Happy ✮ Charlie Heaton

twenty three; real life

TRIGGER WARNING FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT/RAPE IN THIS CHAPTER - READER DISCRETION IS STRONGLY ADVISED. YOU DO NOT NEED TO READ THIS CHAPTER, ALTHOUGH THE EVENTS IN THIS CHAPTER WILL BE REFERENCED IN FUTURE CHAPTERS.

Charlie and Grace had been together for almost three weeks and they'd been perfect. Both of them decided to not go fully public with their relationship yet, thinking that it would be best for Grace's mental health to keep that part of their lives private and away from the public eye.

Even with how well things were going, there were things that were bothering Grace and she needed to get them off her chest and tell Charlie but she wasn't sure if he was ready to know since it was something that had been kept a secret between herself and her mother for almost six years, and her mother kept it a secret for a lot longer than that before she told Grace.

Grace sat down on her sofa, an empty mug of tea in her hands as she stared at the floor in front of her. Charlie sat down on the sofa beside her, noticing how visibly unsettled his girlfriend looked. "Are you okay?" He asked quietly, a hand resting on Grace's wrist.

"Listen, I think it's time I told you... the truth about my father." Grace took a deep breath to calm herself down, trying to hold in her tears but was failing as tears began to blur her vision a little, but she ignored them.

"He was a school friend of my mum's, but they lost contact after high school ended. They saw each other again at a bar and talked for hours... but it wasn't all innocent. My father's name is Jack Ellis and he raped my mother when she was twenty. She fell pregnant with me and wanted to abort me but at the time, she was living in Ireland and she didn't have enough money at the time to get one. When she did, she went to get a scan to make sure if it would be safe to abort me but when she saw me on the scan, she couldn't bring herself to kill me so she kept me and never told me the truth about my father until I was fifteen."

Charlie didn't say anything as he held onto Grace's wrist, gently rubbing circles over it with his thumb, knowing that nothing he would say would impact the situation, nor make it any better. He knew how hard it was on Grace to come forward about what had happened to her mother, especially since this was one of the first times she'd talked about her since she'd passed away.

Note

I was SUPER worried about writing this chapter and putting it up because I don't know how you guys would react to something like this but this kind of thing is very close to my heart and I felt like I needed to do something to get it out of my system. I know it's a bit of a touchy subject and nobody really wants to see it but I think if we don't talk about it, then this problem isn't going to be resolved.

But on a lighter note; thank you so much for 13k reads! It's insane how much love I've gotten from this story and I'm so glad you enjoy it so much!