My Mom Removed My Bedroom Door So Her New Boyfriend Could “Monitor” Me. She Said I Was Making Up Lies About Him. Then I Found My Father’s Secret Journal Hidden In The Attic.

Breaking Point

And while I was sleeping, the worst happened. Brandon snuck in. He was drunk and this time he didn’t restrain himself to just a thigh grab. His hand went all the way.

I had never felt so disgusting and humiliated. I remember traveling home broken. And to make matters even worse, the week we came home my mom found the hidden letters from dad I had been hiding.

She burned them in the backyard. And as punishment for communicating with him, she took my bedroom door off its hinges for monitoring. Of course, Brandon took this as an opportunity.

He would stand in the doorway at night watching me sleep. I remember that was a real breaking point of mine. I remember sneaking off into the school library past hours the next day to email Dad.

I must have sent an hour-long email that made no sense because I just rambled about everything. I didn’t know what I expected, if I even wanted anything, because I was so numb. But then two weeks later I got a reply from him.

It was lengthy, super lengthy, telling me all the right things and how everything was going to be okay. But there was one thing that stuck out.

“Did you check where I said?”

I became confused. Check where? I started going through every single email he had ever sent me. And that’s when I found it. In one of the more recent emails, Dad had told me to go up to the attic and behind the radiator.

I remember reading that email the day after asking my mom if I could go visit him. I think I was too heartbroken to read thoroughly and somehow missed it. Either way, I made a big-time mental note of what dad said and waited until mom and Brandon went on date night.

The Attic Discovery

That happened next week. My hands shook climbing into the attic with a flashlight, and behind the radiator, I found a plastic wrapped journal. I opened it to the marked page dad told me to.

It was dated weeks before dad’s arrest and in dad’s handwriting it said:

“It’s been a few weeks since I caught Lauren and Brandon sneaking off into the bar. I don’t know how to confront her.”

I was shocked, taken aback, and that’s when I heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway that made my blood run cold. They were back early. The restaurant must have been too crowded or maybe they’d had a fight.

I could hear car doors slamming and mom’s heels clicking on the walkway. My heart pounded as I clutched the journal to my chest, knowing I had only seconds to decide what to do. I heard Brandon’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, each creek of the old wood sending a jolt through my chest.

My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the flashlight, its beam dancing wildly across the dusty attic floorboards. I shoved the journal under my shirt, the leather cover cold against my skin, and scrambled toward the attic opening. But I was too slow.

Brandon’s head appeared through the hole just as I reached the ladder, his dark eyes immediately locking onto mine. He stared at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable in the dim light. Then he climbed up the rest of the way, his broad shoulders barely fitting through the opening.

I backed up against the wall, feeling the rough wood press into my spine, the journal pressing against my stomach under my shirt. He looked around the attic slowly, deliberately taking in the disturbed dust that hung in the air like tiny ghosts, the moved boxes near the radiator where I’d found dad’s hidden things.

He asked what I was doing up here, his voice calm but with an edge that made my skin crawl. I told him I was looking for my old stuffed animals from when I was little, trying to keep my voice steady. He didn’t believe me.

I could see it in the way his jaw tightened, the way his hands flexed at his sides. He stepped closer and I could smell the wine on his breath from dinner mixed with his cologne that mom said was expensive but always made me feel sick.

He said I was a terrible liar just like my father. The words hit me like a slap. Then he grabbed my arm, his fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and yanked me toward the ladder.

A Dangerous Game

I had to use my other hand to keep the journal from falling out of my shirt, pressing it tight against my body. Mom was waiting at the bottom of the ladder, her arms crossed and foot tapping impatiently. She looked annoyed, asking why I was sneaking around like some kind of thief in my own house.

Brandon told her I was probably hiding something, his hand still gripping my arm possessively. He suggested they search my room and I saw a flash of something dark in his eyes. I panicked and said I just wanted to find my old teddy bear because I couldn’t sleep without my door.

The words tumbled out too fast, too desperate. Mom rolled her eyes but seemed to buy it, probably because she was tired and didn’t want to deal with more drama. That night I waited until I heard them both snoring, Brandon’s deep rumble mixing with mom’s softer breathing.

The house settled into its nighttime creeks and groans as I carefully hid the journal inside my pillowcase, feeling the corners dig into my cheek when I lay down. I couldn’t risk reading more with Brandon checking on me every hour, his shadow appearing in my doorway like clockwork.

The next morning was Saturday. Mom made pancakes like nothing had happened, humming off-key to some song on the radio. The normalcy of it made my stomach turn.

Brandon kept staring at me across the table, his eyes following every movement as I pushed food around my plate. I excused myself to use the bathroom and took the journal with me, hiding it in the tank of the toilet wrapped in a plastic bag I found under the sink. The water was cold on my arms as I carefully placed it inside.

At school on Monday, I snuck into the computer lab during lunch, telling my friends I had to finish an assignment. The room was empty except for the hum of old computers and the tick of the wall clock. I started taking photos of each page of the journal with my phone, angling it to avoid the glare from the fluorescent lights.

My hands were still shaking, making some photos blurry. The entries went back years, Dad’s familiar handwriting becoming more frantic as time went on. Dad wrote about his suspicions about seeing Brandon’s car at weird hours parked down the street, about mom acting strange and distant.

One entry mentioned finding a receipt for a motel in mom’s purse when he was looking for gum. Another talked about Brandon showing up at the bar during dad’s shifts, always watching from a corner booth, always lurking like a predator studying its prey.

I uploaded everything to a cloud account I made with a fake name, my heart pounding as the progress bar slowly filled. Then I deleted the photos from my phone, checking twice to make sure they were really gone.