The Way Back Home

Chapter Eighteen: I Was Wrong

CHAPTER SONG: "I Was Wrong" by Sleeperstar

April 1st, 2020

London, England

Today she knew fate was playing a cruel joke on her...

Emmanuelle Hunterson sat cross-legged on the hard mattress on her hotel bed, barely fitting for two people, clad in her two piece pajama set, her wet brunette hair strung around her shoulders, small droplets of water dripping from her head towel.

Her phone vibrated in her hand, the miniature screen alight with a different number she wouldn't have recognized had the circumstances been different, but the nauseous sensation in her stomach implied otherwise.

The white words highlighted at the top of the phone screen assaulted her retinas as she blinked away the irritation of her sight, holding back a hiss of anger.

The audacity this man had to keep trying to reach out to her...

And the fact that he kept using different unlisted numbers, thinking she wouldn't recognize his multiple attempts to track her down.

The vibration of her phone continued as her thumb hovered over the green phone icon on the screen, inching down until the she finally touched it and answered the call, placing her end on speaker...

The sound of static filled the room amidst the background of horns and sirens of London's never-ending chaos that tempted her to abandon the sanctuary of her lonely room...achingly reminding her of home...

She waited, her heart pounding with fear as she contemplated hanging up the call...

Then, his gravelly voice, his tone drenched with alcohol and fevered from the aftermath of a possible fix of whatever narcotic he possessed as a lifetime substitute to healthy human companionship.

"You know that restraining order expired ten years ago now? And you can't rely on your selfish bitch of a mother to protect you."

Emmy stayed silent, holding her breath as she bit back the words crawling up her throat, slithering onto her tongue like bile...

Every curse word imaginable she wanted to scream at him...everything horrid she wanted to happen to him crossed her mind to tell him...

Her father was on the other side of the world as far as she knew, not that she had bothered to really check on where he was until recently...

Until he became the reason she had deleted all of her profile pages on social media, not that she had been involved in much beyond Facebook and the Richmond Library official website...

The sound of his mocking voice pulled her out of her contemplation, making her focus on the present.

"Did you really believe taking your mom's maiden name would really keep me from contacting you eventually?" He continued to push her on, goading her to react and it brought back to her memories she had battled to repress, even though they had all been only from her early childhood. "Over ten years, you've been too selfish to check in on your poor suffering dad."

Emmy clutched the phone in her trembling hand, tempted to throw it across the room if only it'd make him cease injecting this poison into her...

She could feel his large hand latching onto her small wrist as though she were a small defenseless child again, her feet dragging across the floor as she cried out, knowing her pleas would go unheeded and the pain would come...