SHADOWS OF HAND-WRITTEN LOVE

PROLOGUE

The letters that birthed a heart

My earliest memory of love sounds like paper unfolding.

Not laughter.

Not hugs.

Not bedtime lullabies whispered beneath blankets.

Paper.

Soft sheets sighing open beneath my fingers while sea wind rattled our window frames and gulls screamed over the Pacific like they were arguing with the sky.

I was five when I learned letters could make distance disappear.

We lived in Willow Creek, a sleepy coastal town carved into the jagged cliffs of Oregon, where fog rolled in like a living creature and the ocean never stopped talking. The waves there didn’t crash, they roared, like they carried stories too heavy to keep silent.

Our house sat on Elm Street, a modest two-storey home painted cream with navy shutters that Mama repainted every spring whether they needed it or not. She said colour kept sadness away.

The backyard sloped gently toward a narrow cliff trail where wildflowers grew stubbornly between rocks. Fireflies visited during summer evenings, blinking lazily like stars that had forgotten how to stay in the sky.

That was where my world began.

And for a long time, it felt perfect.

“Annabelle! Shoes!”

I ignored my mother’s voice as I sprinted barefoot through damp grass, chasing fireflies that darted between hydrangea bushes. My chestnut curls whipped across my face, salty wind tangling them into chaos Mama would later complain about while brushing my hair.

“I can hear you deliberately ignoring me!” she called again, laughter hiding inside her scolding.

I caught a firefly inside my cupped palms and ran toward the kitchen door, bursting inside like I had discovered buried treasure.

“Mama, look!”

Eliza Hale turned from the counter, flour dusting her auburn waves and apron. Sunlight streamed through the kitchen window behind her, making her look like she was glowing from the inside out. Mama always looked like she belonged inside warm light.

“You caught a tiny prisoner,” she said, kneeling beside me. “Let him go, dreamer.”

“But I want to keep him.”

“Love isn’t keeping things trapped,” she murmured, gently opening my hands so the glowing insect floated free. “It’s letting them shine where they belong.”

Mama spoke about love like it was both a science and a religion.

I believed every word she said.

The kitchen smelled permanently like bread, cinnamon, and vanilla. Mama baked when she was happy, nervous, bored, or simply breathing. Baking was less of a hobby and more of her natural language.

That afternoon she was making honey bread ,my father’s favourite, because his letter had arrived that morning.

The envelope sat on the dining table waiting for me like it was alive.

Blue. Slightly wrinkled. My name written boldly across the front in familiar slanted handwriting that leaned forward as if rushing toward me.

Annabelle.

Only my father called me that.

Everyone else called me Anna.

“Wash your hands before opening it,” Mama reminded me, already knowing I would forget.

“Daddy doesn’t care about clean fingers.”

“I do. And Daddy married me, so technically he cares.”

I sighed dramatically and climbed onto my stool at the sink.

Opening Daddy’s letters was a ceremony.

Clean hands. Deep breath. Slow tear along the envelope edge.

I always failed the slow part.

The paper inside smelled like ocean spray, engine oil, and his sandalwood aftershave that Mama pretended to hate but secretly inhaled whenever he hugged her.

I pressed the letter against my cheek before reading.

“Dear Annabelle,” I began proudly, stumbling over some words but refusing Mama’s help, “the seagulls here are thieves and one nearly stole my sandwich. I told him I have a daughter fiercer than him…”

Mama laughed softly, leaning against the counter.

Daddy described everything in his letters. The steel giants of offshore rigs. Coworkers who couldn’t cook. Storms that turned the sea into mountains. Sunsets that painted the water molten orange.

He always ended his letters the same way.

"To my little girl who loves love , never stop believing in it."

I traced those words every single time.

My father, Thomas Hale, was larger than life even when he was miles away.

When he returned from offshore rotations, Willow Creek felt like it hosted a festival. He swept me into the air with bear hugs that smelled like salt and diesel, his booming laugh rattling picture frames.

He brought gifts from places I couldn’t pronounce; glass dolphins from Alaska, jade stones from Asia, carved wooden charms from ports he barely remembered visiting.

But it was never the gifts that mattered.

It was the way he looked at Mama.

