| Romance Fiction posted September 13, 2025 | Chapters: |
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Anna's Discovery
A chapter in the book Yesterday's Dreams
By The Sea Chap 5
by Begin Again
Ending of Chap 4
A cold chill ran through her, like an icy finger pressing against her skin. Across the page, in large, deliberate letters, were the words —
The soldiers are coming.
Her pulse jumped. She brushed the dust away and read more —
He warned me, and I feel it in the silence of the streets. I look at her tiny face and tell her to be brave, though I am not. I carry another life inside me, too small to run, too innocent to fight. One child I will hide in the wall — the other I must carry with me, wherever they take me. I pray Elizabeth will understand, and that at least one of them will live.
Anna's throat closed. She snapped the book shut, heart pounding, then turned it over with trembling hands.
Property of Sophia Rossi.
The name blurred, cleared, then blurred again as her eyes filled with tears. She clutched the journal against her chest. For a moment, the floor seemed to shift beneath her, as if the whole room had tilted.
Was it possible? Could this worn journal hold Sophia's secrets?
CHAPTER 5
A floorboard creaked. The bookseller arrived from the back, spectacles perched uselessly on his head, shirt sleeves ink-smudged to the elbow. He took in the scene —the dust on Anna's sleeve, the way she held the book, the empty spot it had left on the shelf.
"You find something?" he asked, not unkindly. His voice had a soft rasp.
Anna had to swallow before she could speak. "This," she said, and showed him the cover.
He tipped his head, squinted as if the letters might rearrange themselves into an answer he already knew, then shrugged with a slight huff. "Convent boxes," he said. "They come every few months when their cupboards refuse to hold one more thing. People die, rooms are cleared, books need a home." He lifted a hand, palm out, a gesture of apology for the world.
"Can I —" Anna's voice was strained. She inhaled and then asked, "I'd like to buy it."
He named a price so modest she wondered if he had even looked inside. When she hesitated — because it felt wrong, paying so little for a life — he waved off her fumbling wallet and rummaged under the counter for a paper sleeve.
"Take it — it's missing its pages," he said, sliding the journal in with surprising care. "Books know where they need to go. If it is stubborn, it will come back to me." He looked at her more closely. "But I do not think it will."
The cat stretched and yawned without opening its eyes. Dust drifted through the window light. Anna tucked the wrapped journal against her ribs as if it might slip away if she held it any looser. "Grazie," she managed.
"Prego," Antonio said, already turning to frown at a stack of books threatening to collapse. "Do not walk under ladders. Do not read while crossing streets. And if the words make you cry, do not drip on the ink — it runs." He chuckled, amused at himself, and turned away.
Outside, the lane seemed brighter and narrower. A woman in black passed by with a basket of laundry, and somewhere, a door shut with a hollow, old-wood sound. Anna stood for a second in the shade of the shop's awning, listening to her heartbeat catch up.
She should have gone back to Rosa's. She should have waited for a quiet corner, a cup of water, and the ordinary kindness of a chair.
Instead, her feet carried her uphill before she thought to stop. Past the piazza, past awnings already folded for the day, past the wall with the saint's patient face, she climbed toward the church of Santa Lucia.
The doors stood open as before, their cool shadows pooling across the stone. The nave was empty except for the hiss of a candle somewhere near the side altar. Anna walked through it without stopping.
The garden was waiting. The hedges stood trimmed and proper, the fountain kept its small trickle, and the shade of the orange trees fell over the bench. She sat and slipped the journal from its sleeve.
For a long breath, she only looked at it — the scuffed leather, the soft corners, the faint impression where someone's thumb had worried the edge a hundred times. She set a finger on the page she had found in the shop — The soldiers are coming — then closed the book, only to reopen it to the first page.
June 2, 1935
Elizabeth dared me to climb the wall today, though she knew I didn't need a dare. I told her I'd reach the fig tree before she finished tying her braid; by the time she caught up, I was already eating the first fig. She scolded me, but her cheeks were pink from running, and I knew she was glad to be there.
