Novel & Cerita After Twenty Years Story

# Bonus Chapter 20: Twenty The morning of their twentieth anniversary, Duke woke before the alarm and lay still, watching Valentina sleep. She still slept the same way she had twenty years ago. One arm thrown above her head, hair across the pillow, breathing slow and even. He'd memorized this version of her before he'd memorized anything else about marriage. Twenty years. He thought about the boy who'd let her go at the porch swing. Who couldn't have imagined this—not the specifics, not the kids or the bookstore or the gray now threading through both their hair. Just this: waking up beside her, ordinary and miraculous at once, two decades in.

“It was real. You’re living proof. That’s more powerful than any promise.” “I keep waiting,” he said. “For it all to fall apart. For the other shoe to drop. For something from my past to destroy everything.” “It’s been twenty years. If it was going to fall apart, it would have by now.” “Maybe.” “Not maybe. Definitely. We’ve survived everything. Viktor. Catherine. Devon. All of it. And we’re still here. Still happy. Still choosing each other.” “Yeah. We are.” They drove in comfortable silence.

In the span of a few short months, they had lost all three of their children. The mansion that had once been filled with laughter was left with only two living corpses. Every day, they sat in the apartment I had rented, where the traces of my life remained. An old desk, a few worn textbooks, and an empty box that had once held the tie clip. My mother held the box in her hands, running her fingers over it again and again. "Jordan, I received your birthday present." My father stared endlessly at the contract for the artificial heart that I would never use. Silent tears slipped down his face.

Bella Six years had passed, and luckily, I was able to stand on my own. I managed to graduate from college despite having to study while pregnant, and I’m now working as a journalist. I've become someone that many companies would love to hire, thanks to my determination, the skill that took me a lot of hard work to sharpen, and the strength that my family gives me. A typical day is about to start again. My grandparents are both watching the morning news with my daughter, Alliah, who, unexpectedly, is into this kind of stuff even though she’s only five years old.

He takes me by the waist while he tells me with his hoarse and seductive voice, “Happy twenty years of knowing each other, dear.” My smile freezes as I realize I just screwed up. I completely forgot that today marks twenty years since that time in the park. I just manage to say awkwardly, “T–thank you, my love. S- same for you.” Matt looks at me very amused, raises an eyebrow, saying, “You forgot!” “What? No! of course not!” “A-ha... It’s a good thing that I know you like the back of my hand. I knew you would forget it.”

"Donna… she's already dead!" "Shut up!" Anthony roared. "Who says she's dead? She's just angry. She's hiding from me. Wait until I bring her back!" He drove to every place he had ever been with Mabel. The leaking shack in the slums. The underground bunker where they had hidden after their first family gunfight. The island they never had the chance to move to. What he had once taken for granted—her constant presence—had become something forever out of reach.

That night wasn't going to happen again in this life. I went home and dug out my old diary that I'd hidden in a deep corner of my wardrobe. I was ten years old, homeless and wandering the streets at night when Graham—18 at the time—took me in. He was cold and aloof with everyone else, but he was very gentle with me. I knew that I had fallen in love with him when I was old enough to realize it. However, it was a secret that I could never reveal to anyone else. I grabbed the diary and tore it to pieces, shredding every page. Then, I threw the scraps into the toilet and flushed them down.

The world tilted sideways. Her father. Harper’s voice echoed in Sienna’s skull, wrapping around her like barbed wire: Ask her father. Her knees felt like water, her hands numb where the gun weighed them down. She couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t force air into her lungs. “No,” she whispered. “He’s dead. He’s been dead for twenty years.” Harper chuckled through bloody teeth. “Caskets are easy to fill, sweetheart. Doesn’t mean they’re full of the right man.”

LEILA MILLER. It has been two long years since I left my pack but I still remember my way around it, not so surprisingly. After all, it is my home and where I grew up and lived my entire twenty years of life, until I left it two years ago for Matt, way too certain then that I was chasing my happily ever after and that I would have no regrets.

Half their face was bitten off, revealing a horrifying, bloody cavity. Yvonne's fingers trembled violently, because the remaining half of the face was that of the husband she had loved for seven years and hated for two—the face she had once loved most.