Hello people of the fandom! How are you on this glorious day? Before I begin chapter 7, I have a couple of questions that I've been meaning to ask for a while:

1. What is a Mary-Sue? I've heard this referred to and I've got a pretty good idea of what it means, but I would like to be sure…

2. Does anyone know what the Beckendorf/Silena ship is called? Beckena? Silendorf?

So yea….if someone could tell me that would be most appreciated. Here's chapter 7!

The door slammed behind me. Immediately I heard my mother's footsteps coming towards me through the house. Get ready, I thought.

My mother appeared. She had her hands on her hips and she looked livid. She opened her mouth, most likely to scream at me, but I raised my hand to stop her. Surprisingly, she closed her mouth.

"Where are they?" I whispered.

"Excuse me? Where are what? And how dare you come back here without apologizing to me?"

I laughed. My mother looked at me like I was insane, but I didn't care. I was almost hysterical. "You want me to apologize to you? For what? For cursing?" I stopped laughing. My mother said nothing. "Where are my letters, Mother?"

Her eyes widened in surprise. "What letters?" she asked. Her voice betrayed her and cracked.

My nostrils flared. "The letters that Jon has been sending me every day since he left for New York." I took a step towards her. "The letters that you have been keeping from me."

For a moment, my mother just stared at me, as if she didn't know who I was. Then, without speaking, she turned around and began walking towards her bedroom. I followed. She took a key off of her bedside table and opened a drawer. I stood behind her as she removed a bundle of letters bound together by a single red ribbon. I recognized the ribbon. I wore it in my hair every day for eight months. But I hadn't seen it in four years. In fact, I remembered telling my mother that I was too old to wear hair ribbons. I couldn't believe that she had kept it all this time.

She handed me the letters without a word. I untied the ribbon. There were at least 80 letters in the bundle. Some of the envelopes were small, others big. I stared at them. Slowly, I raised my head and looked at my mother.

She wouldn't meet my eyes. Instead, she stared at the ground and whispered, "I did it to protect you."

"PROTECT ME?" She flinched at my raised voice. Never before had I seen my mother show any sort of weakness, especially towards me. She liked to have everything carefully planned out. She liked being in control. Before I came home, she had probably imagined several different scenarios in her mind of how she would dominate this conversation. She thought that I would crumble to her will. She never imagined that this would happen.

"Look. At. Me." My mother finally met my eyes. I didn't see fear, but I saw worry. She looked at me as if I were an animal that had broken loose from its cage. "For three months, you watched me search for these letters. You heard me cry myself to sleep every night because I thought that Jon didn't care about me. Now you say that you were trying to protect me? The only thing that was hurting me was you!"

"Annie, I'm sorry. I thought it was for the best."

I shook my head in disbelief. Tears started to pour down my cheeks. "How could you possibly think that this was for the best? Mama, I love him!"

"Annie, you're fourteen!" She had started to cry, too. "You don't know what love is! He's so far away. When is the last time you saw Lizzie?" I actually saw Lizzie at school every day, but the last time I actually spent time with her outside of school was more than two weeks ago. "You don't spend time with your friends anymore. All you do is sit around and wait for him to come home. I thought, maybe if you believed that he had given up on you, perhaps you would be able to move on with the rest of your life. You could stop dwelling on the past."

"You don't understand. I can't move on." For the second time that day, I pulled the chain over my head. I held the ring out for my mother to see. "Do you see this ring?"

She came forward to get a better look at it. "Where did you get this, Annie?" she asked in wonder.

"Jon gave it to me the day he left. It's the only thing he has that belonged to his father. It was his promise to me. This is his promise that he will always be with me. He's not going to give up on me, Mama. And I'm not going to give up on him." My mother tore her gaze away from the ring. For the first time, she seemed to see the real me standing in front of her. She saw how serious I was. She saw how in love I was. And she immediately knew that nothing would be able to stop me from loving him. No amount of force could keep us apart. My age didn't matter.

When you love someone, it's real. You can't ignore it, and you can't push it away. You have to accept it for what it is. You have to embrace it. I don't know what made my mother change her mind, but from that day on, she supported me. I heard rumors from Lizzie that a group of nosy women were gossiping about my strange relationship with Jon. Apparently, my mother overheard them and said very matter-of-factly that instead of gossiping about children half their age they should "mind their own damn business." I asked her about it, but, of course, she "would never do something like that in a public place." For years my mother and I had been at each other's throats. Now we would laugh and talk for hours about the silliest things. Occasionally, she would ask me about Jon (I was writing to him as often as possible in those days) and we would talk about him for a while.

In December 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. We declared war on the Japanese, and soon Germany and Italy had declared war on America. The last letter I ever received from Jon told me that he was going to join the army. They sent him to North Africa to fight the Germans. After that, I never heard from him. Occasionally, his mother would receive a letter from him and part of it would be written to me. I was terrified that he would get hurt over there. I don't think I would have gotten through that year without my mother.

Before I knew it, it was the summer of 1943. My grades were spectacular, and I had skipped a grade, just like Jon. At the age of sixteen, I was going to become a senior.

I missed Jon terribly. I hadn't seen him in two years, and, even though I loved receiving an occasional letter, they didn't replace him. There was an empty place inside of me that longed to see his face.

Sometimes I thought about that night in 1941 when the Hunters found me. I never told anyone about it, not even my mother. Lizzie was still my best friend, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her about it. Even Jon's mother, who already knew about demigods and the Hunters, didn't know that I had met them. I thought about how different my life would have been if I had gone with them then. I never would have made peace with my mother. I wouldn't have been able to see Lizzie and Ms. Devitch before I left. I wouldn't have been able to say my final goodbyes to Jon.

Two days before the beginning of senior year, I was sitting on the porch of Jon's house with his mother and mine. We were drinking tea and eating cookies outside because it was such a beautiful afternoon. It had been weeks since Jon had sent a letter. We didn't know anything about where he was or what he was doing.

That day had started out perfectly. I had spent the entire morning with Lizzie. We wouldn't be in the same classes next year because she was still a junior, but we planned to see each other as often as possible. We were excited for the adventures that this next year would bring. We wanted to spend every moment together before I went off to college. A perfect day. The sun was shining, and the birds chirped happily. But my perfect day shattered when I saw the Western Union man.

He was walking down the street. I was facing him, so I was the first to see him. Immediately I felt sick to my stomach. I stood up so suddenly that my chair fell backwards. My mother stood up too and rushed over to me. She turned and saw the man. He was still coming down the street towards us.

Ms. Devitch didn't stand up. She continued to sit, but she gripped the arms of her chair and her knuckles were white. We all watched as he looked at the numbers on the houses, trying to find the correct address. I could see the telegram in his left hand.

Please walk past. Please walk past. Please walk past, I thought to myself. My fear petrified me as I watched him walk closer and closer. He didn't stop moving. He was only one house away. For a moment, he looked confused, as if he wasn't sure which house to give the telegram to.

But then he looked up and saw me staring at him. His face filled with sadness as he started walking towards me.

And that is chapter 7. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the Western Union men, during wars such as Vietnam or the World Wars, they were the ones who delivered telegrams telling mothers, wives, and children that their sons, husbands, or fathers had died in the war. I think you all know what that means…

I would really appreciate some reviews. I liked this chapter a lot better than the last one. There are probably only going to be 2 more before the end of the story. Enjoy the rest of your day/evening! Sorry if I made anyone sad.