The Flower That Grew from Ashes novel Chapter 127

The final minute before boarding.

Annelise sat in a corner chair and opened her burner phone for the very last time. She found the scrambled, anonymous number and typed out a text.

The message was simple.

"I'm leaving now. Thank you."

Thirty seconds later, the screen lit up with a reply.

"Safe travels. I put your mother's floral notes on the last page of the documents in the envelope. She would be proud of you."

Annelise's heart skipped a beat. She quickly pulled the white envelope Elias had given her from her pocket.

She opened it and pulled out the pages filled with contacts and resources.

Sure enough. Tucked at the very back was a handwritten page that was noticeably older and yellowed compared to the rest.

It was a page torn from a notebook. Written on it, in elegant and gentle fountain pen ink, was a note about the meaning of daisies.

It was her mother's handwriting.

The handwriting she recognized better than anything.

"White daisies have two meanings. The first is 'innocence, peace, and hope'; the second is a hidden, unspoken love buried deep in the heart."

Looking at those words, Annelise's eyes instantly welled up.

She carefully slid the yellowed, time-worn page out of the envelope and pressed it tightly against her chest.

Through her hoodie, the cold paper almost seemed to absorb the beating of her heart.

The final boarding call echoed through the PA system.

The plane taxied down the runway, accelerated, and then aggressively pulled up, soaring into the sky.

Amid the massive roar of the engines, Annelise sat by the window, watching the brightly lit city below shrink little by little until it was nothing but a blurred patch of light disappearing beneath the thick clouds.

And then, at thirty thousand feet in the air, in the absolute darkness and isolation where there was nothing but starlight and a sea of clouds.

Annelise, the woman who had been publicly whipped at the Lehman Estate without shedding a single tear...

The woman who had lain on the operating table, listening to her own child being killed without making a sound...

The woman who had faced her husband's betrayal and her best friend's scheming as cold as a block of ice... finally buried her face deep into that soft blanket and sobbed uncontrollably.

Her cries were muffled and desperate, like a severely wounded, lonely young animal.

She wasn't crying for Hackett Lehman.

She wasn't crying for Clarissa Sherwood.

Nor was she crying for all the grievances and pain she had endured.

She was only crying for the innocent baby she hadn't even had the chance to feel move—the child cruelly ripped from her body, who never even got a chance to see the world. Her only child.