AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was the one thing I really had hoped wouldn’t be my lot. I wanted out. Wanted away.
I take a deep breath, hoping this isn’t going in a bad direction. I need to refocus the conversation to when she was still living at home with her dad. “Do you ever speak to him?”
“Who?” she responds, sounding truly confused.
“Your father.”
“No.”
One word, full of so much emotion. Anger. Resolution.
My brow rises. “Not at all?”
“He moved after I graduated,” she says, but I already knew this.
Hence why finding her was even harder. The man became a ghost. No records. No forwarding address. And like him, she also disappeared. Her name wasn’t what I believed it to be all those years. Her dad, on the other hand, could be dead for all I know.
“Was it bad? Did he get worse?”
I know immediately that question is going to get me nowhere. Her shoulders stiffen and her face transforms into a stone fortress.
“Aiden.” She leans up to look at me. “Let’s not do this. I left that life behind for a reason. Please don’t make me go back there.”
Her voice is so soft but decisive, I know I won’t get anything from her.
So I drop it, a new plan forming in my head. It’s not a plan I necessarily want to enact, but if she’s not going to give me the answers I need, I know someone who will.
I’m up early and in my car. Two hours and forty minutes later, I’m pulling up to a place I had hoped I’d never go to again.
My mother’s house.
I throw the car in park and start heading to the door, determination the only fuel pushing me forward.
“Aiden, is that you?”
I turn over my shoulder and see Mrs. Matthews waving at me from her makeshift porch. I’m shocked to see her. Mrs. Matthews was always so much older, and now, after all these years, she must be near ninety.
Apart from Pip, she was one of the only people who cared.
Before Pip arrived, Mrs. Matthews and her husband would make sure I was fed. Would give me shelter if I was kicked out of my house for whatever reason. Or even if I just needed an escape.
“I knew it was you. Henry!” she calls out to her husband. “Look who’s here.”
Henry, her husband, walks out of the trailer door and toward his wife. “Why if it isn’t our famous hockey player.”
My lips turn up into a smile.
They always helped me—always tried to, at least.I really should’ve thought more about them when I left.
Yet more people I deserted to chase my dreams and thrive, while they’re here, struggling to make ends meet. The rickety stairs look like a death trap for Mrs. Matthews’s frail form. How the hell does she even get down them?
Sadness sweeps through me. I have the means to help, and after everything they did for me, I should’ve a long time ago. I won’t leave this town before making some visits to secure help for them.
“Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Matthews.”
“Don’t you dare use those formalities with us. Come over and give us hugs,” she says, a bright smile spreading across her aged face.
I do just that, embracing the older couple who were better parents to me than my mom.
