I was too busy staring at the side of his face to notice where we were when he pulled up outside my apartment building.

"I'm not a mechanic at your work or anything but I am pretty sure my house is not the place you were fixing my car." I mentioned quietly to him.

He turned off the engine and faced me, but he did not bother speaking. He just watched me in silence.

"Why are we here?" I questioned our whereabouts "I thought we were going to get Kermit."

"Your car is not fixed." He uttered unapologetically "I just wanted you away from him."

I exaggerated making a strangling motion with my hands as I glared at him.

"You are such a..." I tried to think of a word, but nothing came to mind so I ended up saying "A... Lurch."

"If I have to become some kind of monster to keep you with me then so be it." He let out deeply and determinedly.

My mouth opened and then closed once again.

I had no idea what to say to him, so I opened the door to the truck and climbed out.

"I'm not grateful for the reason why but thanks for driving me home." I held onto the door as I called back into the car.

His expression was foreign to me. The one he wore was hard to decipher. It almost looked like he was ashamed.

"Ella—" He began to deliver gently.

"Try and calm down before you drive again." I cut him off "On the way here, I thought I was in Wacky Races."

I shut the door to his truck and walked away. I rushed up the stairs and I did not bother to look back.

Going through the hall on the first floor of my apartment building, I did not hear him drive away.

When I walked into the corridor of my floor and put the key in my door and found it already open, I found myself feeling nauseous.

I pushed open the door and faced the messy apartment. The living room that was usually the cleanest part of the house was covered in empty beer bottles.

I was naive. I found myself hoping every day that my father would come back sober, and we would be able to live our life to some normality.

Derek Miller was hunched over the coffee table looking at a photo album.

I stepped closer cautiously and the aroma of cheap booze hit me. My sudden nearness made his head snap up and he looked to be trying to work out who I was for a minute.

He pointed to the photo opened in the book with the top of the beer bottle in his hand.

The picture was of the three of us at the beach. My father was standing with his arm around us. My mother was holding six-year-old me with our cheeks squished together while we both grinned.