The morning of the raid, Mayor Howard's statement came less than an hour later, shorter than Paulers. Carefully worded by her campaign staff to distance her from a story that had turned from a liability into a landmine. She withdrew her public support for Garvey in two sentences, and made no mention of the police union endorsement she'd spent weeks protecting. By 4:00, uniformed officers arrived at headquarters with an arrest warrant. Garvey was still in the building when they came for him, standing near the same equipment room where he'd cornered Oliver weeks earlier.
He didn't run. He didn't argue. He stood still while an officer read him his rights, his face blank in a way that looked less like calm and more like a man who hadn't fully caught up to what was happening yet. They walked him out through the main hallway, past the officers he'd commanded for years, past desks that went silent as he passed. Nobody said anything to him.
A few looked away entirely. Oliver wasn't there to see it. She'd left headquarters hours earlier, unsure if she'd ever be welcomed back, but word of it reached her within the hour, and she sat alone in her apartment, reading the news alert twice before she let herself believe it. Garvey was cuffed in the parking lot in uniform in front of a small crowd of reporters who'd gathered the moment word spread that an arrest was coming. He said nothing to any of them.
He kept his eyes forward as he was placed in the back of a patrol car, the same kind of vehicle he'd once climbed out of on Somerset Court, believing he had every right to be there. That evening, the department confirmed that the three older complaints, Brooks and the two others, would also be formally reopened for prosecution more than a decade after they'd first been buried and forgotten. Francis watched the footage of the arrest from Stella's sister's living room, her hand resting in his, both of them quiet as the patrol car pulled away from headquarters. It wasn't relief exactly. It was something steadier than that.
Something that had been a long time coming, finally arriving. 6 Weeks passed before the last truck pulled away from Somerset Court. The city under court order following the case's resolution had covered the full cost of restoring the house. New drywall where the sledgehammers had gone through. A rebuilt support beam certified by the same engineer who' testified to its damage.
New windows to replace the ones shattered that first morning. Francis had watched the work happen in pieces over those weeks, driving by after work some evenings just to see how far along it had gotten. The way you check on something healing. Now on a bright Saturday afternoon, he stood on the front porch with Stella beside him, watching the final crew pack up their tools and load them into a truck idling at the curb. The house looked whole again.
Not exactly the same. A few details had changed in the rebuild. Small things neither of them had asked for but had come to appreciate, like the slightly wider porch steps and the reinforced front door frame the contractor had insisted on. But it stood the way it was supposed to stand. Windows intact, walls solid, no plywood, no caution tape, no cracked glass catching morning light the wrong way.