Page 82 of Shattered

Next entry. Shakier handwriting.

Forgot to tell Delia. Remembered today. Will call her.

I need to tell Delia that someone built an empire thinking of her. She needs to know.

I couldn’t breathe. My tears kept falling—ragged, ugly—as everything in my chest broke loose.

The letters my mother had been trying to tell me about at that dinner. When she’d been confused, calling Axel “Jake.” She’d been trying to tell me about love letters. About Axel. About seventeen years of loving me quietly.

How could he love me for this long? Why had I never seen it?

I flipped faster now. Desperate.

I called Delia. I told her I had something important to tell her. She said tomorrow.

Oh god.

A sob strangled in my throat as I read the next line.

Tomorrow. I need to remember until tomorrow.

Near the end. In a handwriting I could barely read. It said;

If I die before I tell her: Axel loves her. Has always loved her.

The last entry was dated a few hours before she fell.

I made a sound—a horrible, broken noise that came from somewhere deep in my chest.

My mother had known something I hadn’t. She’d been trying to tell me for years.

And that last phone call, that last clear day when she’d said she had something important to tell me.

This. She’d wanted to tell me this.

About Axel. About the letters. About love that had been waiting while I’d been looking everywhere else.

“Delia?” Daniel’s voice sounded far away. He stood on the door way, a bottle of water in his hand.

“What’s wrong?” He asked again.

I couldn’t answer. The sobs were coming faster now. Hard and ugly and unstoppable. I pressed the journal against my chest and cried.

All this time. All these years. Axel had loved me while I’d been invisible to everyone else. While I’d never noticed, he’d been loving me quietly. How much patience had that man needed to keep it to himself all this time?

“Let me see,” Daniel said gently.

I handed him the journal with shaking hands. He read the entries about the letters.

“I knew he loved you,” Daniel said quietly. “I’ve known for years. But I didn’t know about the letters. I didn’t know it had been that long.”

“Seventeen years,” I whispered. “He’s loved me for seventeen years, and I pushed him away. I blamed him. I made him leave.”

“You were grieving.”

“I was cruel. I was a coward.” I wiped my face roughly. “And Mom was trying to tell me. All that confusion at dinner about Jake and letters. She meant Axel. She was trying to give me her blessing and I thought she was just confused.”

Daniel pulled me against him. I cried into his shirt. He held me while I fell apart for the second time in three weeks.