Michael Kentwood blinked in surprise, but there was a faintly wary expression in his eyes. Alia was imdiately suspicious; her father’s reaction would have made more sense if she had asked sothing about her nasty uncle. Why was a simple question about an orphanage triggering such wariness, especially after her father had brought it up?
"Oh, that’s it?" her father asked, voice deliberately blasé. "Why do you want to know?"
"I don’t rember anything about it," Alia confessed honestly. "Before working with Hope for Scholars, I had no experience with orphans at all! I was very surprised last night when you brought it up."
Her father suddenly looked like he sucked on a lemon. He sighed deeply. "I knew my tongue would get into trouble soday."
"What trouble? What are you not telling ?" Alia demanded. "From your words, I must have gone to the orphanage when I was a child. Did the both of you abandon or sothing? Or am I adopted?"
Vague horror filled her veins. Oh god. Maybe she was adopted. Maybe she had no blood relation to her parents at all.
"Of course not!" Michael Kentwood caught sight of his daughter’s stricken look and hurriedly held her hand to reassure her. "You are definitely my biological daughter."
"Then why was I at the orphanage? Was I so disobedient you left there as a punishnt?" Alia asked with morbid curiosity. She didn’t think she was ill-behaved as a child, but perhaps her parents thought differently and wanted to teach her a lesson.
"I can’t believe you’re saying the sa thing decades later," her father said with wry amusent. "I guess there are so things that won’t change after all this ti."
"What things?" Alia asked, feeling like she was going in circles. She demanded hotly, her eyebrow twitching in irritation. "Dad, can you just give the full story? What on earth did I do?"
Did she beat up a whole orphanage’s worth of kids? Surely she wouldn’t be such a terrible child, right?
Beside her, Dimitri ate his toast placidly, his eyes darting between the both of them.
"When you were around seven years ago, I brought you over to the All Saints Orphanage to volunteer, since I needed sothing to occupy your ti while your mom wasn’t feeling well." Her father began with a sigh. "You hated it at the start because you thought I was abandoning you while your mother was ill. You had quite a vivid imagination back then, and you would scream the whole way there."
"Well... you must admit that’s sothing natural to think," Alia mumbled. She had no recollection of this, but she still felt the urge to defend her child-self. "Why were you volunteering at the orphanage to begin with?"
"They always need a pair of helping hands," her father said. "There are hardly any n around to help with heavy lifting, or with the fixing of household appliances, or with painting the walls... There was no reason not to refuse if I had the ti. Your mom also knew about it and supported bringing you there. She wanted you to learn from the less fortunate."
That made sense. Her father had a heart that bled for everyone but his brother. And she rembered enough of her mom that she knew Elaine Hawthorne did love to impart life lessons whenever she could.
Beside her, Dimitri had the faintest frown on his face.
"Why would Alia not rember anything though?" Dimitri asked, curious. "At the age of seven, there should be so mory imprint of past events, even if the details are fuzzy. Unless..."
Then he glanced quickly at her father and fell silent with a thoughtful hum.
"Unless?" Alia prompted.
"Unless nothing. I was just thinking to myself, pay no mind," Dimitri said, drinking the last of his tea.
If Alia believed him, then she was a fool. Clearly, he was respecting her father’s wishes, and her father was determinedly keeping mum about this. But that was fine. Now that Alia had gotten the location of the orphanage and a rough tiline of events, she could do her own research. She discreetly began to type into her phone’s search browser.
’All Saints Orphanage incidents.’ If she was seven years old back then... that would be nearly two decades now, so she expanded the search. She clicked on the first link that appeared.
It was simply a website for the orphanage. Alia scrolled all the way to the bottom and had to stifle a sigh; the website was only created five years ago, which wouldn’t be useful in her search.
Well, at least she had an address and phone number now. She continued her search, oblivious to the way her father shot her an alard glance.
She keyed in, ’All Saints Orphanage old news twenty years’.
There had to be sothing there. But the search results were a dead end, so Alia tried again.
’All Saints Orphanage children girl accident’
Back then, the internet wasn’t as well developed as things were now, but hopefully, the news reports would have so news. Surely so of the news would have been archived online. Alia had a niggling feeling that whatever caused her to forget the happenings at All Saints Orphanage wouldn’t have been ordinary.
It should have made the news.
To her surprise, there was nothing. Alia changed the search paraters, but it seed as though all information on All Saints Orphanage was seemingly wiped off the web. It was as though the orphanage had sprung into existence rely five years ago, with a fresh website.
How very strange. But Alia comforted herself with the knowledge that perhaps it was simply too insignificant to be transferred online. The local libraries should still have news articles saved. All she had to do was to pay them a visit later.
"Millie, why are you suddenly so curious about this?" her father asked, a wan expression on his face.
"Why would I not be?" Alia retorted. "Dad, if you found out you forgot an entire incident for years, wouldn’t you want to find out more?"
"Perhaps... not," Dimitri chid in. "The human mind is a wondrous thing that has the capability to protect itself from harm. Your lack of mories about that place might be a coping chanism your brain has used to suppress horrifying mories."
"But..." Dimitri had a point, but Alia thought about Matteo’s reaction and shook her head. "I have to know. Matteo might be involved."
Now Dimitri was genuinely perplexed and her father was stunned. "Matteo? At the orphanage? No, that is impossible. I don’t recall any boy with that na. What would he even be doing there?"
"That’s what I’m trying to find out," Alia said grimly.
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