Chapter 96: Puppets of Love

They say memory fades with age.

That’s a lie.

Memory doesn’t fade — it rots. It festers, until the smell of it begins to seep into everything you are.

Her name was Rebecca. My daughter. My curse.

When she was little, she had the softest laugh. She’d sit by the window and hum to herself while drawing stick figures on the fogged glass. The neighbors used to say she was precious — all curls and dimples and questions. Always questions. “Where do dead things go?” “If God loves us, why do cats bleed when you cut them?”

I should’ve known then.

But fathers don’t see their daughters as monsters. Not at first.

When she was about six, she started keeping a jar under her bed. Inside it were insects — beetles, ants, the occasional grasshopper — all pinned neatly to the bottom, wings broken. She’d line them up like soldiers, talk to them in whispers. When I asked what she was doing, she smiled and said, “Teaching them to be quiet.”

I told my wife, Margaret. She laughed it off, said all kids were strange.

“She’s curious,” she said. “You worry too much.”

Maybe I did.

Rebecca loved animals. At least, that’s what she said. She used to bring home strays, feed them milk, and then — later — I’d find the bones buried under the porch. I confronted her once. She tilted her head, eyes wide, genuinely confused.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “It just… stopped breathing.”

Margaret told me not to make a scene. “She’s sensitive,” she insisted. “Don’t scare her.”

But I’d seen something in Rebecca’s eyes that night — something old, something empty.

We were a happy family once. I ran a small business, Margaret worked part-time at the library. We had Sunday dinners, movie nights, all of it.

Then came the debts. The lawsuit. The sleepless nights.

Margaret and I started fighting. Loudly. Constantly.

Rebecca would sit on the stairs and watch — never crying, never asking us to stop. Just watching.

One night, after an argument that ended with a broken glass and blood on my hand, she came into my study and said, “Mommy doesn’t love you anymore.”

I remember the calm in her voice. No malice, just certainty. “She’s going to leave you, Daddy. She told me.”

A week later, Margaret filed for divorce.

I moved into a smaller house. Rebecca stayed with her mother. For a while, I thought that was best. But things started happening — little things. Margaret would call me in the middle of the night, hysterical, saying Rebecca had nightmares, that she talked in her sleep, that she said she wanted to “see what fire felt like.”

I told her to get Rebecca therapy. She did.

The therapist lasted three sessions before referring her to someone “specialized in childhood trauma.”

I knew what that meant.

And then, one night, Margaret’s house burned down.

The fire took everything — walls, furniture, Margaret. Only Rebecca survived. They found her outside, sitting in the garden, soot on her cheeks, holding a melted plastic doll.

The report said it was an accident. Electrical fault. But I saw the look in her eyes.

She was twelve.

I remember asking her, “Did you do it?”

She looked up at me with those dark eyes — Margaret’s eyes — and said, “I told her to be quiet...”

Something inside me broke that day.

They gave me custody because there was no one else. I brought her home. Tried to raise her. Tried to believe she could change. But every day, I saw the same cold detachment, the same faint smirk when something died — the neighbor’s cat, the goldfish, my dog. She’d always be there, watching.

Once, I found her in the yard holding a dead bird. “It stopped singing,” she said. “So I helped it sleep.”

I didn’t sleep for days after that.

When I told people what she’d done, no one believed me. She was polite, quiet, sweet. She’d bake cookies for the neighbors. Everyone adored her.

But I knew. I knew.

She started leaving drawings under my door. Strange ones. A house on fire. A man hanging from the ceiling. A little girl standing beside him, smiling. She said it was “just imagination.”

The truth was, she didn’t imagine it. She predicted it.

By then, I’d started drinking more. It was the only way to make the silence bearable.

Sometimes, I’d sit on the couch, watching her move around the house like a shadow, wondering what it would be like to not have to be afraid of your own child.

Then came the day I couldn’t take it anymore.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal, humming. The same tune her mother used to hum.

Something inside me snapped. Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was years of guilt. Maybe it was just finally realizing that she would never stop — that one day she’d hurt someone else, and it would be my fault for not stopping her sooner.

I remember walking toward her. The sunlight hit her face just right — soft, innocent, angelic.

Then my hands were around her throat.

She screamed, kicked, clawed. I didn’t hear any of it. All I heard was the sound of fire crackling. All I saw was Margaret’s picture burning in the flames.

When the neighbor burst in and pulled me off her, I was laughing. Not because I wanted to, but because it was the only sound left in me.

They said I was insane. Maybe I was. I told them she killed her mother. They said I was paranoid, delusional. They took me here.

That was over twenty years ago.

I heard she bounced around from foster to foster with no one willing to adopt her. Her last foster died... both the parents and their young child. They said it was a robbery gone wrong but... that girl she is a monster. I don't know when she changed her name but if there is death around her, she is responsible....She probably pretended to be a victim herself.

But she is playing you, playing you all like puppets. That is what she does , she takes men and makes them puppets of her Love.