CHAPTER 18 Axel
Axel
The text came while I was staring at my laptop—work was the only distraction I had now.
My heart stopped at the notification; my fingers moved before my brain caught up.
Then I was moving. Laptop abandoned mid-report. Then I caught my reflection in the mirror.
My shirt was wrinkled beyond saving, and my hair was doing things that defied physics. I probably smelled like old coffee, desperation, and three days of not caring about basic hygiene.
I couldn’t show up looking like this. Not when Delia was finally reaching out.
I moved with purpose—clothes off, shower on. The water was scalding, but I didn’t adjust it. Just scrubbed quickly, trying not to think about the last time I’d showered with this kind of urgency.
I dried off fast, grabbed the first clean clothes I found. Jeans. A shirt that didn’t look like I’d been wearing it for three straight board meetings. I ran my hand over my jaw and felt a week of beard.
It would have to stay.
I grabbed my keys from the counter.
The journal. She’d said she found a journal.
What had been in it? What had changed between the silence and this text?
I made it to my car, started the engine, pulled into traffic. My hands were shaking so badly I had to grip the steering wheel tighter than necessary. I needed to calm down. To drive there in one piece.
When I finally pulled up, my heart was doing something irregular in my chest. Racing too fast. Skipping beats. Trying to prepare me for whatever was about to happen.
Good news or bad news. Closure or beginning. I didn’t know which.
I knocked on the door.
Daniel opened it looking exhausted but something else too. Something that might have been relief. “Hey.”
“Is she—”
“Inside. She’s been waiting.” He stepped aside to let me in. Then grabbed my arm before I could move past him. “Don’t mess this up.”
“Extremely helpful advice.”
“I’m serious. Whatever she says in there, don’t mess it up.”
“What’s she going to say?”
“You’ll know soon, she’s been crying for the past hour and clutching Mom’s journal.” He let go of my arm. “She’s in Mom’s room.”
I found her sitting on Elena’s bed holding a leather-bound journal against her chest like it contained secrets. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her face was blotchy from crying. She looked exhausted and fragile, like she’d been put through an emotional meat grinder.
She looked up when I walked in. Something in her expression made my chest constrict so tight I forgot how to breathe.
We stared at each other. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. If I should sit or stand or leave or touch her or what. Three weeks of distance had made everything feel impossible.
“You grew a beard,” she said finally.
I touched my jaw. “It’s been one week. This is stubble.”
“It’s a lot of stubble.”
“I was in a hurry.”
“To get here?”
“To see you.” The admission came out raw. Honest. “You texted and I dropped everything.”
Something in her face changed. Got softer. More open. “You came fast.”
“You texted. Of course I came fast.” I moved closer. “What did you find?”
She handed me the journal. “Page forty-three.”
I sat beside her on the bed. The mattress dipped under my weight, our knees almost touching. Almost but not quite.
I opened to the page she’d marked with shaking hands.
Elena’s handwriting stared back at me.
Found letters today. In Axel’s old room. Love letters. To Delia. From Axel. Years’ worth. Starting when he was fourteen.
The world stopped spinning.
Everything stopped—my heart, my breath, my ability to think or move or exist as a functional human being.
Elena had found the letters. She had known for years about my feelings for her daughter.
I looked up. Delia was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Is it true?” she asked. Her voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
The admission sat between us. Heavy. Unavoidable.
“Where are the letters now?”
“Destroyed. A few years ago. I was terrified someone would find them.” I set the journal down carefully. “I thought I’d gotten rid of them all. Didn’t realize I’d missed some.”
“What did they say?”
I looked at my hands instead of at her. I couldn’t meet her eyes while saying this. “They said I loved you. That watching you grow up was the best and worst thing about living with your family. That I was terrified my feelings would destroy the people who saved me.”
“Why did you write them if you never planned to send them?”
“Because I was a teenager and desperate, and I needed to put the feelings somewhere.” I forced myself to look at her. “Writing them felt safer than saying them, than letting anyone know.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Her voice got smaller. “As adults. When I was old enough. Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because you were twelve when I figured it out. Then fourteen. Then seventeen. And by the time you were old enough, years had passed and the moment felt impossible.” I took a breath. “I’d become the boy your family took in. The brother figure who couldn’t admit he never felt brotherly about you.”
My eyes turned glassy—something else was happening. My heart was feeling lighter with each confusion.
“I fell in love with you, Delia. The first time you wouldn’t stop talking to me.
