I could tell when Para let us get absolutely annihilated by an opposing team who were consistently piss-weak against us, that… well, shit was not good at home.
Honestly? I had my own problems, I didn’t want to get in on hers at the moment. But I ordered her into a private chat anyway and asked what was up.
When all she would say was my dad at first, I got pretty riled up. “Of course it’s your fucking dad, Para, when is it anything else in your life?”
She was quiet for a while after that. I put my hand up to my headset. “I can fucking go, if you don’t want to play properly and you don’t—”
“No!” She sounded halfway to tears. I was doing a great job with women today. “Dad has another family. Other kids. He told me when I got home today. I don’t think Mum even knows yet. It’s such a fucking mess.”
Well, it didn’t surprise me that the guy I’d come to know through Para would have a secret double life like that.
Para took a big sniff. “He wants me to meet this sister of mine, like, she’s four years older than me or something, I guess he thinks we’re near enough in age that we’re going to become super-close or something. Like, has he ever bothered to stop and look at me? I don’t do girlfriends or anything like that, Mum barely wants to spend time with me. And I bet she doesn’t know the first thing about what he’s really like, either. He was going on about how she found him by looking up his old sporting history, he was really pleased about that. He likes to act like he’s some big hero, you know, absolutely fucking God’s gift, when he isn’t—”
It was too much of a coincidence. All the details lining up like that. “Para, is your dad fucking Brad Chalmers?”
Para didn’t give me an answer in words at first, but I could tell from the way she breathed.
“Yeah, I fucking know who he is. I’d even recognise him if I saw him at the shops, trust me, I know.”
“You—”
“I watched as he met with your sister the other day, Para. Yeah, I know her. She goes to my fucking school.”
It might not have come together for me then, except Para started stammering all over the place. Once I was focused on something being wrong, I got it pretty damn quickly.
“You said four years older. She’s eighteen, same as me… How old are you, Para?”
I heard a clatter from her end. “If you disconnect on me now Para, you can be assured I will never fucking speak to you again.”
She sighed, a sob. “I’m fourteen.”
“So when we first started chatting, you were…” It explained everything. Why she’d never just left home even though her father was a complete shit—her father, Brad Chalmers—and why she’d always seemed so vulnerable to the world to me even when she showed tremendous strength, why I’d felt such a need to get in her corner.
That fucking baby voice. She’d been a baby when we started talking, she was still a baby.
“I was too young when we first met,” said Para, as if she could tell what I was thinking. “I’d talked to older guys before, and they either wanted to creep on me, or they treated me differently. They’d think they needed to protect me, and sometimes that meant they wouldn’t talk to me at all, and they’d tell other people without my permission that I was too young to talk to. You were probably the first guy I’d met gaming who didn’t think I needed to be watched, or that it was weird for any girl to be gaming. But I could tell you were the sort of guy who wanted to do the right thing. I didn’t want to have you think you shouldn’t be talking to me at all.”
Even though I fucking shouldn’t have been. What if Julia had found out about this? It was completely different now I knew I was talking to an underage girl. Having private voice chats with her. I could say it was just about gaming all I liked, that the real danger for Para was inside her own damn family, but who was going to believe that?
And this was the father Tamara was so excited about finally meeting. Her mother had been right to want to keep her away… but her mother had wimped out on telling her the truth.
I needed to do something. Stop this. Keep that monster away from her—but there was something else that wanted to come out of me right now, and it was insisting on being first through the gate. That old panic at the wrong move getting me uncovered, because if he’d ever realised we were talking he would definitely have—
“Para, you fucking little liar, you have no idea what you could have done to me pulling this bullshit. You had no right to just decide what you wanted and fuck with me—”
She disconnected. I should have fucking known she would just ditch the conversation. Para was scared of confrontation, that plus her age was how he’d found it so easy to keep her in her place, wasn’t it?
Now I didn’t know when Tamara was supposed to m
eet with Chalmers again. Just that it was going to happen… and he was going to use Para to lure Tamara in, because he knew just as well as I did she wouldn’t tell Tamara the truth about him.
She was just a kid still. And I’d attacked her like some vicious animal. The same way I’d attacked Tamara—apparently, her sister.
If they happened to bother comparing notes on me, neither of them would trust me again.
I had to get in touch with Tamara and warn her not to see Chalmers again. Now. What if she was having dinner with his family tonight or something?
But how could I find her? I’d never bothered to get her address or number, and I knew after today that Callie would never help me. She might even warn Tamara against me or call the cops.