.

“We’ve read up on you.” He said in his gravelly voice “You’re a very patient woman, Miss Posen.”

Patient? No. She wasn’t patient. She just believed that the human mind would behave as it would. People wouldn’t’ change their behavior. She wasn’t going to bend to make them. Instead, she would watch and calculate, and maybe one day learn. But anger and annoyance, and impatience was a waste of energy.

She stared down at her fingers, spread evenly on the metal table, and wondered if she tapped them, would it spark something in Detective Lawson? She certainly didn’t’ want to rush him into opening the folder. But still, she was curious, indefinitely so, about the evidence he figured he had against her.

You’re not in trouble. He had said when he first asked her to come down to the station. She was enveloped in a calm kind of fear that she hoped didn’t reflect in her stare. She drove behind his station wagon with police plates until they made it to the small brown brick building at the edge of town. She drove carefully, keeping her stare on the speedometer, trying not to press too hard.

She felt like she was in trouble now, after having sat in this room for upwards of two hours. Of course, she didn’t’ know that for sure. There was a clock bolted to the wall on her left but its hands were permanently stuck at 6:30 and it was well past midnight now.

“You have the right to a lawyer if you so please.” He spoke.

“I know.” She said.

“You seem to know a lot of things, Miss Posen. Aside from your whereabouts on the night of October 31st”

“Halloween.”

He nodded and breathed out a thick sigh that added to the desperation of the moment. His breath was hot and sour with the scent of cigarettes and day-old coffee. She remembers the day perfectly. If he came to her in fifteen years, grayer than he is now, she would have remembered everything from the shade of the wallpaper, and the way the bell at the front desk of the motel didn’t’ work. It clanged in a muted tone-deaf way.

“Your fiancé told us everything we need to know.” He said, drumming his own hands on the table “We don’t need your confession, Miss Posen. The only one you’re helping by talking now is yourself.”

She lifted a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. There were two things wrong with that statement: Emily would never turn her in. She wasn’t as strong-willed as Aubrey, but they had promised each other, covered in sticky blood on the exposed balcony, that they wouldn’t say a word. Two: Emily wasn’t her fiancé, she was her wife. As of last month, she was her wife.

“I have nothing to say to you.” Aubrey’s mouth was considerably dry at this point. “I would like to go home. If this isn’t a formal interview, I have every right to do so.”

“We can charge her.” Lawson pushed, a little more desperately. “For interfering with a gravesite. Tampering with evidence. Disturbing a crime scene. That’s twenty years right there.”

If this was another tactic, it could be an effective one. She felt her fingers twitch and Lawson noticed it with his hawklike stare. Her eyes still reflected nothing, not a hint of panic, she made sure of that. But her blood ran cold. The idea of Emily being thrown into prison for twenty-odd years, the same dirt under her fingers, disturbed her.

“or” he put emphasis on the word “Or you can tell us exactly why the two of you were digging up one of the most prominent political figures in the city of St. Helen’s.”

She stared at him in silence. The light above them buzzed and clicked. She intertwined her fingers and leaned forward. The chair underneath her creaked and groaned. He held his breath as if she would say something, anything. “I would like a lawyer, please. I have a right to counsel.”

That would look bad. For the media, that would look bad. But she had instructed Emily to do the same thing. They would request legal-council and keep their mouths shut until they were given a perfectly planned out script. No lawyer would believe them, that’s true, but if they found one slimy enough, they wouldn’t need their belief, just their backing.

Aubrey wasn’t allowed to leave the station. She was in trouble, and she knew that the second they shoved the wooden skewer under her nails to peel away the dirt. They would hold her until she was willing to talk, or until her council got here. Neither of those was an option until morning.

They had taken her jacket along with her shoes, so her feet were cold when they lead her to the holding cell in the back of the station. It wasn’t a big place; a brick room painted a sickly olive green with fluorescent lights and concrete benches lining either side.

