I'm so glad so many of you are enjoying presentiment!! It makes my day when people ask about lore and such, so thank you! 💓🌸
So, what happened with Joel in my mind is that Sarah went missing / was kidnapped when Joel was at work - vanishing without a trace, really. Joel searched high and low to find her, contacting the police while he still lived in Texas : it was a huge case for the small town, Tommy was in Joel's life at the time as well.
I imagine a few months go by before they find her in the lake, with evidence of foul play : and Joel just loses it, goes absolutely crazy, he's broken and distraught, a shadow of a man. He’s lost himself, and there’s nothing left besides rage and violence, a need to destroy and tear everything to pieces - including himself.
He blames himself, thinking he was neglectful and got his babygirl killed. When the foreign DnA results come back with a match, he finds the perpetrator and...yeah.
Flash forward a few years, Joel's pretty fucked up by now : violent and angry and hollow - existing as a ghost. Composed of nothing but grief and a twisted desire to be loved again, to be told that he’s not a monster who let his daughter die. He's moved away from Tommy, gone off the radar himself, and situates himself in an abandoned cabin near a small town in Wyoming. He's not really himself anymore at all, he barely feels human. He knows Tommy stopped looking for him after Joel ended up killing random men in bar fights and dumping the bodies in the forests around the town.
He knew some crappy couple lived in the house across the forest, but everything changed when he saw they had a small child. It would torment him to think about, bringing back all kinds of memories he had buried deep.
He would lose his mind every time reader's parents let her play, alone, in the woods : and would often watch her from a distance to make sure she's okay - scared this little girl would meet the same fate his Sarah did. ( that's the 'jackals' reader makes reference too, it's just joel watching over her from behind the trees )
He kinda made it his own responsibility to care for her indirectly, seeing that her parents were extremely neglectful : reminding him of his own regrets. He'd sometimes 'break' into the house to put extra food in the cupboards in those weeks reader's mother would go on a bender, when reader was still young enough not to question an infinite food supply. It was almost like torture for him to watch a little girl go about life alone, knowing he wished he spent more time with his baby before she got taken away from him.
He kinda dipped after she got to the age of 14 and met Jerry : he knew she was in good hands and left her alone for a long time, only accidentally seeing her again years later when he got back from a hunting trip and saw her smoking on the porch, all grown up. That's where everything switched, and where the story starts. He feels as though the reader was brought to him for some kind of reason - like she was his second chance to fix everything he did wrong.
( when he goes to the gas station all those nights : he's checking on her to make sure she's safe, but he's also being a bit of a creep because he feels their imaginary 'dynamic' that he came up with has shifted with her age. He also comes to the diner after she didn't show up to the gas station or home, and decides to get rid of Jason after seeing the way he eyed reader : there was a point he thought Jason took her, and got so scared at the possible idea he killed him anyway. He asks reader if she's scared to test her survival skills and such, and almost wants to prove she's not capable of taking care of herself so he can justify taking her )
Joel feels as though he's undoing what happened to Sarah by keeping the reader safe and out of harms way, in a mini-psychosis during the story until the last confrontation. He believes he's doing 'the right' thing, but a large part of him is still simmering from his past violence and anger : he felt good when he killed Sarah's murderer, and some parts of him are just sick and twisted. which is why he hurts the reader. He feels it's out of his control, like he's split down the middle. He spends all his time with the reader because he regrets not being around sarah more often, he doesn’t let her go outside and locks the door because he wished he watched sarah closer.
His lines are blurred, and he's trying to deal with his grief and monstrousness by caring for the reader, and ends up finding some clarity at the end of the story before the smut.
I hope this answered your question! I didn't have a concrete idea of Joel's lore besides a few main points lol.