When I was twelve and you were ten and you followed me around the house chattering about paint theory like it was the most important thing in the world.
I thought you were ridiculous and fascinating and I couldn’t stop listening. ”
Her eyes got bright. Too bright. She blinked.
“Is that why you built the museums?” she asked. “The software, the galleries, all of it. Was it because of me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Watching you paint made me want to create spaces where art could breathe. I watched you work and thought you deserved better than bedroom walls and rejection letters.”
She made a sound. Small. Broken. Like I’d reached into her chest and squeezed.
“That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me, and it’s making me feel guilty.”
“Why guilty?”
“Because you spent seventeen years building cathedrals with my name on them, and I spent those seventeen years being completely oblivious.” Her voice cracked. “You were loving me quietly and I was making myself smaller for people who barely saw me at all.”
She picked up the journal again. Held it against her chest like armor. “I’m sorry for pushing you away.”
“You don’t need to apologize for grieving.”
“No, I need to apologize because I told you love wasn’t enough when I was drowning. That was cruel.” Her voice got thick with tears again. “You’ve been drowning for seventeen years and never asked me to save you. You just kept swimming nearby. Waiting.”
“It wasn’t drowning.”
“It sounds like drowning.”
“It was just loving you from whatever distance kept everyone safe.”
“That definitely still sounds like drowning.”
I almost smiled. Almost. “Maybe a little.”
She told me about the other journal entries then. How Elena kept trying to remember what she needed to tell Delia. How the urgency grew as the disease progressed and her mother had fought to hold this truth knowing her daughter needed to hear it before it was too late.
How Elena had run out of time.
“I don’t want to run out of time too,” Delia said when she finished. Her voice was fierce. Determined. “I spent three weeks pushing away the person who’s been building my life into his work. I don’t want to be scared anymore.”
“You don’t have to decide anything right now. You’re grieving. You should take time.”
“I’ve been taking time. I don’t want to waste time with you anymore.”
Those words made my breath catch, hope spreading like wind through my chest.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to stay.” She took a breath. “I need you to support me. To keep holding on.”
“I’ve always been supporting you, Delia.”
“I know that now.” Her eyes searched mine. “Can you keep doing it? Seeing me at my worst? Most broken? Least functional?”
“I’ve been doing that for weeks, and I’m not tired yet.”
“What about seventeen more years?”
“I think I can manage that.”
She kissed me then.
I froze for half a second. Then my hands remembered how to move. One went to her face, the other to her waist. Pulling her closer. Holding her like she might disappear or I’d wake up and discover this was a dream.
She pulled back to study my face. Reached up to touch my jaw. Her fingers were gentle and soft.
Then she said, “It really looks like you’ve been suffering.”
“I have been suffering.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“Make me.”
So I kissed her again.
Slower this time, taking my time. Memorizing the way she felt against me. The way her breath hitched when I kissed her jaw. The way she kissed me back, her lips soft and warm.
This was real. This was happening.
She leaned against me. I wrapped my arm around her and we sat in her mother’s room and didn’t say anything for a while. Just existed together in the quiet.
After a long time, she stood. Offered me her hand. “Take me home.”
“Where’s home?”
“My apartment. With you.”
I took her hand. Stood. We walked out of Elena’s room together, past Daniel who looked relieved to see us leaving together. Past Maria who smiled like she’d known this was coming all along.
“Tell me more about the letters,” Delia said, settling into her seat, looking at me like I was something worth studying.
“Haven’t I humiliated myself enough for one day?”
“Not even close.”
So I told her. About writing letters describing how she looked when she concentrated on a painting. About letters at eighteen saying I was leaving for college because staying was too hard.
How every letter ended the same way.
I love you. I’ll always love you. Even when I can’t say it.
By the time we reached her apartment, she was crying again.
“I made you cry,” I said.
“It’s not a sad kind of cry.”
Inside her apartment, she turned to face me.
“Stay tonight,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. No more distance. Just stay.”
So I stayed.
We didn’t make love—just lay in her bed talking until we were both too exhausted to form coherent sentences. She told me about the past three weeks—the guilt, the way she had to stop herself from reaching out to me.
I told her about waiting, checking my phone obsessively. And making my entire staff miserable because I couldn’t focus on anything except the woman who’d told me to leave.
She fell asleep first. Her head on my chest. Her breathing evening out into something peaceful.
I lay awake for a while longer. Just watching her.
Delia had surfaced. She’d chosen to grab onto something instead of sinking. Just like I knew she would.
And for the first time in weeks, it felt like enough.