Page 111 of Letters to the Lost

He was my hero. I would talk about him constantly as a child, praising how he was the best dad a girl could ever ask for. Even when I believed he had abandoned me, I still loved him. The little girl in me believed that her daddy never truly abandoned her.

But it wasn’t true.

He knew.

“I knew,” Dad says solemnly, “I didn’t know what to think Autumn. I was barely here but when I was you were an angel. But then your mom… Jane would tell me how horrible you had been that day, misbehaving, tantrums, you wound her up until she broke and she would say she felt like she had no other choice.”

“I was a child!” I scream at him.

The part of my heart that always held the childish hope that her daddy would have saved her, is gone.

Shattered.

I was a child. An innocent fucking child and he knew.

“Did you ever try to stop her?” I ask him, unable to stop the tears that leak from my eyes.

“I… I did. Not hard enough I suppose, but I did.”

“That’s not good enough Dad. You were supposed to protect me. You were my hero, the only person I wanted when I was scared of the monster under my bed, but you left me with a much scarier one. YOU LEFT ME!” I scream.

Brenn’s hand reaches out to comfort me, but I dodge out of the way. I don’t want comfort right now. I want answers.

“Did you ever know where I was?” I ask.

The silence that surrounds the room is almost deafening. Dawning falls over Brenn’s face.

“Please tell me you didn’t. That you didn’t know where she was this entire time,” Brenn begs.

“Once. I knew where she was once. I hired a PI and he found her, but you have to understand. Both of you have to understand. You looked happy Autumn, you looked so happy, and I hesitated and by the time I was going to come for you, Jane had moved you. Again.”

“What else?” I demand when no one says anything.

Dad’s eyes are still cast to the floor as I stand rigid, waiting for the next blow.

“Ellie…” Dad starts but I cut him off.

“What about Ellie?”

“She’s someone I hired to be your bodyguard,” Dad tells me, shattering what I thought was my first real friendship.

“Autumn, Ellie is your friend. I promise you. We only hired her to keep an eye on you. You both becoming friends was never the plan, that happened organically, I swear,” Brenn rushes to reassure me, his panicked eyes turning angry, narrowing them towards Dad.

“Is there anything else? Anything else I should know before I completely lose my shit. Are the guys actually in love with me? Is Shan even my friend? Or are there any more fucking lies in this house, even when we promised there would be none!”

Brenn takes a deep breath, looking at me with sad eyes as he watches me break over our dad's deception to me.

“We found your stalker Autumn. It wasn’t Charlie,” Brenn tells me.

Ice runs through my veins.

It is Charlie.

It has to be. No one else calls me Little One. That’s his name for me, the only one to ever call me that.

“Who?” I ask.

“Peter. Do you know who that is?”

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