AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My senses prickled the moment I stepped foot in the house. I knew something was wrong even before I heard Uncle Dave’s voice in the living room: “Charlie, come in here please.” His tone was anything but kind.
I wanted to run upstairs and lock myself in my room, but if I did that, he’d only follow me. Whatever this was about, he wasn’t going to give it up.
After setting down my bag at the foot of the stairs, I creeped around to the living room, finding Dave sitting on my dad’s recliner, rocking slowly. His arms were on the armrests, his hands clutching the fabric of the chair as his dark eyes landed on me. He didn’t get up. He stayed exactly where he was, even when I walked in.
I stared at him. “What?” If this was some stupid ploy to get me to get him something to drink or some food, I’d tell him he could get that shit himself. I wasn’t going to wait on him hand and foot. No, fuck that.
Fuck him especially.
When I didn’t say anything, he lifted a finger, pointing to the coffee table in front of the couch. My eyes spotted a folded-up paper on the table, and my eyebrows creased. He said, “What is this, Charlie?”
What is what? What the heck was he talking about?
As if it was a trick, I inched toward the coffee table slowly, my eyes flicking back to him every few seconds to make sure he was still in the chair. A sense of ominous foreboding filled the air, and it was hard for me to swallow once I reached the coffee table and picked up the paper.
A small object was nestled inside the paper, and when I picked it up, it fell out, dinging on the wooden table—and when I saw what it was, my heart damn near stopped.
A small rectangular blade that should be safely hidden in the bottom drawer of my desk. A box cutter refill I’d taken from the garage when I’d wanted to die, the same blade I’d used to cut myself.
I looked at Uncle Dave and found he watched me with a serious, deep-set frown on his face. One of his fingers had started to tap the armrest. He was waiting for me to open the paper, not saying a single word.
My hands trembled as I opened the paper. I tried to get them to stop, but after seeing that blade, my nerves were more fried than before. My breath caught in my lungs when I laid eyes on the contents of the paper.
My letter, the one I’d wrote when I’d decided to get a knife from the kitchen and kill myself. My goodbye letter. My suicide note. I’d totally forgotten about it, every part of my mind so caught up in Brett and the fact that he’d come back to me to remember I’d tucked it away in my desk for my parents to eventually find.
And somehow Uncle Dave had found it, along with the blade… and that told me he’d done some snooping.
“Care to tell me what that is?” Uncle Dave finally spoke, breaking the heavy silence of the room. “Because I can tell you what it looks like: it looks like my favorite niece was thinking about taking the easy way out. Tell me it’s not true, Charlie. Tell me you weren’t going to kill yourself.”
I closed my eyes and folded up the letter. I didn’t put it down, though. This letter was mine. Like hell would I let him show this to my parents. When I opened my eyes, I turned toward him and said, “Obviously I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t.” He leaned forward on the chair, his frown deepening. “But after finding that little blade there, I can’t help but wonder if it’s always in the back of your mind. What would your parents think about this?”
My parents finding out I was semi-suicidal was nearly as bad as me telling them all about the things Uncle Dave and I got up to during my childhood. I didn’t think I could bear the way they’d look at me after. Like they had to be careful around me. Like they didn’t know how to handle me. I’d become even more foreign to them than I already was.
When I didn’t answer, he stood up. “I can’t imagine they’d be happy, Charlie. Then again, I don’t think they’d be happy to hear your boyfriend’s staying in the treehouse.”
A lump formed in my throat, and I struggled to say, “What?”
“Your boyfriend’s living in the treehouse out back,” Uncle Dave clarified. “Or it’s a homeless person. But something tells me it’s that boyfriend of yours. The weather was shit Saturday. He walked here in the rain? Please. Your parents might’ve believed that, but I could smell how fishy it was.”
Again, I swallowed, and the action itself was harder than ever. “How did you—”
“I waited until you were gone, and then I looked around. I searched your room, hoping I’d find something about Ian, but imagine my surprise when I found that note and that blade instead. I think I read over that letter ten times. I probably have every word of it memorized by now.”
Oh, God. This could not be happening. My head spun, and I stood there, rooted in place, not knowing what to do.
“My brother’s always been blind, and his wife’s not much better. So once I found that stuff, it made me wonder what else you were hiding.” He paused, an ugly smirk crossing his face. “And then I remembered the treehouse your dad built you and Claire when you guys were little. He wanted something that would last. I was the architect for that treehouse, you know, so I knew it’d still be there.”
He let out a hideous chuckle, and the sound was like nails on a chalkboard as it fell upon my ears. “I knew there was something off about the guy. A homeless twenty-nine-year-old? Please.”
The more he talked, the harder my heart beat. My parents would be furious with me if they knew I’d not only wanted to kill myself, but that I’d also been secretly keeping my boyfriend nearby.
Of course, even Uncle Dave didn’t know about my stalker. Hopefully he didn’t know the truth about Brett, either.
Uncle Dave moved closer to me. He stopped when he stood directly in front of me, a dark expression on his face, his brown eyes cloudy. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t tell your parents about any of this.”
My mouth opened, and I tried to say something, to say anything, really, but no words escaped me. I was mute in the face of Uncle Dave and his snooping around, because I honestly hadn’t expected it.
