Life Is A Nightmare

Chapter Twenty: Nothing Is What It Appears

(Jayden)

All this time she's been taunting me. She's been trying to draw out the past and I didn't understand how she knew there was more to what happened in the house. I didn't see what had her fixated on the past but it's making sense now.

Everything is coming back. Everything my dad wanted me to forget and I want to get it off my chest like never before. I want to be free of what I was told to never talk about but what was always by my side.

I told myself I was getting better but how is that if I'm not talking about the whole past. I've only touched on Vivian and even her death doesn't seem real. There's a hundred doubts I can come up with to what they say happened and I let them. I let my life be taken out of my hands and placed into someone else's. I thought telling the truth would help but it's brought me here and eighteen years later I have half my life gone when all I wanted was to leave. I wanted to graduate high school and escape home, escape my dad's lies he told himself and not end up in the same town where my life began tainted from the start.

"I knew sooner or later you would want to talk." she says standing at the door of my room.

She left a few hours ago and I've had time to think. Too much free time unable to sit still. Needing to keep busy to stop myself from thinking about how twisted this is to discover who she is. "How did you find out?" I can't look at her, can't face what is right in front of me.

Too many times I watched my dad lose it, flip out because he wasn't Jared's favorite anymore as if it was something to fight over. I couldn't understand because it didn't make sense. One minute my dad was upset wanting to leave because he was scared for me and then the next he wanted to stay. He didn't want to step outside because he was used to being inside unable to escape the house we called home.

Fear kept him there and Jared's constant control over our lives drove him to be a monster just like him. He turned into someone else when it came to Simon and when he found out Simon was pregnant he was livid. There was a look in his eyes I only saw Jared have before and it scared me. I thought he was going to kill him. I really did but as luck would have it it didn't come to that.

I remember the night before the cops arrived, arresting Jared and taking us to my grandma's house, Simon was let go. He was told not to say a word and he never did. He never spoke about it and neither did his daughter who is the same age as Vivian would be now.

"He never talked about my father when I was young but after so many years of asking he gave in. He told me when I was fifteen and I couldn't believe it. I didn't understand how he didn't go to the police during the trial. I couldn't grasp the idea of keeping something so horrible to himself for years but then I realized he was protecting me. He didn't want me to be in the public eye like your dad was, like you and your sister. And then there was the fact your dad wasn't telling the whole story. Tell me Jayden did he tell you not say anything? Did he threaten you?"

"I don't know what you think you know but he's not like that. He's not a bad person." I haven't spoken to my dad in years except for some reason right now I'm still defending him, still wanting to believe he was doing what he thought was best for us but was it?

"He forced you to bury the past of the person he was. He made you keep your mouth shut because he was scared of getting in trouble himself."

"You don't know how much we went through before Jared brought your dad there. You don't know what it was like to have no one else to talk to outside of that house. You didn't have to live there. My dad did things he shouldn't have but he wasn't the monster. He wasn't Jared who trapped my dad and your dad inside the house."