Free My Delicate Destruction: Book One of the Wolfegang Series by Jillian Ashe

small ones.
    The most recent L.A. Times issue popped up. It was in Japanese too; only a few articles were in English. The paper had the results of the latest presidential election… of The Federation of Worlds? Worlds, as in plural. I checked the date. February 12th, 2518.
    I’d been asleep for over five hundred years.
    I couldn’t breathe. This was a bad joke. There was no way this could be happening to me. It was physically impossible. I should have died almost four hundred and fifty years ago. I should have, right?
    Fire ran through my veins, and my skin burned hot. I was pissed. No, I was more than pissed. I was so angry I wanted to rip the computer off the desk and throw it at the person next to me.
    I took a deep, slow breath. My entire body quivered with rage. I was determined to find out what happened to the people I loved. I typed in the date I was admitted to the hospital and then scrolled through from there to later and later dates.
    It was weird reading what had happened, what had gone on while I was asleep. Like the end of the war in Iraq, who became the next president, and Man landing on Mars. I was asleep for all of it.
    On October 18th, 2016, there was an earthquake. More than a million dead, the article said. My mouth fell open in horror as I read. The UCLA Medical Center had collapsed in on itself. That explained the state it was in when I woke up. Everyone I knew probably thought my twin and I had died in that quake. I read everything I could about it, but the article didn’t give details on who survived or died.
    I went and searched through the city obituaries to find my parents. My dad had died in the quake in ’16. My mom died thirty years later of a heart attack. They were both buried in a Catholic Church cemetery in Santa Monica. It was the same place that Grandfather was buried. I wrote down the address. It was different from what I remembered.
    I opened another tab and googled Victoria. I got five million hits. I clicked the link with her biography. It was definitely her. I recognized her from the picture. After the quake, she became a supermodel. She started out with an ad campaign for Ralph Lauren and then later created her own clothing line. She married Trent at twenty seven and they had three kids: Katerina, Julia, and Larry. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. I always thought I would be there for her wedding, the birth of her first child, and same with Trent. I kept clicking, there were hundreds of pictures. I printed out one of the family. There was a date of death at the bottom of the page. It said she died of old age in 2091, Trent passed only a few months after her.
    I then searched for Kevin A. Reed. He came up only three times. Once in the courts for a marriage license in 2021 to a woman I didn’t know. At least he waited. He really had waited for me. I let that sink in for moment before I continued reading.
    Her name was Mary Johnson. Then ten years later there was a divorce to the same woman. A gut clenching sadness came over me; it washed over the anger, cooling it with tears.
    It was stupid of me to think he would wait his whole life away. And I wasn’t sure that was the real reason I was so upset. I had lost so much. Just slept away the centuries. I would never get that time back with him; we would never have our happily ever after.
    Tears streamed silently down my face, and people were starting to stare. But I couldn’t stop. He died a few years after his divorce in a car crash. He was racing in NASCAR at Daytona. I felt so proud of him for going legit. I wish I could have been there to see it.
    My vision narrowed, and I felt lightheaded. Grief crashed over me, wave after wave. I felt my heart crack and bleed. I lost myself in that grief, so lost that the tears stopped, and my body went cold. I couldn’t deal with it, and I knew I didn’t have the time to. I had to close that part off. Maybe I would never be able to deal with those feelings. The only thing I could do was