Golden Glade Get Lonely

Laurel's gaze dropped to the ground the moment he started to speak, maybe because she was ashamed for asking the question in the first place, maybe because she wasn't ready to hear the answer. She listened, ears folding back uncomfortably, one of the rare displays of a view into her damaged soul. She swallowed as she listened, and there was so much she wanted to say — I wouldn't blame you if you had; sometimes I wish you had killed me that day; how could you ever love someone as ugly as me — but none of them could ever cross her lips.

He said, 'you were everything I hoped you would be', but Laurel just didn't understand, couldn't quite wrap her mind around it all. He said it was hard to be a father, but at least he had had a choice in becoming one, when she was just thrown into this life and now she was here, and it wasn't fun at all.

At last she looked at him again, piercing eyes filled with pain as she looked back at him, and her voice filled with sharp needles and shattered glass. "Is this what you hoped I would be?" She didn't mean to be a terrible daughter, she really didn't, but somehow everything that came from her mouth was a flurry of painful daggers. She wished that he knew how she really felt, how sad she was and how much she hated herself, but showing those things seemed like the dumbest thing she could do; like it would take the last shreds of love he might feel for her from his grasp.

"I just don't know how to do better," she admitted then, a painful admission that was nowhere near all the words she wanted to pour out and all the hurt she wanted to show. But it was all she could give at the moment.

She thought selfishly that she might be happier elsewhere, and that they would be happier, too. But she was afraid to be alone, too, afraid to get hurt and afraid to die if she would leave.