“Sins of the Father” by Dan Franklin is a perfect-bound chapbook published exclusively for Brian James Freeman’s Patreon supporters in June 2026 as part of Lividian Story Box: Volume One. This Limited Edition one-time printing features a full-color front cover, inside cover, and interior illustrations by François Vaillancourt.

Excerpt from the Chapbook:
“My father,” she said. “I’m here to pick up my father.”

The corrections officer looked up from behind his computer, studied her through a wall of scratched, bulletproof glass turned greasy from fingerprints. She could see herself reflected in the dull sheen—a scrawny thing, bony and awkward and acne-scarred. Her aunt had once told her that redheads only turned out beautiful or ugly, no in-between. Now that the softness of puberty was fading from her cheeks, she supposed the verdict was finally in. It was not favorable.

She focused on the officer instead.

“Name?” he asked. The tone of a man worn just slightly too barren for pity to take root.

“Heather Freeman,” she said. She pointed to the driver’s license on the countertop. “That’s me. He’s Red.”

The officer picked up the license and gave it a brief inspection. He tapped a few keys on his computer and slid the laminated card back to her through the cut mouth in the glass. He squinted at the glowing screen.

“You sure he gets released today?”

Heather turned and looked back at the boy skulking in the corner of the sterile waiting room. He was younger than her, just barely a teenager, and sported the same rail-thin build. A sagging hoodie hung around his neck like a collapsed tent, the dark blue turned nearly black from the rain’s saturation. And it had rained, had poured, had unleashed a flood like a broken dam that washed the week by in its chilly, miserable embrace. The sun outside the fogged front windows had muffled into a stormy twilight despite the clock claiming it as half past nine in the morning.

“He might go by something else,” she said. “Robert?”

She prayed she’d gotten the date right. She’d checked it again and again, but sweat gathered under her arms just the same. If he wasn’t released…what then? Tell Devin what? He had waited nearly ten years for this, had barely been old enough to read or write when he had started waiting.

“Freeman, huh? You mean Bobby?”

She hesitated, then nodded. She’d never heard him called that before. The prison paperwork called him Robert, but he was always Dad to her or Red to her mom. Devin drifted a step closer, as if to interject, and then resumed his anxious pacing. His matted hair was beginning to dry, the water leeching away from the same reddish mop they all shared. It did not look like fire. Nothing could burn, as best Heather could tell. Not until the rain stopped anyway.

“He’s out at ten. You two taking him home?”

The words brought only a trace of comfort. It would be better for everyone if he stayed, just stayed, just died in there and never came out. And yet, all the same, she missed him. She missed his smile, his face, missed him like an amputee might mourn their severed limb.

Devin snorted. “Yeah. He’s our dad.”

The officer clicked and scrolled on his computer. She waited for him to notice the charges and fixed him with the most threatening look she could manage. She didn’t need his outrage. She had enough of her own. Her mother had told her that it was love that turned her hair the dull shade of rust, but Heather knew it was something else.

She was pitifully aware of how small she was, how insignificant, how badly she needed a bath, but she was ready to throw his disgust and anger back at him if he so much as hinted it.

She was not ready for the sadness in the man’s eyes as he shook his head…

Publication Format:
This Patreon supporter exclusive chapbook is perfect bound, printed entirely in full-color, and signed by Dan Franklin and François Vaillancourt. Limited to a print run of 600 copies. Shipped with the other chapbooks in Lividian Story Box: Volume One.