A NOTE BEFORE YOU BEGIN
My first novel, Matelda — In Silence We Forgive, scared me before I even started writing it. It took everything I had to finish. I loved it, and I'm still proud of it, not because it's mine, but because it felt real. The struggle, the hate, the war, the friendships, and most of all, the love, all of it felt true to me in a way that very few of the hundreds of romance stories I've read ever have.
I sent it to friends, and they loved it too. Some of them criticized me, but never the story itself. I know that every story finds people who love it and people who don't, and that's fine. Matelda will always be the book closest to my heart.
After I finished it and put it on Amazon, I needed something to pull me out of that world. Around that time, a friend sent me her diary, pages of notes, nothing organized, just fragments of her own story, and asked me to write it down properly.
So I did. It came together fast, but it felt beautiful, and it felt strong.
She asked to read it first before anything else happened with it. I sent it to her.
A few days later she sent it back. She'd gone through it and cut almost all of the dialogue. She told me it was too painful, that the dialogue burned, reading it back. But she still wanted the story out there. She wanted it to remind people what it was like to be a teenager, and what that kind of love, and that kind of pain, actually felt like.
So here it is.
I wish I could share the first version. I think you'll still feel everything in this one, though, because what's left is honest, unguarded, and real in a way I didn't write so much as carry over.
Thank you for reading.
— Jossef S.
P.S. If this story finds something in you, my first novel, Matelda — In Silence We Forgive, is available now on Amazon. It's a very different kind of story, love against the backdrop of a mafia war, but it comes from the same place this one does.
