𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗲

21. 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗘𝗹𝘀𝗲

Frankie's POV

A few days had passed since my little outing with Stef. We're things better between us? They certainly were. That night a lot of my questions got answered. Better yet, my mom seemed to be telling the truth.

Ella Mae. Stef had told me the first truth. That was my birth name. It was the name that popped up in the foster care system. It was the name I told Stef and Mike the night they met me. Why had she and mama and Mike been keeping that sort of secret for so long?

Stef said they were going to let me in on this piece of information once I was around eight and could understand it better. But as the years passed, the idea of telling me only seemed harder and harder. I understood this but I also felt like it was unfair to me. Just because they were scared didn't mean I had to suffer from the consequences of nothing being said. And here we were, years later. I originally thought I had dug my own hole into this but it now seemed my parents were the ones with the bigger shovels and deeper graves.

Then I had asked about my last name. Alvarado.

I was surprised Stef told me everything, or at least what she said she knew. She also seemed honest and open and I felt like our bond strengthened that night. Or at least got repaired. She finally told me what she had been avoiding all day. More so a majority of my life. We came to the agreement that we both didn't do so good on our ends communication wise. My moms could have been more honest with me to start with. I could have been a lot more responsible with my decision making. We both hadn't been open from the start. This threw everything off balance. I think they knew this about me when I was younger but I was just starting to learn this about myself.

The next day I had spoken with both my moms. We sort of rediscussed what Stef and I said in the car. Mama also apologized for not giving me any answers. Her reasoning was the same as Stef's, almost as if they had they scripted out. But they also seemed to be telling the truth. Mama told me the same thing mom told me in the car.

There were things I already knew that they told me, like how I was found in a shed when I was five. Then there were new pieces of information like what had happened before they found me that night. The events leading up to it seemed awfully familiar when they explained it and an icy chill ran down my spine. I guess a distracted driver had hit a car earlier that night. The car it hit just so happened to have me in the backseat of it. I was supposed to be in a car seat or at least booster seat, but I wasn't because they didn't find one after the wreck. Supposedly the driver and passenger in the front of the car had been arrested for crimes my moms wouldn't explain. And the distracted driver that hit our car also got in some legal trouble.

But that distracted driver unknowingly saved my life. The two men never explained to police that they had planned to kill me that night. Only I knew this piece of information and still very much remembered it, but decided to keep it my secret when my moms explained the car accident. Stef however knew the original connection between me and the two men. The whole police department too knew they had stolen a car a few months earlier from a grocery story parking lot. They knew Anthony was my foster parent at the time I was accidentally taken and I guess the name Ella Mae was all over the radio for the next few months. When I was five, I didn't know if Anthony was looking for me after I was taken. And when I got put into my moms care, the thought sort of faded away considering I was in the nicest foster home I had ever been in since Anthony.

After months of me being missing, I was finally found. When the car accident occurred, I guess I had escaped the wrecked car before any police had arrived on scene. Authorities nor Stef knew the exact details of where I went after the car accident but they knew I ended up in a shed.