The Deep Dark Web | lrh

01

His name was Luke, and he had two kids.

He was twenty-nine years old when we met, and he had divorced his wife when they were only twenty-seven. Nobody really knew who she was, or what she was like; the most I'd heard about the young woman was that she was stiff. Unmoving in her attitude, stubborn in her position. If she fixed her mind about something, there was no going back. The complete opposite of Luke.

His children's names, I had no problem finding out, were Ellie and Corey.

The little girl had blonde hair, green eyes, and freckles all over her button nose.

The boy had brown hair, blue eyes, and the most adorable lisp in existence. I used to love hearing it.

She wore little white dresses. Liked to dress up as a ballerina, too. God, she made the prettiest ballerina.

He liked dressing up as an army cadet. He always said he wanted to join the navy someday. His ambitions used to warm my heart, and I tried to encourage him in any way that I could. Because that's what you do with young children; you raise them up rather than put them down.

Their father was Luke Hemmings. A kind hearted man, with a wide smile and slightly quiffed blonde hair. He seemed normal enough. He drove a family car, went to the gym whenever he wasn't too busy with the kids. He cooked and he cleaned and he read them bedime stories; of princesses and princes and castles and dragons. The picture perfect ideal, almost the epitome of what a good father should be like; that was Luke, hands down.

But that- I soon began to realise- wasn't the case at all. He just wasn't like other dads.

Because other dads worked in offices, in hospitals, in places that were considered kid friendly if you didn't look too deep into it. Some dads were construction workers, teachers, doctors, therapists, even new college professors who had zero clue what they were doing; totally innocent, believable forms of occupation.

This dad, however...

Well, Ellie and Corey's dad was a little different.