A GRAVE CHRISTMAS: A DI Erica Swift Christmas Special by Farrar M K

Author:Farrar, M K
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Warwick House Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Over the next few days, the boy spent more time at the woman’s house than he did his own.

He only really went back to his house to sleep. It wasn’t that he wanted to leave her company, or the relative warmth of her home, for the cold, miserable surroundings of his own house, but he worried what would happen if he stayed there and his father came back and found him gone. More than he worried about the beating he might take when his father eventually caught up with him, he was concerned about what he might do to the woman who’d been kind enough to feed him tea and toast, even after she’d caught him stealing out of her bin. He’d never forgive himself if her kindness meant thrusting his father’s violence into her life. It sounded like she’d already had enough of it to deal with from her childhood.

She’d told him that her name was Dani, and when he asked if that was a boy’s name, she’d laughed and said it was short for Danielle.

Though she smiled and laughed, her exterior was like a fragile crust over the person who lay beneath. The boy knew what it meant to have mental health problems. Wasn’t that what his dad had said about his mum—that she’d had issues with depression and that was why she’d left? The boy wasn’t so sure if that was the reason, rather than it being the fact she’d had to live with his father for years, or if it was the living with his father that had made her depressed, but he sensed something similar about the young woman who’d helped him.

Despite his fear of his father’s return, the boy slept better than he’d done in a long time. With a belly fully of warm food, and the knowledge that he might have one person on his side—someone who actually understood a bit of what his life was like—allowed him to rest peacefully.

A couple of days later, the boy woke to find his dad asleep on the sofa. He was passed out, only wearing one shoe. The sock on the other foot had a big hole in the toe, and his father’s uncut, jagged yellow nail poked out through it. He snored loudly, his mouth open, and, as the boy watched, the older man let out a loud fart. The room already stank of stale alcohol, and now it was even worse. The boy screwed up his face and backed out of the lounge, pulling the door shut behind him.

A knot twisted in his stomach. With his dad home, he wouldn’t be able to just go down to Dani’s house to get something to eat or spend time in her company. If his dad noticed him gone, he’d demand to know where he’d been. The boy didn’t want to get Dani in trouble.

Something else occurred to him, leaving him sickened and breathless with the possibility. What if Dani noticed he’d hadn’t come to see

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