Ariana knoblet stared at the crisp white envelope that she held in her hands, her unkempt red hair falling over her shoulders to her hips in tangled ringlets. She was cold, despite the summer heat, goose bumps forming along her thin arms under her dark jacket. Greif clung to her like a black fog, her green eyes lifeless as she carefully opened the letter in her hands, pulling out and unfolding the precious words inside. Her long pale fingers slid gently over the parchment, feeling the indents left by her mother's graceful lettering.
The words trapped on that small piece of paper were the last words of Hannah H. Knoblet, the last gift she would ever give to her grieving daughter. These words held the answer to her mother's last unsolved mystery, her most important secret. This letter was about her father, the one name she had never allowed herself to say, or Ariana to know.
The tears began to pool in her eyes as she read the carefully written lines of cursive, blurring her vision and smudging the black ink as they fell on the letter. Why now? Why tell me now? She wondered whipping her eyes furiously. You spent my whole life hiding this from me and avoiding my questions, why tell me now?
Thoughts whipped through her head like a storm in incoherent fragments, tearing and ripping at everything she thought she knew. The noise inside her mind grew louder with each new question until it was unbearable; she was helpless within her own emotion.
Then the storm was stilled and everything within her fell silent as she read the last neatly scrawled line of her mother's letter. Every emotion that had been rushing in her faded into a dead stillness as the words burned themselves into every corner and doorway of her mind.
Ariana sat silently for what seemed to be forever, trying to swallow the impossible information she had just uncovered. She shifted in her bed and re read the last lines of the letter, this time as the words flowed into her she wasn't filled with questions; she was filled with determination. This is all I have now, Ariana thought as the last words echoed repeatedly in her head; "Find your father. Find Sherlock holms."