It smelled like urine and a woman was curled up in the corner. She had vomited on herself in a drunken stupor. She wore a leopard print dress that cut too short past her knees. She didn’t’ look up when the guards opened the metal door with a slat leading to the outside world.

Aubrey kept her back to the door and took a steadying breath. She hadn’t imagined that her honeymoon would lead her here, to a holding cell with the drunk and disorderly. Barefoot and shivering and wishing that they hadn’t been so cheap and took the tickets to Hawaii instead of staying here.

She lowered herself to the cold bench opposite of the woman who grumbled in her sleep. Aubrey clenched her eyes shut and leaned the back of her head against the brick. She had been naive to think that this would all go away. A dead politician and a missing night clerk didn’t’ just go away. It attracted unwanted attention.

Another hour could have passed, maybe two, before the door opened. The deadbolt clicking away pulled her from her elusive state. She sat up straighter, digging her hands into the concrete. The burning lights made any type of sleep impossible.

She half expected another alcohol-soaked teenager. Instead, it was Emily. She looked worn, her skin pale and her eyes a sunken type of black. She hadn’t any shoes either. They took her flannel, stained with sweat and dirt. It left her in a tank top and a pair of jeans that were equally as muddy.

Her resolve lasted. She kept her back to the guards, trying to gauge the interaction. They gave none. Instead, she walked calmly and sat on the bench across from Aubrey, still far enough away from the company neither wanted to keep. Her nose crinkled at the rancid scent.

“Hi,” Emily breathed out.

“Hi.”

She wanted to pull the woman into her embrace, to warm her so that her bare arms didn’t’ mark all the signs of being nearly frozen. Aubrey’s fingers twitched again. Her wife had held it together quite nicely, they both had, but she fought against her shoulders trembling. Once it started it wouldn't stop.

“Did you call Chloe?” Emily asked.

“Yeah… you?”

“No. Beca.”

Aubrey nodded. The two were the fiercest Lawyer’s anyone could get. Beca had studied prosecution, but her sharp tongue and angry flare was enough to scare anyone straight. Aubrey blinked hard, remembering the dinner parties with acidic wine. Her only worry then was the chicken she had slid into the oven being too dry. If it was, neither of them said a word.

“Beca sounded like she was pulling her clothes on.” Emily had a ghost of a small smile “So maybe we won’t have to wait until daybreak.”

“Maybe,” She frowned, leaning forward. Her body ached something mighty. “Are you alright?”

“As alright as I can be.”

Aubrey wouldn’t let herself cry. Emily’s voice had cracked. Here wasn’t the place for everything to boil to the surface. But still- she couldn’t help herself. She stood and crossed the gap, so she sat right next to the woman she loved. Emily tensed at the idea but melted. She leaned her head against Aubrey’s shoulder with a halfway decent sigh of content.

“Do me a favor,” Aubrey whispered, barely audible “Next time you accidentally unleash an ancient evil on our honeymoon, make sure a mayoral candidate isn’t in the room next to ours.”

“Thanks,” said a bleary-eyed Beca as she took the key. They’d just been on a plane for around twelve hours, and they were exhausted. It was around noon in London, but her body was still on LA time, which meant she felt like it was 4 am, and she’d barely slept on the plane at all. Chloe had slept a bit more than Beca, but she was still sleepy and jetlagged.

A porter helped the two women to their room, and he politely reminded the women to call the front desk if they had any problems. “Actually, call me directly if you have any problems. It’ll be faster.” He wrote his extension on the notepad by the phone.

“I just want to sleep for days,” said Beca, once he’d left the room.

“Me too, but I want to see everything here,” said Chloe. “Maybe a short nap?”

Beca agreed, set an alarm on her phone for two hours later, and both women fell asleep almost instantly.

Beca groaned when the alarm went off. Chloe distracted Beca from her grumpiness by doing that thing Beca liked with her tongue, and, after Beca returned the favor, the two women headed out for some sightseeing in London.

