Secrets Are

Book 3: Secrets Are Broken | Chapter 27

The first chance that I had gotten to look over the copy of the coded journal in great detail was after a long day of searching some empty houses and buildings around town, checking to see if my father happened to decide not to head out of town. There were plenty of people who had been willing to help us search for Ryan, but nothing had come up that lead us to Ryan. It was disappointing, but we weren't going to give up until we got some kind of answer as to where Ryan was and until we were able to bring him home.

No matter what people were saying, my family and I weren't giving up the hope that Ryan was going to come back home one day, safe and sound. I still was holding onto the hope that my father still would never kill his sons.

The ones that he actually acknowledged as his sons, so that didn't include Nick even though he was one of my father's sons. I knew that our father didn't include Nick as one of his sons so there was a chance that we would kill Nick, but as for Hayden and Ryan I was still hoping that wasn't the case. Hurt them, yes. But kill them, no. Hopefully that hadn't changed.

When Ben and I had gotten back to our apartment after another day of searching, which we did on the weekends, we both took showers and then relaxed on our bed. I grabbed the copies of the coded journal, which sat on my desk, before getting onto the bed. There were several copies that I had made after Natalie had given me the copy she had made around the apartment just in case.

I had made plenty copies so that if my father ever found out I was working on decoding his journal and found the copy I was using then there would be back ups. And I hadn't just hide copies around mine and Ben's apartment, but also his parents' house and Natalie and Hayden's house. So, believe me when I said there was more than enough copies just in case the one I had sitting out on my desk went missing.

I had even given a copy to Ben's father since he was curious to figure out the coded journal as well. There was a good chance that he could figure the whole thing out before I did, but I didn't mind if that happened. I was just glad there was someone else besides me, that I knew, working on this journal.

I heard the television turn on as I got to work writing down all the symbols in my father's journal on a brand new notebook that I had bought a couple days ago. It took me most of the night to get every new symbol down onto the notebook. I had to make sure to look carefully at each of the symbols to make sure that it was actually a new one and not something that had been repeated.

And there were definitely a ton of symbols that had been repeated so my father had made symbols for every letter in the alphabet. The next task was to figure out what symbols belonged to what letter and I knew that was going to be an extremely hard task. With twenty-six possibilities for each symbol, I was going to have to figure out the right combination before I could finally decode my father's journal and find out what he had written in here.

"Babe, dinner's ready," I heard Ben say sometime later as I was trying to figure out what symbol went with what letter. I hadn't figured out what one symbol meant and I was getting frustrated.

"I'll be right there," I said sighing. Ben reached over and pulled the notebook away from me as he said, "You need a break from that. Come eat and then you can look over it again."

"Alright," I replied sighing again. It was probably best that I took a break from the journal. I was never going to figure it out if I was frustrated and didn't give my brain a break. Maybe I should just call it a night tonight and come back to it tomorrow.

My brain would probably be very happy with a long break from trying to figure out what each of the symbols meant. I gathered up all of the papers that I had spread out from the journal and stacked them in order using the number in the corner that I had put before copying the copy Natalie had given me.