Wild Ambition

Chapter 21

I had a name and it was my father's name. I couldn't believe that after all this time of waiting and wishing, I finally knew my father's name. Now I just had to find him, but that was proving to be hard. After I had come home from having lunch with Melissa that day, I told my grandparents what happened and that I had gotten my father's name from her. They had been so excited that they called the private investigator they had hired and told them to find a man named Peter Anderson that could also possibly be my father.

But the private investigator was having a hard time finding a man who had lived here with that name and could possibly be my father. All my hopes of finding my father were going back to the way I had felt before. I was losing hope again that I was never going to find my father. It seemed like he didn't even exist.

I knew he had to exist though because I was here, but he just seemed to have disappeared from existence. And as more time went by and months started to pass by, I felt like giving up. I had talked to Melissa a couple of time since she had given me a name and she was absolutely sure that was the name that Charlotte had given her. My grandparents had tried to get Charlotte to come over so we could talk to her about my father, but she seemed to be avoiding us.

I didn't really get why she was avoiding us, but that's what Charlotte was currently doing. It wasn't clear though if she knew that I knew what my father's name was. I wouldn't really know that until she actually talked to us. It was the only reason I wanted to talk to her, not that I really expected her to confirm that Peter Anderson was my father's name, but I wanted to at least try and get to her answer that question truthfully.

It was possible that Charlotte had told Melissa a different name than my father had given her. I had thought about that, but with the way Melissa described her relationship with Charlotte back then, it sounded like they had been really close to each other. And Charlotte hadn't given anyone else my father's name so it seemed like Charlotte hadn't given Melissa a false name. It was going to be hard for me to believe anything that would come out of Charlotte's mouth with all the lies that she has told me over the years, but for some reason I truly believe that Charlotte had told Melissa the truth about my father's name. I just didn't understand why we were having such a hard time trying to find him.

***

"Are you excited for Christmas?" Nathan asked me as we walked through the mall. There were Christmas decorations everywhere we walked in the mall. None of the stores we walked into had missed the opportunity to decorate for the holidays. The decorations had gone up sometime at the end of November since the last time Nathan had brought me to the mall. That had been with all of our friends. Today it was just me and Nathan.

"No. I hate the holidays," I replied looking at some jewelry as we passed by it.

"Let me guess your mom is the reason for why you hate the holidays," Nathan said as he looked over at me and walked close to me. I had gotten a lot closer to Nathan in the past couple of months, closer to anyone that I had met since coming to California. There was something about him that just made me drawn to him. So, I was hanging out with him more often than I had been in the beginning. I was getting comfortable around him.

I hadn't exactly spilled any of my secrets to him yet, but I was slowly getting closer and it was possible that I could end up spilling one today, which probably would just about how my holidays had gone in the past. All my Christmases, along with all the Thanksgivings I had celebrated, had been spent alone. Charlotte was usually out at a party or hanging out with her friends so she was never home. She had never bothered to spend the holidays with me and I didn't think that was going to change especially when she seemed to be avoiding me and my grandparents at the moment.