Like she was the only lighthouse guiding him home.

Friday nights meant movie nights. Daddy would call from whichever rig he worked on, and Mama placed the phone on speaker while we sprawled across the living room floor eating popcorn she always burnt slightly.

“I learned frogs breathe through their skin!” I shouted once.

“I learned your mother cannot cook popcorn,” Daddy replied.

“I heard that, Thomas Hale!” Mama yelled.

Their laughter braided together so naturally it felt impossible to imagine one without the other.

My childhood measured time through letters.

I stored them inside a pink shoebox beneath my bed decorated with butterfly stickers.

“Why butterflies?” Mama asked while helping me arrange them chronologically.

“Because letters travel,” I said seriously.

Mama kissed my forehead like I had solved philosophy.

Outside our home, my world slowly expanded.

My first friend, Lila Jameson, met me on my first day of school after I tripped over my shoelaces and landed face first into her lunchbox.

“You’re bleeding,” she said calmly.

“You’re sitting on my sandwich,” I replied.

That was the beginning of our friendship.

Lila was practical where I was dreamy. Fierce where I was soft. She visited our house so often Mama began packing extra snacks automatically.

“Every gentle child needs someone who bites,” Mama declared once.

Lila grinned proudly.

Then there was Uncle Harry my father’s best friend and unofficial household mechanic.

He visited weekly, fixing broken appliances and complaining loudly about Mama’s baking experiments.

“You married a man who repairs oil rigs but depend on me to fix your toaster?” he teased.

“You’re welcome to stop visiting,” Mama replied sweetly.

“Impossible. Anna feeds me biscuits.”

I handed him two proudly.

Life moved in warm, predictable rhythms.

Until the day it didn’t.

I was nine when the first crack appeared in my perfect world.

Mama and I were baking cinnamon rolls. Flour covered every available surface, including my nose. She guided my hands gently across dough.

“Cooking is like loving someone,” she said softly. “Too much force ruins it.”

“I thought love was strong,” I replied.

“It is,” she said.

Then she stopped talking.

The rolling pin slipped from her fingers.

It hit the floor.

Mama collapsed.

Hospitals smell like fear disguised as cleanliness.

White walls. Bright lights. Machines that beeped like they were counting down something invisible.

Uncle Harry stayed with me for three days while we waited for news. He bought orange juice that tasted too sour and told embarrassing stories about Daddy falling asleep inside a university laboratory once.

I laughed because not laughing felt impossible.

Daddy arrived three days later.

He looked like grief had hollowed him out from the inside.

“Where’s Mama?” I asked.

He hugged me instead of answering.

Mama never came home.

Much later, I learnt the name for what took my mother , a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. Sudden. Merciless. Over before anyone could save her. The doctors said it was painless, as if that knowledge could soften anything at all.

Grief changed my father quietly.

He forgot birthdays. Forgot meals. Forgot laughter.

But he never forgot the letters.

Sometimes he slipped them beneath my pillow even while living in the same house as me. They became longer. Heavier. Filled with advice he didn’t know how to say aloud.

I slept with them beneath my mattress because I believed they protected me from nightmares.

By ten, I had learned survival disguised as responsibility.

I cooked simple meals from Mama’s recipe book. Braided my own hair. Left reminder notes on the refrigerator for Daddy.

*Pay electricity bill or Anna will cry.*

He laughed the first time he saw that note.

It sounded rusty.

But real.

The letters never stopped.

They arrived like proof that love could survive distance, death, and time.

I believed that with every heartbeat.

The last purely happy memory of my childhood happened on my twelfth birthday.

Daddy returned early from offshore carrying a lopsided cake he insisted he baked himself.

“Is it supposed to lean like the Tower of Pisa?” Uncle Harry asked.

“It’s artistic,” Daddy snapped.

Mama would have laughed until she cried.

So I laughed for her.

For him.

For the fragile illusion that our house still knew how to hold joy.

Looking back now, I understand something about love.

The happiest moments rarely announce themselves as final.

They simply pass quietly.

And you only realise they were endings long after they’re gone.

That was the house where I first learned to believe in love.

It was also the house where love would eventually teach me how deeply it could hurt.