They were both in better spirits after seeing a bunch of the sights - Chloe had insisted on singing “London Bridge” at the tower bridge, and Beca had been bummed that seeing the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace would have to wait until the next day. They’d toured the National Gallery, but they hadn’t gotten a chance to see everything before the place closed. They decided they’d look around the next day on their own, and maybe they’d book a guided tour for the following day.

Beca insisted on going somewhere expensive for dinner and getting wine, and the two practically stumbled into their hotel room afterward, drunk, but not too far gone.

They made love again before falling asleep intertwined.

Chloe got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. She shivered as she got out of bed, wondering if she should turn up the heat before getting back into bed. She didn’t want to turn on a light and disturb Beca, so she figured she’d deal with it in the morning. As she went back toward the bed to climb back in with her wife, she saw a ball of light.

“Becs?” Chloe asked. “Were you looking for me?”

Beca didn’t respond, and Chloe saw the ball of light begin to change form. It appeared to turn into a man in old formal wear. Chloe was frozen in place, unable to scream.

However, as the figure appeared to float toward the bed and her sleeping wife, Chloe immediately found her voice and let out an ear-piercing shriek.

Beca sat up in bed with a start and turned on the bedside lamp. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

Chloe looked around the room. There was nobody there except the two of them, and she wasn’t even cold anymore.

“I guess I must have been having a nightmare,” said Chloe. “Was I sleepwalking?”

“I’ve never known you to sleepwalk, babe. Maybe it’s the wine and the time change?”

“Maybe so.”

Chloe climbed back into bed, relaxing in her wife’s arms. She soon fell back to sleep, having convinced herself she’d been having a crazy nightmare.

The next morning, the two had breakfast in a restaurant in their hotel.

“Tell me about the nightmare, Chlo.”

Chloe shook her head.

Beca took her hand. “What had you so scared?” she asked.

“I...it was nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“It’s fine. You’re my wife now.”

Chloe smiled. “I like that word.”

“Me too.”

The two women chatted about their plans for the day. Beca was excited to see the changing of the guards, and they both wanted to give the National Gallery a better look. They asked at the front desk about a guided tour, and the clerk gave them a list of recommendations.

They stopped back into their room to freshen up, and they opened up Beca’s laptop to book the next day’s tour online.

That night, they had another lavish dinner out, again with too much wine.

They climbed into bed, and after making love again, they fell asleep.

Chloe woke up around 3 am to find herself on the floor with her wife standing over her. She blinked a few times before asking, “What happened?”

“I don’t know, Chlo. I heard a thud, and you were on the floor.”

“That’s weird. I must have rolled out of bed.”

“Are you okay?”

Chloe rubbed her head. “I think so. I might have bumped my head a little.”

“Do you want me to get you some ice? I can probably call that porter and have him bring you an ice pack.”

“No. I just want to go back to sleep,” Chloe said with a yawn.

Chloe woke up before her wife the next morning. She gave her wife a kiss on the cheek before heading to the bathroom to get a quick shower in before the tour. She heard Beca scream just as she was turning off the water.

She pulled on one of the complimentary bathrobes and ran out of the bathroom.

Beca pointed at the door. Before Chloe could ask her what the problem was, she saw it too.

“Beca, did someone...or something just walk through our closed and locked door?”

“You saw that?”

Beca nodded. She paused for a beat. “Chloe, what was that nightmare you had the other night?”

Chloe told her about the ball of light that had turned into a man.

“I think this place is haunted,” said Beca. “I wonder if that’s why you fell out of bed last night. Maybe you were--”

Chloe cut her off. “Beca, I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

“Me neither,” said Beca. “Pack up and I’ll check us out. There’s got to be somewhere else we can stay.”

Chloe got dressed, and they packed their things in record time. Chloe hadn’t even bothered to dry her hair before leaving the hotel room.

As they headed down the hall toward the elevator, they saw an old man in a butler’s uniform with holey socks roaming the hall. He didn’t move out of their way, and, as they were about to let go of each other’s hands, he passed right through them.