RED: Welcome To Fayetteville | Complete ✔️

Chapter 48: The Watched

"When can I leave?" Natalie leaned against the front desk. Her labeled bracelet pressed against her wrist 24/7 and was making it itch. The barcode and letters gave her an identity to the doctors, but she wanted to rip it off.

"You guys have to see that I'm not crazy." She pulled her hair to the side and made sure to keep her cool. She didn't want to be locked here any longer. "I messed up, and it was an accident."

"Ma'am, we are doing everything we can."

The smell in this wing of the mental institution was sterile, like a bomb of high-class Germ-X exploded on the walls, which was strange to Natalie. It smelt and looked like a hospital, but she wasn't sick.

"Baby..." Pam, Natalie's mother, said from the door to the youth wing.

"Mom!" Natalie felt it like a tidal wave. She hadn't seen her mother in a few days but it felt like years. She ran to her arms and let the tears rush down. They were dripping down onto her mom's shoulder, and it wasn't the first time. The pink sweater soaked up her tears.

"I love you. I love you. I love you," she kept saying. She hadn't said it enough, and she needed to let it all out.

"I love you, too, honey. It's going to be okay. I'm taking you home today." Pam wasn't playing games. She came here for her daughter, and she demanded she was going home with her.

"Ma'am, you'll need to sign in here," the lady at the front desk picked up a clipboard and sat it on the counter.

Pam moved closer to the desk and leaned over. "I'm not signing anything besides release waivers."

"She'll need to be discharged by the doctor," the lady with stringy red hair was moving her papers into files. Natalie's was next.

"Where's the doctor at?"

"She should be coming in here in about twenty minutes, ma'am."

"Great. I'll be here," Pam grabbed her purse and Natalie's hand.

-----

Back in Fayetteville, the cemetery had its usual visitors. Danny accidentally left his headlights on in the gravel parking lot. He sat beside his brother's tombstone. Then, he would walk to his daughter's.

He kneeled down into the cold mud. The weather was making his fingers hard to move. They couldn't curl up the way they normally would, but he was still able to rub the grass on her grave like it was Genni herself... but it wasn't. It was just grass. Under the ground was a platinum container with her body.

It wasn't enough, so he thought he needed to do more. He rubbed his scruffy beard that was getting too long. He wasn't wearing his wedding band, but he kept trying to spin it around his ring finger the way he used to before he took it off.

"Everything that's going to happen is for you, Genni. I have to do this... for you," he whispered.

If Genni could have heard him, she would have toned him down. She would have told him no.

Genni wasn't here anymore... but someone was...

Across the cemetery at the far building—where Derrick was watching him before—was someone in a red hoodie.

***Is Natalie ready to go back to Fayetteville? Will Danny and RED clash? What's going to happen next?

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