Chapter 6

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Again Julie stopped reading the journal and moved a hand across her face, tired and lost for words. Pain filled the female's body, and all she wanted to do was go and hug her father. She could feel the guilt that he felt, watching his father and the female, her mother's stepmother, take away the horse that brought her mother so much comfort and joy, a final gift from the male she called her father, the young female's grandfather.

If someone had taken Fia, the mare that Julie grew to love and cared for, then she would have acted the same way as her mother. She would have run as well, leaving the scene before she received a beating in having to listen to that shrill noise her horse made while she left.

Julie chewed on a loose piece of skin near one of her nails and studied the words before her. She read and reread them, trying to see if her father left any hints of his past behind.

It meant that they were more understanding of other people and their hidden needs.

Julie read that line again and again when she reached it. She wondered what he meant by it and wondered what he had lost to make him feel that way.

Was this in the journal he had left for her? she wondered, fingering the next page. Did he finally cave and tell her the story of the "Hollywood Prince?"

Hollywood Prince that had been his nickname for his whole acting career. It went with the fact that her mother had decided to call him "Hollywood," for he had been there and became a sensation because of it.

A joke between her mother and aunt was to give her father an old movie of his. Each one of them was different, and each one of them was watched by the whole family, with her mother and aunt tease her father about his acting.

Admittedly, Julie watched them more than the movies, loving how the three of them interacted with each other when they watched them.

Sure, she had seen the movies all the way through when she was alone, but during that time, the time where a couple of her siblings would try to get the three adults to quiet down, but they didn't, she would watch them. For, she found them more entertaining than the movies.

When she did watch the movies alone, she didn't understand the hype that all females had back then over him, except for her mother. She didn't understand why they kept fangirling over him, a male that she first considered her dad and then an ex-actor.

When she asked him after watching the first movie that she watched completely through, her father almost choked on something he was drinking while her mother busted out laughing, toppling over the sink.

"She's your daughter," she could still her father say to the laughing female.

"But she is yours as well, Hollywood," her mother teased.

Julie shook her head, a bitter smile on her face. She had seen the love that they had for each other, the way they complimented each other's movements as if they were on the same wavelength. She had seen the pain her mother had been in the first time her father was diagnosed with cancer that eventually took him away from her.

She had seen it in the way her mother tried to keep his memory alive, the way she told stories about him while they grew up, even though they had heard them all before, entranced with her words that they knew by heart.

The daughter saw it on the face of her mother, the soft smile she had on her face when Julie went back into the room to kiss her mother goodnight only to find her mother dead, clutching the journal. She hadn't told anyone this, but she had felt that her father's comforting presence in that room when her mother passed on, welcoming her mother back to him.

She could still feel both of them in this house, in this room, watching her read the journal that her father gave her mother and was now in her possession. Julie could feel them in the words that her father had written, words neatly lined across the page like ants marching along behind one another to the next letter, the next word, the next sentence, and so on until they reached the end of the page and went to the start of the next one.

Julie felt them in the margins where her father doodled different pictures while he thought of the next sentence that his wife should know or the comments her mother left next to a sentence that he had written.

The "Oh Dean," and "Why didn't you tell me, my Love?" felt like her mother so much that the older female had to wonder how many times her mother had read this journal, searching for stuff that she had missed the first time she read it cover to cover.

Julie traced the words her mother added, eyes searching across her words, her heart feeling empty. "Oh, Mom," she whispered with a soft sigh while she traced something else that she had written. "I am going to miss you."

With a soft sigh, the female stood and walked to the baker's rack in which she knew her mother collected different types of pens. She grabbed one, a purple pen that she had used many times before, and scribbled on the notepad placed there that held different dates and phone numbers but also other pen marks from her mother.

A small smile appeared on her lips before she went back to her seat and sat down. Like her mother before her, Julie went back and reread the parts before she made her own thoughts and predictions of the words her father wrote all of those years ago before she left and before he died, leaving the older female, her mother, to fend for herself until finally and like all creatures, she passed away in her sleep after telling her tale to her grandchildren.

Will they know their grandfather's point of view, a man that they had never met?

Perhaps.

But for now, the daughter of both Cinderella and her Prince shall read and write in the journal, engrossed in a world that she never knew from a man that they had called the Hollywood Prince.

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