A/N: So there's two big things going on in this chapter. The second half is the continuing argument from what John did in the last chapter. But in the first part, what ultimately happened to Ronnie's mother is revealed in a flashback. Warning-she's been murdered. The scene described below has Ronnie finding her mother's body, and her mother isn't dead yet. Lily tries to get Ronnie to leave the house, but Ronnie doesn't leave before the murderer comes back. The next couple (or maybe three) chapters will reveal a lot, but not all, of the information about what happened to Lily and Sam and Bobby. This is only the fourth chapter, but I'm still planning on the story being between 15-20 chapters at least. There's a lot of unpacking I'm planning to do.

Because of the murder scene, even though I don't explicitly show anything, I'm changing the story rating to a T.

Eight Years Earlier

Ronnie hated taking naps.

She always woke up feeling funny. Her head didn't feel right and she still felt sleepy. It always passed after a little while, but it still felt weird.

It took Ronnie a minute to realize that something was wrong. Really wrong. When she and Mommy laid down earlier, it had been daylight. Now, it was night and it was dark. Real dark. Ronnie looked at the clock next to the bed. It said 11:00.

Ronnie's bedtime was 9:00. Had she slept all day?

If she had slept all day, where was Mommy? Where was Grandma? She was still in Mommy's bed, so she didn't think she'd been moved anywhere.

Was Mommy supposed to work tonight? Ronnie didn't think so.

"Mommy?"

When Lily didn't answer, Ronnie climbed down off the bed. She felt her legs get wet and she started crying. She'd wet her pants. Grandma was gonna be so mad.

"Mommy?"

Lily didn't answer again, so Ronnie just went down to her room, put her wet pants and underwear in her clothes hamper, and put on a new pair of clean pajama pants. Lily would want her to have a bath before she went to bed for good.

But where was Lily?

Ronnie walked through the upstairs looking for her mommy or her grandma. She couldn't find either of them, and she was starting to get scared. Really scared. Was she all by herself?

No. She couldn't be. Mommy and Grandma wouldn't leave her. Would they?

Ronnie walked downstairs, calling her Mommy all over again. She heard someone moving around in the living room and felt better. Lily had just woken up and gone downstairs so she wouldn't wake up Ronnie.

"Mommy!"

Ronnie ran over to her Mommy before she realized why Lily was on the floor. She was hurt. She was hurt bad. There was blood everywhere, especially right under Lily's stomach. Lily was moving a little, trying to sit up, but she couldn't do it.

"Mommy! Mommy, what happened?" Ronnie asked. She tried to pull Lily up, help her sit against the coffee table in the living room, but it didn't work. Ronnie was just too weak. "Mommy, I can't pull you up."

"Ronnie?" Lily woke up suddenly at the sound of Ronnie's voice. "Ronnie, you're okay?"

"Yeah, Mommy, I'm okay." Ronnie said. "I just slept for a really long time."

Lily stifled a scream. How was it possible she was still alive and in this much pain? But at least one fear wasn't true. Ronnie was alive.

"Ronnie, listen to me." Lily said, gargling. She could taste blood in her mouth. "Have you seen Grandma?"

"No. I don't think she's here."

"Good. Listen to me. I need you to do exactly as Mommy tells you to do, okay?"

"You need the phone to call the medics?" Ronnie asked. "I can do it. I know our address and everything."

"No. No, baby, listen. I need you to go next door to Mrs. Morris' house. Okay? Knock on the door until she lets you in. Call the paramedics from there. But right now I need you to get out of this house. And whatever you do, do not talk to Grandma."

The front door opened and Dolores stood there, shaking her head at her daughter's instruction. "I don't think that'll be necessary, Lily."

"Mom, please. Your problem's with me. Just let Ronnie go."

"Grandma?" Ronnie asked. "Did you do this? Did you hurt Mommy?"

"No, Ronnie. I didn't." Dolores said.

Her voice was as normal as she always talked, but Ronnie knew something was wrong. Very wrong. Why hadn't her Grandma been in the house before?

"Ronnie, go back to bed." Dolores said.

"Mommy said to go next door."

Dolores' face suddenly changed. She was furious. Ronnie tried to get away, but her grandmother was faster. She grabbed Ronnie's arm, pulled her to her, and suddenly hit her in the face with an open hand. Ronnie screamed and tried to get away, only for Dolores to strike her again.

"Ronnie, stop it. Stop it and stop it now. Listen to me. This is nothing but a bad dream, okay?"

Ronnie stopped moving and trying to get away. She took another look at her Mommy and back to her Grandma. "It's a bad dream?"

"That's it, honey. Just a bad dream. I want you to go upstairs and go back to bed. When you wake up in the morning, everything will be okay."

"Mommy won't be hurt anymore?"

"No, baby. Your Mommy's fine. Just get up to your room."

Ronnie didn't know what to do, but she decided Grandma had to be right. Everything was just too strange to be real. It had to be a dream.

"Okay, Grandma." Ronnie said. "I'll go."

"Good girl, honey. Good girl." Dolores said. She kissed Ronnie's cheek and sent her back upstairs. "I'll come tuck you in."

Lily let out a strangled cry.

"Hush, Lily. It's time for Ronnie go to bed."

Ronnie went back up to her room, knowing things would be better in the morning. She heard a sound from the living room, a loud kind of popping sound, and she decided to hide in her closet just in case. She heard her Grandma calling her, but didn't answer. She woke the next morning to the nice policeman telling her that she needed to go to the hospital to be looked at by a doctor.

Ronnie was amazed at how stupid she could be sometimes.

