ambit. [hs au]

Chapter 15

A/N: THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF A DOUBLE UPDATE.

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* Trigger Warning: description of child sexual abuse *

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Franklin's P.O.V.:

Investigating this city has been the major part of my whole fucking life.

This is not me being superlative with my words; I can securely say I've been doing it for generations.

I knew something was wrong with this place the second I put my feet here, more than 30 years ago. The city was just too perfect. I had been in a lot of other inner England cities to know that's not how it works. No city is that far away from London, that secluded and that successful. It doesn't make sense for a city with only 18k citizens to have one of the best school systems in the whole fucking country.

To be almost completely crime free.

To live in such deep harmony.

And to be so fucking rich.

It was the first thing I noticed when I visited Thirskot with my old mother, may she rest in peace. How could I not? Back when life was only barely manageable, anything that shone like gold was bound to gain my attention, and motherfucking Thirskot was like a diamond among the pigs.

Let me tell you a little about my life, first.

It wasn't easy, but it was a life where I could still make ends meet. It wasn't always peaceful, but it was good. Not great, but good enough.

In my time, people used to get married super young, and it wasn't any different for me. I didn't even finish high school when my girlfriend got pregnant with our first son, and we got married right away. There wasn't another choice in our time either, no other path we could've chosen - it couldn't be any different.

I was never the brainy typa fella, you know? Never had good grades at school, was too busy being the cool lad to waste my time studying and doing homework. I was smoking behind the school cafeteria and enjoying some blues with my lads. That was all I could care about. I was telling Mum and Dad goodbye in the morning, and while they thought I was going to school, my lads and I were taking the bus to explore other cities, thinking of ourselves as great explorers, and making empty promises that we would desbrave the world once we were old enough to travel worldwide.

So when I was forced to get married at the age of 17, working as a mechanic all day, I was not in a good place, mentally speaking. But I was a good fella, created in a Catholic home, molded to be a good husband one day. And that's what I was going to be. Neither mine or my wife's family were rich, so we didn't count with luck to begin our lives together, just my hard work at the mechanic parlor, while she, a 17 year old - a child herself, if you ask me - made everything she could to take care of our son and our tiny little home in the backyard of her uncle's house.

I worked my arse off, until we got out of that one bedroom hole and managed to buy a two-bedroom apartment downtown at Sheppey East. It was so fucking little, our oven was literally in the living room, but we didn't care - it was ours.

We had a 40-year mortgage plan to pay, but for all effects, that was our home and we were paying for it.

Barely making ends meet, we made it through the 5 first years of our marriage. And just as little Tamar was about to start going to school, came the news we weren't ready to face just yet - we were expecting again. The second baby was on the way.