I stood. Corinne looked up at me with her placid brown eyes, expecting me to say something more. But at that moment Dante and Chloe appeared, led in by a tall man whose dreadlocks reeked of patchouli oil. I went to find them some food.<\/p>\n
The corn harvest started after breakfast, and Chloe, Dante and I headed into the field with our burlap sacks along with everyone else. The work reminded me of my teenage days, planting the vineyard whose fruit I never tasted. I studied the kids for signs of the resentment I\u2019d felt. But they loved the novelty of it, and anyway, all the other kids were working, too; they didn\u2019t want to be left out. We were halfway down our first row, when Chloe asked me if we could invite her daddy and Lucia to come live with us in Selu.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not going to live here.\u201d I dropped another ear into a burlap sack. \u201cWe\u2019re going home in a few days.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to go home,\u201d Chloe said.<\/p>\n
I sighed, realizing that some part of me agreed with her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to come here with Daddy,\u201d Dante said, \u201cso I can show him my bow.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can bring the bow home.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCan I shoot squirrels in the park?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dante bent a stalk to reach its fruit. \u201cWhy are you so mad at Daddy?\u201d<\/p>\n
I let go of the cob I was tugging to study his dust-smudged face. There was tension in his forehead I had no seen until the last week. \u201cI\u2019m not\u2026\u201d I corrected myself. \u201cI am mad at him because he wants to be with another friend and not me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe you could be friends with his friend, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
The suggestion made me smile. It was the type of thing I always told him about getting along with his school mates. \u201cGrownup men and women are different from boys and girls,\u201d I said. \u201cMen and women sometimes have one special friend that\u2019s a wife or a husband. You can only have one wife or one husband at a time. Daddy is my husband, and if he wants to have a different wife, then he can\u2019t have me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n
A noxious vision came into my head of me in bed between Charlie and Zulya. \u201cBecause\u2026\u201d Because what? Because it\u2019s illegal? Because God said so? Because people aren\u2019t made that way? The answer should have been obvious, and yet it wasn\u2019t coming to me. I\u2019d always seen the failure of my parents\u2019 experiment as proof that marriage should only involve two people, but now I couldn’t explain why. \u201cBecause of special feelings that men and women have.\u201d It was the best I could manage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m glad I\u2019m not a grownup.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not so bad. Usually.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dante didn\u2019t look convinced.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyway, the most important thing for you to know is that your Daddy and Mommy both love you and want to be with you and you\u2019ll get to see us no matter what happens.\u201d It took courage for me to say that, having harbored so many thoughts in recent weeks of locking Charlie away from myself and my children forever. I half expected some kudos for the effort, but Dante had found a broken stalk and was fashioning it into a spear. \u201cWatch this, Mommy!\u201d<\/p>\n
Read the previous post.<\/em><\/a> \u201cWhy are you so mad at Daddy?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[97,119,65,45,88,48],"class_list":["post-1153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adrienne","tag-digital","tag-ficition","tag-interactive-nove","tag-monogamy","tag-novel","tag-polyamory-and-children"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1153"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1208,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions\/1208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nRead the next post.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"