Sweet Charlotte

「 twenty-five: desperate tears 」

The immediate moments after finding Charlotte dead were a blur. Willow remembered Seth screaming, his palms digging into the pebbled back road. Sobbing, hardly able to keep a single breath of air in her lungs, Willow tried to grab him; to pull him away from where he was staring at her body. From staring at what was left of it.

"Police," he strangled out, "we need to call the police."

Willow tried her best to help him off of the ground, despite that her chest could barely hold enough air to keep herself standing. Getting him to his feet, Willow's hands shaking against his arms, they stared at each other.

The first time since he collapsed, Seth got to look at her: the way her eyes said more than she could, the way her cheeks puffed up in remembrance, the way the quiver in her throat held all the sorrys she wanted to say. Delicately, his fingers slipped to her face, brushing at the chill of her cheeks. Feeling his throat leap, he guided her into his arms. One of his hands settled on the back of her head, but once she was close, the other wrapped around her and kept her pressed to his chest. Her sobs melted into his shirt while his strained ones fell through her hair.

In reflection, Seth remember how Willow's cell couldn't get reception but Seth's could, so she took his phone to make the call for him. He remembered not being able to let her go — not wanting her to wander too far. So, while she dialed 911 and hushed her shaky voice through the line, he sat in the driver seat of his truck, legs hanging out the door.

Given by the urgency of their call, coupled by the fact that neighbouring homes had complained about the screaming, the duo stood in the bleakness of the forest for a matter of minutes. Willow hastily showed the three officers where Charlotte was and, as they'd suspected, they were taken in for questioning.

"My truck?" Seth asked, an officer guiding him to the back of their squad car.

"Our officers will handle it," the female responded. "It's in good hands."

Then, as they arrived at the station, the two were placed in cold, cemented, separate rooms.

"Her diary is in the back of my truck," Seth said. "You guys can look. You can take it." He said, bubblering between his moments of calm.

"We just," Willow's voice wavered as she spoke. "We just wanted to find her. We needed to. No one else was looking. The police didn't think she was in harm, they just thought she was a runaway. We all did." She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue the officer interrogating her had passed her. "We had nothing to go on but hope that we'd find a trace of where she went. We didn't think we'd find," she hesitated her voice snagging on sob, "her there."

"Everyone said she was a runaway — that was what we thought too — but that meant no one was looking for where she ran off to." Seth said, his fingers clawing at his hair. "We didn't touch anything at the scene. We had nothing to do with anything, we were just," a sob bubbled out of his throat, "looking to bring my sister home."

They'd been shut up in opposing rooms for what felt like days, answering whatever questions they had the answers to. Then, for a long period, the two of them were left alone.

Seth's head collapsed into his hands, his sobs bouncing off the walls of the room. Willow sat silently, her tears falling and nose sniffling, ripping her tissue to shreds.

Then, with the door squealing, light flooded into each of the interrogation rooms from the hall. "You're free to go," the officers said, and both teens stood from their respective tables. "If we have more questions, we'll contact you." The two said nothing in response.

Willow and Seth knew that the police were aware they had nothing to do with Charlotte's disappearance or murder. That's why they were being set free.