She talks of America more and more. Letters come from her uncle with promises of work and a better life across the sea. I told her the sea is here — blue enough for anyone — but she only smiled and said there is more to life than figs and stone walls. She may be right. Elizabeth thinks before she speaks. I leap first. She steadies me when I go too far. I don't say it often, but I need her.
Anna smiled faintly. She had only ever known her grandmother as stern and proper. To picture her laughing at a wall-top dare felt almost impossible. Yet here she was, captured in ink, young and full of mischief.
September 14, 1936
September 14, 1936
We slipped into the harvest festival tonight, despite being told to stay home. Elizabeth carried a basket. so we'd look useful, but when the fiddles started, my feet went their own way. She pulled at my sleeve, whispering that her mother would kill us if we were caught. I tugged her into the circle anyway.
Lanterns hung over the piazza. For a few minutes, there was only music and laughter. When we stumbled out breathless, she told me I would be the ruin of her. I told her she would be my salvation.
Anna traced the words with her eyes, wishing the days Sophia and her grandmother shared were still there for her to read. A festival. Lanterns. Laughter. She had never imagined Sicily in such vibrant colors. It made her wonder how much her grandmother had held back, and why.
Anna turned the following pages carefully. Some were missing altogether, torn out at the binding. Others were scribbled over in thick pencil, colored shapes pressed deep into the paper as if a child had once claimed the book for play. Whole stretches of time were gone. She turned slowly until words returned, the date at the top reading April 3, 1939.
April 3, 1939
I met someone whose uniform should have made me turn away. I didn't. He spoke of music he had missed, of paintings locked away in Berlin, and of a sister who still wrote to him. His voice was careful and low, nothing like the orders shouted by soldiers in the square.
Elizabeth saw it in my face. She didn't scold, but her silence said enough. She is my compass. I turned anyway. She is mad, but I know she would never desert me.
Anna's breath caught. This was him — the soldier. No longer a rumor, not faceless. A man who loved music and paintings, who had a sister across the sea. It unsettled her to realize Sophia hadn't written of him like an enemy. She had written of him like a man. Knowing Elizabeth feared for her.
March 2, 1940
I can no longer hide it. Elizabeth looks at me and knows, though she has said nothing. A child grows inside me. Fear shadows every thought, but I tell myself that God will not punish her for my sins.
Anna pressed her palm against the page. A child. She thought of her own mother, so closed, so resistant to this trip. Was this the beginning of that silence? Or the reason for it?
September 8, 1941
Maggie said "mama" today. She looked straight at me with those wide eyes and said it as if she had always known. I laughed until I cried. For a while, the harsh world outside seemed to disappear. In here, it was only her — strong legs learning to walk, bright eyes chasing every shadow. She is my everything.
Anna blinked back tears. Her thoughts were racing through her mind. Maggie —Margaret. Could this child be her mother?
"No," she breathed. "It can't be."
The truth hit anyway — if my mother is Maggie, then Sophia, oh God, is her mother, my grandmother. And Elizabeth — Anna gasped as she completed the thought — Nonna, the woman she loved, wasn't her grandmother by blood. She buried her face, trying to erase that thought. A ragged breath caught in her throat as she cried, "Nonna, this can't be."
Tears streamed down her face. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, shoulders tight. A flash of Margaret's voice on the phone — clipped, shutting the door. Had her mother known or suspected? She's hiding it. But why? Shame? Fear? To protect me?
She drew a shaky breath and looked back at the page. Her mother had never spoken of a childhood like this — one filled with laughter, with a mother's joy. It felt like peering into a life her mother had tried to bury or forgotten.
She swallowed hard, trying to understand, to accept what she was reading. Her heart raced as she turned back to the journal and read the next visible entry.
February 19, 1942
He came in the night. I should have told him not to, but when I opened the door, the words would not come. He crossed the room quietly and stood over Maggie's bed. She stirred once, then settled, her curls spread across the pillow.
He didn't touch her, only looked, his face softened by something I cannot name. At dawn, he left, pressing my hand to his heart as if to speak everything he could not.
Anna closed the book against her lap. She could almost see him standing in the dark room, watching a sleeping child. It unsettled her — tender and wrong all at once. She drew a slow breath and opened the journal again, needing more.
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