Wrapped In Armor by MJ Fields

Author:MJ Fields [Fields, MJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Valley Publishing LLC
Published: 2022-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

We spend the next couple days the kind of busy all days should be—playing with our children, watching our children play with each other, cooking, baking, London obsessively building a castle for everyone, and rebuilding it when it’s washed away by the tide or April showers. Lexi is just loving everyone and mimicking sounds more than ever.

Today, we girls make applesauce. Tessa taught me how when London was Lexington’s age, which is how I became obsessed with making her baby food.

It dawns on me then that my mother never took joy in cooking or baking. A memory, dreamt up or real, flashed in my mind that involved four place settings at our dining table.

I hurt for their loss, for Elizabeth’s life … taken, abused, forever changed. I hurt for the girl who I was raised to be and the woman I am now who I can’t take joy in her return, not when she has made my life hell. She didn’t return how she left, not that I remember who she was, just the stories about how wonderful she was my entire life. She isn’t her. She isn’t my sister. She’s the monster who lives under the bed, in the closet. She’s the woman who wants to steal my husband.

In fact, she already has.

That thought brings me to wondering if he, too, has been irrevocably changed.

And then Tessa starts a dance party that springs on a food fight of sorts and a messy kitchen, one we don’t have the chance to clean up, because by the time we’re changed and have wrung applesauce from our hair and helped our girls do the same—CJ and Matthew jumped in the freezing ocean—the kitchen is again sparkling.

I know she did it as a distraction, and I appreciate that more than she’ll ever know.

That night, before she falls asleep, through a yawn, London says, “I’m glad Lexi gets to experience the cousins, too.”

“Experience?” I laugh softly as I pull her closer.

London grins sleepily. “They’re an experience.”

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