He had promised her he would come to bed in a little bit. That he was just going to work for a little longer, but that he would be with her soon. When she wakes up at three in the morning, his side of the bed is still empty. His side of the bed is still neatly made, just how she had left it this morning. So she moves out of the bed, her feet slipping into the slippers before she heads quietly down the stairs. She doesn’t want to wake him just in case he’s fallen asleep on the couch.
But he hasn’t. He’s still at the kitchen table, bent over a ton of paperwork. It’s dark inside the house with the exception of the light above the table. She watches from the doorway for a moment, seeing him look at what seems to be a picture. “Hey,” she says, just before she moves into the kitchen. “Still awake?” She moves behind him, her arms wrapping around his shoulders.
Spread out on the table in front of them are pictures and documents he’s been inspecting these past couple of weeks. Mostly the same gruesome pictures, but he’s looking at one she hadn’t seen before. Isn’t that the girl from the news? She’s been missing for weeks. Though when she was having breakfast this morning, she did hear something on the radio about it. She had turned it off when she had heard him coming downstairs. Now she knows what they must have been saying.
“Are you coming to bed?” She knows that he wants to solve this as soon as possible. If they’ve found this girl dead, then whoever is responsible might take someone else soon. But him sitting here all night, looking at these pictures isn’t going to help. He needs some rest. She reaches for the picture and puts it on the table, then removing her arms from around him. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”
It was despair, that is what it was. All-consuming, blinding despair. The kind of thing to keep him up at night, to rob him of a second’s sleep, to have Frank shaking half-way through a day, rushing off the station because he needed to breathe, and he couldn’t. Not with a guy like this out. Not when that was all he could think about.
His paranoia was always keeping at the edge of his seat, but it had been worsened lately. Its razor edge stuck against him, when he was put in the case, nudged closer to his throat once he got deeper into it, playing a terrible balancing act between keeping him alive and driving him insane by the time Frank realized there was a pattern behind the guy’s actions. Women, blond, between the ages of 25-35, at home, alone. Every time he thought about it, his stomach twisted, toppled over itself. It was too perfect a match not to rob him of the ability to think.
Frank called Arabella now about fifty times a day, once every thirty minutes. Even his hatred for phones couldn’t survive the fear sitting at the edge of his skin. She always answered because she was always fine, but he couldn’t get the thought off his mind that maybe next time, next time he called, next time he worried she wouldn’t be.
He could picture all too well the guy coming in while she was distracted in their room, doing something. His mind could come up with to perfect a picture of that psychopath hurting her while he was too far to help.
It was her presence that shook him back into being. “ Hey, ” It took him to readjust to the real world, clear his throat, shake his head. Frank only got up to move towards the coffee pot and to pour himself another cup. He only walked to walk farther away from the stairs. “ No, I — ”
He failed to realize his hands were shaking until he held onto his cup. His tired brain only thought of hiding it from her a second too late. “ I, hm, I still got some paperwork to get through, you know. I — ” There was a small shake of the head. “ Go back to sleep, babe. ”
From his place at the kitchen, awake, he could watch both the back and front door. He could shoot the intruder before he got to the stairs. He could not do that if he allowed himself to sleep. “ I am fine. ”
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