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“I was pissed at first; who wouldn’t be? But from the first time I saw her, I knew she was mine. There’s no way I could leave her for anyone else to take care of, so I did what I had to do. Janine hung in there for another couple of years, but I had to put my life on hold to take care of my kid.”
“It was hard at first; she didn’t want any part of me.” Ryan smiled at the memory of his little girl. “But we soon got into a routine of sorts until things evened out. Her grandparents were still pissed that I was in the picture, and truth be told, Janine probably wouldn’t have told me had she not been sick.”
“When Ada was eight, her mom died. It was hard on both of us, but we pulled through, but my little girl was never the same again. She became distant. I tried everything, and for the next few years, things seemed to be going back to normal. I hadn’t been in her life for the first few years, but I’d learned in the time that we had together how to be a dad, so even without her mom there, I was holding my own.”
“Things evened out between her grandparents and me, and even though I missed it here and wanted to come back, I couldn’t take my kid away from all that she knew, so I settled there. When she was about nine or ten, she started making new friends. I was so excited to see her finally coming out of her shell that I didn’t pay close attention.”
“When they’d have sleepovers, I’d just supply all the junk food they required and stay out of their way. I had no idea she even knew how to use the computer for anything other than schoolwork. One of the little girls was a few years older; turns out she taught the others how to go into chat rooms and such.”
Tears he didn’t know were there fell from Ryan’s eyes as he relived the horror of what had led to his child’s demise. It’s the reason he never wanted children, never would’ve married Misty or anyone else with a kid. Not because he hated kids, but because he’d already failed one.
“She never told me what she was up to, and I stupidly believed she was too young to know about certain things. I never once imagined that at her age she’d be a victim…” Ryan felt bile rise up in his chest as Pete rushed to find a bedpan while Celia rang for the nurse.
He didn’t need to go on since it was all written in the report how someone had tricked his young daughter by using her mom, saying that they were once friends. This monster had used the child’s innocence to convince her that telling her dad or grandparents about them would lead to her losing her last contact with her mother, the mother she was still grieving.
No one knew until it was too late that the child was being groomed. Not until her torn, abused body had been found in a ditch miles away from home. It all came out in the investigation, and the cops had done a bang-up job hunting down the offender and bringing him to justice, but something inside of Ryan had died back there.
He’d donated all the money left from Janine’s life insurance, money that had been put aside for his daughter’s future, to help protect kids from Internet predators, and had headed back to his hometown to lick his wounds. He’d done his best to put it all behind him less he went mad, even started dating again to get his mind off of his loss.
As she watched the emotions play across his face, saw the agony as he wretched into the bedpan the nurse had brought in just in time, Celia was now more certain than ever as she watched the nurse clean him up that Ryan Swamp had not sent that message.
Dale West was about to piss himself. He was so scared. He’d been biding his time, waiting for the busybodies to stop hanging around to go into the room even though it was cordoned off with police tape to retrieve his little spy cameras. But now it was too late. He knew as soon as he saw the team of men heading into the room with those wands that his goose was cooked.
He locked himself away in his office, trying to think up an excuse. No one had seen him plant the things, so maybe he could get away with placing the blame on someone else. With that thought in mind, he rushed to erase the videos he’d captured of the young woman that he’d been collecting. His crazy-ass wife would skin his ass if she got wind of what he’d been up to.
