BILLIE'S NIGHTMARE

Chapter 32

When morning broke, I upped from my bed and took a cold shower. I never liked them but they always made me finish faster. When I was dressed, I grabbed my phone and placed it into my shorts pockets and made my way towards the stairs.

As I was about to climb down, I was pushed again the same as I was yesterday, but this time fell butt first onto the floor.

"No, no, no, please. This can't be happening." I paced up and down the hall. If I wasn't afraid of falling on my butt until it felt broken, I would've tried to push through. But my body was already aching from yesterday's ordeal.

I wanted to sob. I wanted to shout. I wanted to break something. But instead, I slid down onto the wall and stared up at the ceiling. I was giving up. I didn't know what else to do. How to get help. Where to find help. After millions of helpless situations that I have faced, this one makes the worst out of all of them. I couldn't even cry.

I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and looked foward to find my father climbing up.

"You won't be joining us for breakfast?" he asked.

The question annoyed me. I would never have joined them for breakfast, but having the choice to would have been nice. I rewarded him with a scowl.

"Don't you have work to get to?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I do. In a few minutes. There's something I need to get from my office."

"I don't care." I replied, making his eyebrows draw together.

"Elizabeth —" His phone rang inside his trouser pockets and he reached in and pulled it out. He held out his index finger towards me, a sign that the conversation was not yet over. But I knew it was. He would either forget about it or be too distracted with work to ask again. He might not even come home when I'm up, so conversations with him were always over when they're interrupted by a business call.

He muttered into his phone, giving commands as if he was the instructor of Earth itself. Suddenly, he held his hand against the phone and pulled it away from his ear.

"Elizabeth, get me the file in my office. It's the only one on my desk. Once you have, bring it to my car and please don't touch anything else in there."

With that command, he put the phone back against his ear and walked down the stairs. He didn't even give me a chance to come up with a lie as to why I couldn't bring it to him. I sighed heavily and made my way to his office anyway. I opened the door and stepped in. I immediately wanted to get back out. The whole atmosphere itself was draining. It defined work in a way not even company offices were able to. This was where my father spent his time when he wasn't working in the company. Doing more work. How exhausting.

I scanned the room, paying little attention to the surroundings but looking for one thing in specific. When my eyes caught it on the desk as my father said, I picked up the orange file. If I were curious enough, I would've looked into its contents, but I chose not to. It seemed uninteresting if I was saying the least.

I turned around to leave, but as I did, my hand collided against a stack of papers and they went tumbling to the ground. I grunted.

"For fuck's sake," I said, placing the file on the desk and bending down to pick the papers up. I put them back where they were, and noticed that some of them had fallen into the trash bin. I picked them up and was about to place them back when I noticed that they didn't look like the other documents.

Those were printed copies, these seemed to be pen written contents. I read the words and gasped at the first word, my eyes inflating.

Written in crooked handwriting at the top of the page was a name. Mine.