1
Elise
I grew up in a modest neighbourhood. My parents were there for me no matter what. They were part of the community and very well-respected. Being their only child, I was spoiled and loved. We didn’t have all the money in the world, but my father always made sure I never wanted for anything.
I was a popular girl. I had a lot of friends, I went to dance class and, when it started to matter, the boys liked me. My life seemed perfect. A tad strict but perfect nonetheless. Strict because my father was a police officer and he needed to know where I was at all times, but perfect because he helped make the streets safe. It was a proud badge to walk around with. The kids always widened their eyes when I told them what he did. “My daddy fights the bad guys!” It was like having a superhero for a father.
But my father had dark days on the police force; days he’d come back from work withdrawn and shaken. He’d seen things, abominable things: starving, abused children found alone in run-down homes. He’d been called to gory crime scenes of dead drug dealers and prostitutes beaten to death on the job. He’d stood over corpses left to rot for weeks, met with murderers with dead eyes and proud smirks.
My father had seen everything ugly in this world. His overprotectiveness wasn’t without good reason, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t wish he had a different profession. A profession that didn’t involve trauma and pain, and wasn’t so damn dangerous, either.
When I was a child, I’d sit for hours by the door, waiting for him to come home. Even at seven I knew “Daddy had a dangerous job” and so I’d take my Barbie dolls to the locked screen door and play, glancing eagerly out the window every time the headlights of a car went past.
I shouldn’t have had to wonder whether my father would come home alright. Those thoughts were too heavy on the mind of a seven-year-old girl. I think that’s why I matured faster than kids my age. Death wasn’t a topic most gave serious thought to, and with a grandfather who died on the job doing the very same thing he did, it was not an irrational thing to stress about.
My early childhood was a rinse and repeat of playtime and worry and hours spent looking out the front door. Until, one day, it wasn’t anymore.
It was the day I met Aston Turner.
*
I was nine years old when my father came home one day with a small shadow following him. I was on the phone, talking to my best friend Cindy about the cute boys in our class. Being shallow was an innocent pastime at that age, and liking boys instead of thinking they had cooties was new and exciting.
I was on the bottom step of the staircase, smiling at the sight of my father in his police uniform walking past the gate and down the path to the front door. It was at the porch that he stopped and turned around.
It was then I saw him.
A boy. Skinny. Tiny. Paler than a sheet of paper. He was standing behind Daddy with a backpack on his back and his face downcast.
“I have to go,” I cut Cindy off.
“But we have to talk about kissing Jacob –”
I hung up on her and stared, wide-eyed and confused, as Daddy opened the door and stepped in, keeping the door wide open to let the boy inside.
“Jean!” he shouted out, and my mother came bursting out of the kitchen with a tea towel in her wet hands. She stared from Daddy and the boy with a look that mirrored mine.
“I want you to meet Aston,” Daddy said, wrapping a kind arm around the boy’s shoulders. He smiled hesitantly up at my mother, and sitting there, I stared into his face and caught the way his eyes misted.
I’d never seen my daddy cry, and he was crying in that moment.
I knew straight away that my life was going to change forever.
2
Elise
Aston was a foster child since he was five. His father murdered his mother and two younger sisters with a kitchen knife. The crime scene was so chilling, so unbelievably scarring, a few officers had to have therapy to get the grizzly images out of their heads.
They’d found Aston unconscious and buried beneath the body of his mother, soaked in her blood and his. He’d been cut up head to toe, but somehow he pulled through, surprising the police with the sound of his hollow breaths. The doctors at the hospital called it a miracle and they celebrated his good fortune. Everybody in the town of Montley talked about it for a couple weeks, about the boy that pulled through, about the boy that God smiled upon yet simultaneously had to call home three innocent souls. And then, like all hot topics, the topic cooled and they stopped caring, and Aston was forgotten.
He entered the foster care system, had seriously bad behavioural issues and bounced from foster home to foster home all throughout town. Nobody knew how badly he was being abused, until Daddy found him neglected and starving, eating his own fingernails in the basement of a foster house that was the drug haven for some seriously horrible people.