Page 27 of Daddy's Dirty Little Secret

14

AMELIA

Afew days had passed since Dad moved back into his house. He’d fixed the front door himself—not professionally, but well enough—and insisted I stop worrying. I’d covered his electric bill just enough to keep the lights on and the fridge running, but I couldn’t afford the full amount to get his security system back online. He told me not to worry about it, said he didn’t need it anyway. But I could tell he was lying. Something about the way he rushed through his sentences, the forced lightness in his voice—it didn’t sit right.

So I showed up today with a dish of baked ziti and a gnawing sense of dread I couldn’t shake. The smell of it in the car made my stomach turn, and by the time I pulled into his driveway, I was swallowing hard to keep the nausea down. I told myself I might be coming down with something, but the truth was, I’d been feeling off for days. Restless. Uneasy. Like something bad was coming, and I was the only one who didn’t get the memo.

When he didn’t answer the door—front or back—I started to feel the familiar pinch of anxiety settle in. I knocked again, harder this time, and waited. Nothing.

Letting myself in through the back door wasn’t new. I’d been doing it since I was a teenager, and he never minded. The kitchen was exactly the way I expected it to be: clean enough to pass but not spotless. A coffee mug sat in the sink, yesterday’s newspaper folded neatly on the table. The chair was pushed back like he’d just stood up and wandered off. But the house was quiet. Too quiet. And he wasn’t answering his phone.

I tried calling again and listened as it rang twice before going to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message.

Something felt off. It wasn’t any one thing—it was everything. The too-tidy kitchen, the silence, the unanswered phone. My gut had been buzzing since I woke up, and now it was screaming.

I left the dish on the counter, wiped my palms on my jeans, and walked down the hallway. The framed photos hadn’t changed. They still followed my life from kindergarten to graduation and beyond. They still made the house feel like it belonged to someone who had been proud once, before things got…complicated.

Dad’s office door was half closed, like it always was. He didn’t keep it locked. Never had.

I pushed it open and flipped on the light.

The space was neat, unnaturally so. No clutter, no takeout bags, no piles of mail or sticky notes tacked up on the corkboard. His laptop sat closed but plugged in, perfectly centered on the desk. For a man who used to leave everything out where he could see it, the whole room felt like it had been scrubbed down for show.

I hesitated, standing behind the chair, then pulled it out and sat. My fingers hovered over the laptop for a second before I opened it. It blinked to life immediately.

It blinked to life immediately, but then the login screen appeared, and my stomach sank. The username was alreadyfilled in, but the password field waited, blinking expectantly, as if daring me to try. I sat there for a moment, thinking maybe it would come to me—something obvious, something personal. I typed in a few guesses: his birthday, my name, the name of our old dog from when I was a kid. Nothing worked. I tried the company name, a few variations of his favorite sports team, even the street we grew up on. Every attempt was met with a polite but firm error message.

After the sixth or seventh try, I leaned back and exhaled slowly through my nose, annoyed at myself for even thinking it would be that easy. I wasn’t angry at him, exactly—not for protecting his privacy. He was allowed to do that. But it stung, in a quiet and specific way, to realize he’d drawn a line between what he was willing to share and what he wanted to keep hidden. Especially from me.

I pushed away from the desk slightly and glanced toward the drawers, reaching instinctively for the nearest handle. The first two slid open without resistance—one held a couple of pens, a pad of yellow sticky notes, and a half-used pack of batteries. The second had an envelope from the water company and a folded grocery list scribbled on the back of a paper napkin. I pulled on the bottom drawer and felt resistance right away. I tried again, a little harder, but it was locked.

My fingers tightened on the handle as I stared at it, frustration rising in my chest. I understood he had a right to keep things to himself. I wasn’t trying to invade his life. But after everything that had happened—the fire, the break-in, the bruises, the sudden spiral into debt—it was getting harder and harder to believe this was just about privacy.

He hadn’t been himself for weeks. Months, really. Always deflecting, always minimizing, never quite answering when I asked him what was going on. And now this—the password Icouldn’t guess, the locked drawer he never used to lock—it all felt like pieces of a puzzle I didn’t have the image for yet.

I sat there in the quiet, looking around the room, trying to slow my thoughts. Nothing looked out of place. Nothing was technically wrong. But that was the problem. There was no explanation for the break-in. No arrest. No security footage. He had no real plan to catch up on his bills, and yet he wouldn’t ask for help. He was keeping something from me.

I reached into my bag again, this time pulling out the small tin I kept tucked in the inner pocket. Inside were a few emergency bobby pins, and with a quiet sigh, I slipped two into my hand and crouched beside the drawer.

I’d picked locks before—just once or twice, mostly as a teenager when I was curious or bored. Dad never caught me, and I never admitted it. I felt guilty now, but the worry twisting in my stomach overrode my hesitation.

It took a little longer than I remembered, but finally, I heard the soft click. The drawer creaked open.

At the top was a bundle of photographs held together by a rubber band. I eased them out carefully, immediately recognizing my mother’s face. There were pictures of her in the garden, laughing with a glass of iced tea, arms wrapped around me during some long-ago birthday. I hadn’t seen these in years. The sight of her caught me off guard—something in my chest gave a sharp tug. She died when I was eighteen, but seeing her like this, full of color and movement even in still images, made the grief feel startlingly fresh.

I almost closed the drawer and left it at that. But a yellow notepad caught my eye, tucked beneath the photos. I pulled it free and began flipping through. It wasn’t a journal or casual notes. It was a ledger—lines of numbers, dates, and what looked like repayment amounts. Near the middle of the pad, a number had been underlined twice—$574,000.

My mouth went dry.

If I was reading this right, my father owed someone a very large amount of money.

As I flipped another page in the notepad, a business card slipped out and landed face down on the floor. I picked it up, expecting something familiar—a bank logo, a company I’d recognize—but it wasn’t. The card was unbranded, plain, with a name I didn’t know, a phone number, and an email address. On the back, in small, tight handwriting, someone had scrawled a single line:Monthly, or we escalate.

Before I could even begin to make sense of it, I heard the back door open. The clatter of keys hit the counter, followed by the unmistakable sound of a bottle being pulled from the cabinet. The creak of a cupboard door, a glass being set down—my heart jumped into my throat. He was home.

In a rush, I shoved the notepad back into the drawer, trying to make it look untouched, and pushed it closed. I didn’t bother trying to relock it. I slipped the business card into my coat pocket just as his footsteps thudded heavily down the hallway.

He appeared in the doorway, glass in one hand, half-empty bottle in the other. His face was red, his expression unsteady, and his eyes didn’t look quite focused. The smell of whiskey hit me before he even spoke.

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