The Thief(Complete) (Sample)

XXIV.

I woke up the following morning as if that nightmare wasn't on my mind again while I stood in the kitchen mixing things for breakfast. Sure, I wanted to see things a little clearer and find out more information but the only way for me to ever do that is confirm it with the person that I don't want to ever see in my life ever again.

I filled the inside of the coffee cake cinnamon rolls then put them inside of the oven, I cleaned my hands then sat down at the table and opened up my laptop. I opened up google chrome then took a few deep breaths before typing in Madeline Renforth into the search bar, the same pictures that I saw 3 months ago when Mr. Ryan showed me her popped up on my screen followed by different social media links and news articles.

I clicked the first article headlined, 'Divorce proceedings must move forward while young child still missing.' I positioned my chair a little closer to the table as if I wasn't already close enough to it, I leaned my body closer to the top part of the table then place my elbows on the table while I started to read the article.

There was a picture from outside of the courthouse, it was a younger version of my father with a younger version of Clarabelle and a young Josiah. They were walking hand in hand into the courthouse, the next picture was of who I assume is my mother. She looked like she had been crying for weeks as she walked up the steps with her lawyers, that's what the picture was captioned.

My dad looked happy while she looked like she was going to break at any point in time. The article stated that they settled on 3.8 million in spousal support for my dad and my mom paid his lawyer fees, he didn't care for joint custody but he demanded joint custody with the kidnapped younger child once she was to be found. He tried to paint a picture that she knew what happened to the young child, he taunted her in court but she tried to hold her own and couldn't.

I wiped my tears as they fell from my eyes, there was a picture at the bottom of the article. I closed my eyes then began to cover my face while sobbing uncontrollably, the picture was of me when I was a young little girl. I can hear footsteps coming down the steps then approaching the kitchen, I wiped my tears as I then felt a hand rubbing my back then a kiss on my forehead.

"I think you should see this.."

My tear filled eyes looked up at Theo as he leaves from the kitchen then comes back with a envelope, he sits it on the table then slowly slides it in my direction.

"Whats this?" I asked.

"This is something that I found a few months back, I didn't want to give it to you because I felt like if I did then I'd failed you in your search for finding your mom or at least a little bit about yourself. You went to Paola for help and she felt like she couldn't help either, we failed you because we couldn't find anything—"

I opened the envelope while still listening to him.

"She was only able to get hospital records of your childhood injuries but your stepmom was the only person that was ever present during these hospital records. Your dad wasn't ever on file, he signed nothing." He continues while I dumped everything out and on to the table. I rummaged the stuff on the table while looking at them.

"Is this my birth certificate?" I asked hesitantly and he nods without hesitation but then sighed.

"It's not real.."

"Your dads name doesn't come up on anything, it's as if he were a ghost and so were you but Clarabelle was the only lead then we hit a dead end again. I told Ben about the nightmare you had about possibly being kidnapped, we instantly thought about the young girl who wasn't too much younger than us who was kidnapped. We couldn't remember too much because we were young ourselves but then I remembered what you said weeks before that about your ring.." he explained.