Fortitude

Epilogue

Song that inspired me to write this chapter:

All of The Stars - Ed Sheeran

10 years later...

Angela's POV

Today would be exactly 10 years since Mom's death. I miss her every day, it hurts.

But what hurts the most is the memory of that day, ten years ago. The memory that will forever haunt me.

The accident. The blood everywhere. Her last breath. Her dead body lying on the ground, limp and cold. Dad's screams and cries. The ambulances. The funeral. The moment I placed Fortitude inside the coffin with her, right between her hands. And all those years of torment, pain, all those years of missing her.

This morning - before Dad drove all the way back to that cliff where he said he first met Mom, the cliff he sat on every year on that same day, the day of her death, and waited for a shooting star - he gave me a 'present'.

It was some sort of diary.

And it was Mom's.

He said Mom wanted me to have it.

He said he should have given it to me years ago, but that he decided to wait until I was old enough to understand.

"To understand what?" I asked him, but he simply told me to read it.

He said something about 'discovering the truth about my origins' but it still didn't make much sense.

"What truth?" I asked him then.

He looked down at his feet, as if he were afraid to look at me.

"The truth you should have known about before," he simply said, and I clearly understood what he meant by 'before'.

Before her death.

I sighed, hopping on my bed, the diary in my hands.

I stared at it for a long moment, afraid of opening it.

I suddenly wished he never gave it to me.
I wished he would have taken me with him to that cliff.

Ever since he started going there every year on that day, at midnight, he's refused to take me with him.

I knew he needed some time alone, and I felt like going there would be like invading my parents' privacy, but I still felt upset when he left me here alone.

I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath.

Come on, Angela. Come on. You gotta find out the truth about yourself, and about your mom.

She wants you to. Do it.

When I was finally able to open the diary without feeling like I was suffocating, my phone buzzed.

It read 'Dad'.

I answered it, and his voice startled me.

"Angela! I just saw it! I finally did! A shooting star!"

My heart started pounding against my chest, and tears started running down my cheeks.

But I was smiling.

"It's her."

"She's watching over us. She always has been," he whispered.

And I remembered a bible verse that my dad told me about, a few years back:

"the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it"

It couldn't be more true.

the end