After Twenty Years Story Novels & Stories

A reminder. Then I sat up slowly. Today I was Twenty years old. The thought came without ceremony. No celebration announced itself. No expectation. No pressure. Just the quiet truth of it. Twenty years of it. I had not imagined my life would look like this. I had imagined something far more structured once. Instead, I had become someone who ran. Someone who survived. Someone who had loved and lost in ways I still did not fully understand how to carry. Still, this morning felt different.

Will she want to buy me out entirely? “I called you aside to tell you a story, one I’ve told you many times before. Twenty-five years ago, when your mother came to me saying she was pregnant with you, I thought my life was over. We were just eighteen—barely out of high school.” I can still picture Mike’s mother’s face. She gave all her beauty to Mike—the same lovely gray eyes and shiny brown hair. But I won’t say her name. I refuse to say her name. Not after she left me with a child and vanished.

I uttered after a few whiles, after which the pain had subsided but it was still nibbling me inside. “Ooh thank God, after twenty years you finally woke up?” Ana replied and fell into my arms, hugging me tighter almost to the point in which I got suffocated. I ignored what she said, what kept pondering inside my head was what she said. Twenty years? How the hell was I asleep for that long? “Why was I asleep for that long?” I asked, shocked and curiosity gripped me whole. Ana's face darkened shortly after, and I anticipated there must be a problem at hand.

On the other hand Thor and I are having a baby, which everyone seems to be excited about it. The secret of the past is buried beneath their hearts. XXX After 20 Years I haven't walked that road in twenty years. Hell, I wasn't even driving a car twenty years ago, unless my grandparents decided it was time to teach their sixteen-year-old grandson how to drive a stick. Things have changed, I have changed, and many more things will change.

Part one of the story ends here. The second part of the story starts after a four-month gap.

She joked that she should have recorded the scene with a memory spell, saying it would have made headlines. That night, we celebrated until midnight. After the party dispersed, Lucas walked me home. At the foot of the steps, shrouded in darkness, we shared a long, tender kiss before reluctantly parting. But when I pushed open the heavy, carved doors, my breath caught in my throat. Vincent was sitting on the sofa in the living room, while my Mentor and two clan elders sat opposite him with complicated expressions. It turned out that for the past two years, while I was in Europe leading a "closed experiment," the elders had no idea about the sordid truth behind our canceled union.

She thought about what the last twenty years had been. Not what she had planned. Better than what she had planned in the ways that couldn't be planned and harder than what she had planned in the ways that turned out to be necessary. The Graymoor argument and the six weeks of distance and the mill and the formal mating and the birth and Aldric's letters and Mira's mediation and Carr's sixty-two percent and Kit's founding premise extended and Dorin's third ledger and Lena's smile and Sera's blank page and Wynn at the perimeter on the first morning of the twentieth year. All of it necessary.

Twenty years of searching. Finally done. Now we could live. Really live.

He replied. "Twelve is a bad year," I whispered to myself. I was twelve when my entire world turned upside down. I was twelve when the reality of the world hit me hard, and he was twelve when he lost his only living parent. "I don't want us to be like that." He continues. "He had to do a war to marry my mom. My mom had strived hard every day to prove that she was worthy of him before his family. All for nothing. They both died at the end."

Aruna couldn't breathe. Her eyes remained locked on the photograph. Her mother. Not a memory. Not an old report. Not a surveillance image from years ago. Tonight. This very night. She was alive. Standing under airport lights. Close enough to touch. Close enough to reach. A painful lump formed in Aruna's throat. Twenty years. Twenty years of unanswered questions. Twenty years of loneliness. Twenty years believing she had been abandoned. Now the distance between them felt smaller than ever. And somehow more painful.