Sounds of Summer|Braden Higgins|

|TWENTY|

Maisie looked down at the envelop with her name scribbled across the front of it with a frown. Two weeks had passed and she still didn't think she could open the letter and read it. Braden had told her that if she wanted he'd sit with her while she read it, but she didn't think that would be a good idea.

Instead, she was gonna read it on her own. And there she was. She was sitting on the dock, feet in the water, something she learned she liked to do a lot the past couple of days. They only had a few days left before the had to leave the lake house and spend the rest of the summer in their town.

"Here goes nothing." She mumbled to herself before she ripped the letter open and seeing his familiar handwriting. "Shit I don't wanna cry."

Maisie,

I know this is a pretty shitty way of you finding out that I've died. It's also a pretty shitty way of finding out why and a pretty shitty way of me apologizing to you for all of my mistakes that I made while we were together.

If you'r reading this then Nana finally gave it to your friends to give to you. Most likely it was Jackson. He did always want to give you bad new in the best ways possible, although this isn't the news that anyone would want to get.

Sitting here and writing this letter has got to be the hardest thing that I've ever had to do. And that's saying a lot because I'm sitting next to the bottle of pills I'm about to take to end all the misery that I've been feeling for the last few days.

Ironic isn't it? Dying the same way that my mother had done years ago. Anyway, let's get to the really heard stuff, you know, telling you how sorry I am.

Two years ago, I bumped into the pretties girl I had ever seen. You were a little scared of getting into another relationship and I couldn't blame you. After telling me everything, I understood why that was.

And I promised you that I'd never do to you what Kyle had done, and I broke that. I did the exact opposite of protecting you like I should have, but life at home was getting harder and that was triggering anger inside of me that I didn't even know I had.

The abuse was getting to much and I just didn't know what to do. Dad would come home drunk, blame my mother's death on me by telling me that I was a fuck up that didn't belong to have the parents that I did. Because that's what you tell a kid that you created.

God, I wished everyday that I could wake up with a different set of parents, ones that cared about what I did and cared to go to baseball games and school events. Yet, I didn't have that at all.

Instead, I had an abusive father and a mother that loved getting high on whatever drug she could afford to get her hands on. I did have my Nana and Granddad, but they couldn't always just drop what they were doing to come watch their fuck up of a grandson.

The first time I ever laid a hand on you, I hated myself. I went home and I cried for hours, thinking of ways that I was going to tell you sorry.

And then my father came into the room and he beat me, telling me the same stuff he had been telling me for years.

I guess I was just angry at everything that was going on in my house. And then I would think about other kids home lives and grow angrier because I couldn't have that. I never had it.