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Chapter Twelve, A Rotting Casket
The biggest mistake she'd ever made was asking why. Why is he like this? Why is he so cruel? Why me? Why now? Why at all? She should've kept the questions to herself. The answers had always been there, hiding in plain sight, buried beneath floorboards, whispered behind locked doors in a basement she had never entered. In every house she once called home. In Russia. In California. In Hawkins.
Amelia had blinded herself, desperate to think of him as someone better than he was because the truth would've shattered the illusion she'd worked so hard to preserve. She had clung to the idea of a man who might change, a man who could love her, somewhere deep beneath the layers of secrecy and steel. But he'd never been that man.
He had always lied. He carried his secrets with pride. He stood tall every time he walked through their front door. He had the house under control. He had her under control.
It wasn't just a job to him—it was his world. He gave it all up to work his way to the top of an invisible empire. Working with Russians. Creating portals to alternate dimensions. He gave everything up for that world. Everything.
But he couldn't have both. Not the monster and normalcy. Not a family and a hidden fortress. Not her, even if he had tried his best to keep her what he had considered safe.
He had never really been there. Not for birthdays, not for scraped knees. Only for tears. Amelia Bloom was raised under Margot's watchful eye. If not her mother, then her grandmother's soft hands, braiding her hair while humming lullabies. She should have been a child, but she became a doll.
Fragile, precious, breakable.
She had never been a daughter to him. She was a risk. A weak little kitten, trembling at the edge of the world's fence. And the world was filled with creatures waiting to devour her. Creatures he had seen multiple times.
But he had told her that monsters wore the faces of children and that darkness lurked in playgrounds and classrooms. So he kept her tied to a leash. He couldn't lose her to those monsters, be they children or real creatures. He couldn't lose her, despite not even knowing who she was.
But an absent father becomes something else in a young girl's mind. He becomes a myth. A fear. A nightmare, after being absent on her third, fourth, and fifth birthdays. It didn't matter to him anyway. He didn't believe in birthday wishes—it was Margot who had taught her to blow out the candles. At least she was kept inside the house.
Don't ride your bike after six. Don't talk to strangers. Don't drink, smoke, kiss, host, hope. Don't ask questions. Don't talk about your family. He thought he could scare her into obedience, make her regret it once she stepped into the outside world. But no one out there bit her. None bared their teeth at her. He was the only monster.
