Found (Lost and Found #2, New Adult Romance) (Lost & Found) by Nadia Simonenko Read Free Book Online Page B

whisper softly in his ear, and then I snuggle up against him and close my eyes.

Wednesday, March 27 – 8:00 AM
    Owen

    I was five years old again last night. I hadn't gone that far back in a long time and I’d rather die than go back there again. The nightmare's edge was as sharp as ever.
    I’m sitting with my mother in the living room of our old house in Alabama as she reads to me. Our peaceful moment together shatters as I hear the patio door burst open and slam into the kitchen wall.
    “Sharon, where the fuck are you?” screams my father from the kitchen. Sharon is Mom’s first name but I’ve never heard Dad sound so mean while talking to her before.
    Mom closes the book and quietly gets up from the couch. Her face looks scared and serious as she helps me down, and her being scared frightens me even more than Dad yelling.
    “Owen, sweetie,” she whispers, “I need you to go to your room, close the door, and don’t make a sound, okay? Just stay in there and I’ll come get you soon. I promise.”
    “Are you mad at me?” I ask. I didn’t do anything wrong, but Dad is angry and Mom is sending me to my room. I must have done something.
    “No, honey, you didn’t do anything. You were a good boy today,” says Mom. She kneels down and hugs me, and then she points toward the hallway to my bedroom.
    “It’ll only be for little bit while I talk to your father. Don’t come out until I get you. Now go.”
    I run for my room on the other side of the house and fearfully close the door behind me. I scamper up the stepladder to my bed, across the rocket ship comforter, and then off the other side into the pile of blankets nestled in the gap between my bed and the wall. The blanket pile is where all my teddy bears live, and as I duck beneath the top blanket and hide with them in their bedroom, I know I’ll be safe.
    My father yells at the top of his lungs out in the kitchen, but I can’t tell what he’s saying from in here. He shouldn’t stomp in the house like that, either... Mom makes me take off my shoes so I don’t make noise like that.
    He’s very angry at someone, but if it isn’t me...
    ...why would he be angry at Mom?
    I climb out from beneath the blankets and his voice grows louder, angrier and more terrifying with each tiny step I take toward the door. It’s all I can do not to hide back under the blankets at the sound of Dad’s voice. Whenever they yell at me, it’s for breaking things or making a mess, but Mom doesn’t do things like that. Maybe I broke something and Dad is angry because he thinks Mom did it.
    I know Mom said to stay in my room, but I should tell Dad that she didn’t do anything so he stops yelling at her. I open the door and tiptoe out into the hallway.
    Suddenly I’m back in my room again, huddling in terror underneath the blankets and clutching a bear whose name I’ve long since forgotten. I don’t know what happened, but I’m crying and I don’t even know why. What I saw makes no sense to me and all I know is that everything is broken.
    The nightmare falls apart at the same gap it always has—at the missing page in my crumbling memories—and I wake up alone on the couch, bathing in a bright rectangle of warm sunlight.
    I know exactly what happened in the gap. It lives on as a terrifying still-image, a photograph burned into my brain that I’m never going to forget. Some people remember their fifth birthday or their first puppy... but me? Ha, no way. Like I'd get to have a
good
memory.
    My last remaining memory of that year is watching him beat my mother—hurting her badly in a way my five-year-old brain couldn’t understand—and the feelings of confusion and terror as it happened.
    I sit up and groan as my head throbs painfully. The empty cough syrup and beer bottles next to the couch immediately clue me in on why I feel like shit, and I close my eyes and rest my head in my hands as I wait for the room to stop spinning.
    I should have gone home. I should have gone