The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The First Collection by Frost, J (great novels .txt) 📕

are Wonder Woman brave, sweetheart. Can you keep being brave while I ask you some questions about what happened in the bathroom?”

She nods and nestles in tighter. “I’m sorry—”

“Sh. You don’t need to apologize again. I just want to understand what happened. I want you to think about it but I want you to picture it like it’s on a little screen in your head. Like you’re watching it on your laptop. Can you do that for me?”

To avoid triggering another panic attack, I need her to have some distance from the trigger. Picturing a traumatic event on a screen is a technique I learned in Thailand to help deal with the things I’d seen in the Navy. I hope it will work for Emily.

“Like watching a movie?”

“That’s right. In the movie, we’re in the bathroom and I’m standing behind you with my fingers in your mouth. But you can’t feel it or taste it, because this is a movie, right?”

“Uh-huh. It looks scary to watch, though. Like the girl in the movie is going to choke.”

She’s really distanced; I go with it. “Why do you think the girl’s going to choke?”

“Because her daddy’s fingers are really big and her mouth is small and soap’s poisonous. It will make her be sick and she’ll choke.”

I kiss the top of her head. “Does it occur to the girl that her daddy has checked the soap to make sure it won’t hurt her?”

“Uh, no. She doesn’t think about that. She’s too scared.”

“Her daddy did check, so it’s not something to worry about. The soap is not going to harm her. Her daddy is not going to harm her. There’s a difference between hurt, like we do in a scene, and harm. Do you understand that?”

She nods.

“Good girl. Daddy will never harm his little girl. Picture it again for me. Is she scared of other things? Can you see them? Like when a movie shows the person’s thoughts?”

“She’s remembering something bad that happened to her. It’s making her very scared. It’s making her feel like she can’t breathe.”

I bend over so I can kiss the top of her head and smooth my hands down her back. We did hit a trigger. Time to pull on my big, black, Dom wetsuit and take the plunge. “Like you’re watching a movie, can you describe the bad thing that happened to her?”

She sniffles and grinds her face against my thigh. “You’ll think the girl’s disgusting.”

“No, I won’t. There’s nothing about the girl that’s disgusting. She’s Daddy’s best girl, and Daddy’s best girl is not disgusting.” I give her a moment to process before I prompt, “Describe the bad thing she’s remembering, sweetheart.”

“She’s in the school bathroom and three girls are holding her head in the toilet while they flush it. The water’s swirling around her head and up her nose and she can’t breathe,” she says in a monotone.

There’s nothing monotone about her body language. Her face is screwed up tight, tears pooling in the bridge of her nose. Around my hips, her arms have turned into steel bands. She’s curled into a taut ball against my thigh and calf. My poor baby.

“When did this happen to the girl?” I ask gently.

“It’s, um, her freshman year of high school.”

“Did it happen a lot?”

She nods. “Every time the Monster Ms caught her in the bathroom. So, she didn’t go. She got really bad stomach pains and wet her pants because she was afraid to go. Everyone laughed at her and called her a baby who needed diapers, but at least she didn’t get her head flushed.”

Fuck, no wonder that bottom losing control of her bladder during a scene affected Emily so badly. “Sweet girl, it wasn’t her fault, just like it wasn’t the fault of the bottom who peed during the scene. Do you understand that?”

She shakes her head and screws her face deeper into my thigh. “Maman said it was her fault for being awkward and that she needed to stand up to the Monster Ms and not let people walk all over her.” Her voice quavers and rises, and I know I’m losing her to littlespace. “But, Daddy, the Monster Ms are really big.”

“Easy, Emmy, easy. Remember you’re watching a movie. No matter how big the monster seems, it’s really only tiny on the screen, right?”

She nods and eases a little against my leg.

“Were the Monster Ms older?” I ask.

“They were juniors already.” Her voice has dropped back into a normal register and I stifle my sigh of relief.

“Did the girl stop the Monster Ms in the end? Was she Wonder Woman brave, baby doll?”

“No, Daddy. Professor Haupman caught the Monster Ms locking the girl in a closet and made her tell him what was happening. After that, the girl stayed in his classroom during recess, lunch, and after school. She went to the teacher’s bathroom, so she didn’t wet herself anymore. Over the summer, she and her Maman had to go and meet with the principal and the governors. After that, the Monster Ms didn’t go to her school anymore.” She takes several deep breaths while I rub her back. “But Maman was still angry and said she’d made a lot of trouble for everyone when she should have solved her own problems.”

Fuck me, what can I say to that? Emily was bullied, horribly bullied, and her own mother didn’t support her. No wonder she escaped to a bookstore after school. And what kind of fucking nightmare was this mother of hers? A woman who threw Emily to the wolves when she was being bullied and burned her precious comic books and tried to force her back to the cheating husband and was so critical of my sweet sub that Emily’s internalized her mother’s voice as her most self-destructive thoughts? What the hell do I say to this?

I know what I don’t say and that’s anything judgmental about the mother who now has dementia. There might be a time in the future when I