Old Neighbors

Chapter 1

The day that Ryan Barnes moved out of his parent's house, for the second time, surprisingly started off much easier than he had anticipated.

He had been planning this move for a while now, almost six months in fact, and now as summer drew to a close and stretched into that last week of unbearable humidity in August he was gathering up the last of his boxes and loading them up into the trunk of the family SUV.

"You've hardly got anything in there," his father critiqued, typical of the recent habit both he and his wife had picked up of trying to convince their son to stay.

"I've hardly got anything worth bringing." Ryan replied with a chuckle before reaching up and slamming down the trunk. "Besides," he continued, "You know I had all the new furniture shipped to the apartment, along with the furniture from mine and Ari's bedrooms." Ah yes Ari, one could never forget about her. Arianna Barnes was sweet, little, five-year-old, angel with hair the exact shade of dirty blonde that matched her father's. Ryan had never planned on having kids, and he certainly wasn't prepared to become a single father five years ago at the age of twenty, but the moment he had laid eyes on his little girl his heart had belonged to her.

His father huffed at the reminder of the previous afternoon in the Barnes household; spent breaking down and packing away things such as Ryan and Arianna's beds and Ari's plastic Cinderella vanity that she insisted they take with them to the new apartment. It was clear that Daniel Barnes hardly counted these things as furniture, and to be fair the vanity really was a toy whilst the two beds had both been handed down from a relative lord knows how many years ago, and was still very skeptical of his son's decision to move both himself and his daughter so far from home.

It's not like Ryan didn't have reason for such a far move, practically across the country, because he did. Early on his life, Ryan had decided that he was going to make his living working with computers. He didn't always know what, but it was something he was good at. The only problem with that was that IT was a field in which the schooling required a tremendous amount of tedious homework, and once Ari came along he found that he no longer had neither the time nor the concentration for that. So he left school, thankfully Ari wasn't born until after he had earned his associates degree, and began working as a freelance technician. It was great but the money was undependable, until now.

A client had recommended him to a friend he had out on the west coast, one who worked high up in the food chain of an advertising company that was currently looking for some help in the IT department. The pay was steady and after a few video interviews Ryan managed to secure the job, and so that is what brought him to this very moment with his father.

"I'm just worried about you son," The man in question said, fixing Ryan with a hard look on his slightly wrinkled face. "I know you can take care of your little girl just fine on your own, don't think I don't, but you're not going to have any help out there."

Ryan smiled through the warning, hoping his father would buy the phony confidence that he was trying to pull off. They had had this discussion countless times before, although normally his mother is involved, and it always manages to make Ryan feel the same level of guilt each time.

Not that he would ever confess to that.

"Dad it's all set. She starts school in a week, I drop her off on my way to work, there's a great afterschool program for her to stay at until I get out of work. Is it perfect? No, but it'll work."

Daniel Barnes let out another scoff at this, but this one was much more amused than the first and Ryan would take that as a win.

It was right then that the two of them heard the sound of the house's front door opening, emerging from it a large woman with short brown hair and too much make-up just like every other day, and of course a stick-skinny little girl trailing right behind her.