She'd let her guard down and been hurt. Again. Every time she got close, to anyone, they let her down and she got hurt. She'd said it before, but this time she meant it.

She was done getting close to anyone.

Another bad memory was floating on the surface. In some ways, it was the worst one of all. It was one of her first memories, one of the clearest she had of her mother. Over time, the picture she had of her mother in her head had faded to oblivion. Now she didn't even have the crumpled paper photograph anymore.

She heard John outside on the phone with someone, and she didn't say anything when he knocked on the door and told her he was going to town. He asked if she wanted to go with him, and her only response was to tell him to go away again. When she heard the front door close, she pulled out the journal she kept in her duffel bag and a pen. She made a note of the day and time, how old she was, and wrote two simple sentences.

John threw Mommy away. He's just as bad as everyone else.

Ronnie skimmed through the other entries in her journal to see if she had recorded anything else that hurt as much as this did. She wrote in the journal because when something bad happened to her, writing it out was a way to detach herself from it. In a way, it didn't hurt anymore because it wasn't running through her head and making her wonder what she did to deserve whatever she got. The entries were familiar looking, but it was as if they'd happened to someone else.

Bill told me I was stupid because I failed a math test.

Kelly told me to stop being a baby when I threw up.

Allison paddled me for getting sick and having to come home early from school.

Jack spanked me with a belt for spilling milk on the table. I can't eat any more dinner for the rest of the week, and he's going to spank me again tomorrow night.

Nope. None of that even compared to this.

Ronnie checked the clock. It had been over an hour since John threw her mother's photograph in the garbage. She supposed he would come home and try to forget about the entire thing.

Fine. He didn't want her either. Just like everyone else.

Ronnie left the bedroom and went to the porch. She sat in the swing she'd noticed John in the first day she'd gotten there. She sat there and stared out into space, trying to conjure up some good memories of her mother. Not many were forthcoming. Her mother had, for the last five or six years, seemed like a wisp of smoke that was just too far away to put her hands on.

And now John had come and blown her away.

Before she could think of anything else, John's truck pulled back into the driveway. He parked and got out and Ronnie never moved. She wouldn't look at him again. Later that night, after he went to sleep, Ronnie decided she was going to run away. Run away and never look back, since she didn't have anything to look back at. John climbed up onto the porch and walked over to her. He pulled something out of his pocket and extended it to her.

"This is for you."

"I don't want…"

Ronnie started to say anything from you, until she realized what John was holding in his hand. It was the cigarette packet, fully intact. Ronnie took it from him gently and opened it up. The picture was still there. She was cried out, but she looked at John with wet eyes.

"How?"

"I figured if the trash had just gotten sent to the dump, they wouldn't have crushed it yet." John explained. I figured if I went and said I threw something away that meant a lot to my daughter, they'd let me look for it."

"You went dumpster diving for me?" Ronnie asked. "Is that why you smell like garbage?"

John smiled. "Yeah. The pack got a little bent at the bottom, but…"

"It's okay." Ronnie said. She pulled the photo out and stared at it. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. I'm really sorry, honey. I should've just asked you about it, not jumped to conclusions like I did."

"You shouldn't have been snooping through my stuff anyway." Ronnie growled. "If you'd just asked I would've showed it to you."

"You're right." John said. "You haven't given me any reason not to trust you. I'm sorry for that too."

"Is it because I'm a foster kid? Is that it? You look at me and think, oh, she's trouble, just 'cause I'm in the system?"

"Maybe a little, yes." John admitted honestly. "But I was wrong, sweetie."

Ronnie shrugged. She was too tired to keep up the charade of being angry right now. "I'm used to it."

"Used to what?"

"Being treated like I'm a bad kid." Ronnie said.

"You are not a bad kid. You've just been handed a rotten life."

Ronnie scoffed. "You can say that again."

"Ronnie, I just want to get to know you, sweetie." John tried again. "I want to be friends."

"Why? We're just gonna be apart in a week."

"Just because you move to another house doesn't mean we have to stop being friends." John said.

"No thanks."

John sighed. He was desperate. "What if I told you something about me?"

Ronnie finally stopped looking at the picture and up at John. "What?"

"What if I told you about me?" John offered. "Would you open up a little then?"

Ronnie was intrigued by the offer. No adult in her life, except maybe Gil, had ever really offered her an option for something like this. Besides, she realized, if she let him talk first, she could figure out how to filter out the real bad stuff and still keep it to herself while she figured out what to tell him.

"Okay. Deal."

"Can I sit with you?"

"Only if you get a shower first." Ronnie said. "I wasn't kidding when I said you smelled like hot garbage."

John laughed. "Okay. I'll be back."

Ronnie waited patiently on the porch, relieved to have her photograph back. The world felt somewhat back to normal now. John came out and sat next to her.

"Okay. I'm gonna tell you the story of the day my son died. But there's something you need to know first."

"What?" Ronnie asked.

John took a breath and waited before answering. He'd thought about it in the shower, and he'd decided that Ronnie was old enough and mature enough to know the truth. He knew that if Sam had been around, he would've stopped his father any way he knew how. He would be able to find some way to connect with Ronnie that didn't involve telling her what he was about to tell her. He'd thought about calling Dean, but he, Lisa, and Ben were on a vacation that the couple had been saving up for for months and wouldn't be back for another three days. But, he reasoned, with everything the kid had already been through, it clearly wouldn't hurt.

"You might find this hard to believe, but I need to know if you trust me." When Ronnie nodded, John told her the truth. "Monsters are real."