Daughters Book 4 The Little Girl From Down the Street

As with Book 3, I am haunted by the face of a young girl who I didn’t help.
While walking on the street she would often pass by my house. In our little town there weren’t many sidewalks. If I was outside working in the yard she would stop and want to talk. Fine, I was willing. But after that first time her visits became more regular, and once, when I wasn’t in the yard, she actually knocked on the door. Of course I answered and we went outside to talk…but I was becoming a little nervous about a nine-year-old girl being so often in the yard of a thirty-year-old single white male.
What if somebody noticed? Would they think I was encouraging her, even molesting her?
So one day this big brave man asked her not to stop again. So, she didn’t.
Not much later, after the family moved away, I heard that both her stepfather and her stepbrother were molesting her. Her visits to me must have been a cry for help from an adult she not only liked but evidently wanted to trust.
And I failed her.
This happened thirty-five years ago. She is impossible to forget. I wonder about her often. How is she? Is she married and happy? I hope so. Or, from her misuse as a child, did she enter the dark world of drugs, pornography and prostitution?
According to the so-called experts that is what often happens.
Sweetheart, I remember your face. I don’t remember your first name, and I haven’t forgotten you.
Wherever you are, may God be shining on you….
****
Fayanne has pretty auburn hair and green eyes, but doesn’t smile much. At nine she’s losing her mom to Alzheimer’s. She’s too young to understand what it means when her mom gets that funny look in her eyes and then sometimes acts like she doesn’t even know her…but the worst is what her mom’s boyfriend does to her at night. She wonders if what he does is right, and good, and should she like it? She has questions but nobody to ask, until one day while walking to school she meets another man, a nice man. They talk, a lot, but she’s afraid to ask him that one question she really wants to know.