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“Good luck,” Violet replied before adding, “When it’s all over, will you tell us or, at least, find a way to let us know that you’re okay?”

“Yes,” Eliza said. “If something happens to us, Lydia’s family will take care of our kids, but since they don’t know anything about this, well, I hate to ask, but–”

“We’ll find a way to check in on them,” Rachel promised and took Violet’s hand. “Don’t worry.”

Lydia swallowed hard, and Eliza nodded with tears in her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

Before the women left, Violet hand-wrote their phone numbers, along with other pertinent information, on a piece of paper so that it wasn’t stored on any phone or computer hard drive and locked it in their safe. Then, she found Rachel standing in the middle of the empty room that would be the nursery, and she was rubbing her belly.

“Everything okay? Maybe you should lie down, my love.”

“My love,” Rachel repeated after her as she turned to her with a smile. “Can we paint this weekend?”

“Um…Ican paint,” Violet replied. “Youcan lie in our bed and have all the windows open so that you don’t inhale any of the paint fumes.”

“Fine. Fine,” Rachel said and wrapped her arms around Violet’s neck. “It’s gone.”

“I know.”

“How do you feel?”

“Scared for them,” Violet answered honestly. “And a little for us. But I trust them, too.”

“So do I,” Rachel said. “But I also feel, I don’t know, relieved somehow. Like, it’s out of our hands now, and we can’t just press the button whenever we want to try to force the future it shows us. I know we said we wouldn’t, but now, we can’t.”

“Hey, earlier, what did you and Felicity mean about the energy?” she asked, wrapping her arms around Rachel’s waist.

“Well, you hate scary movies, so you never watch things with or about ghosts, and I’m not sure they’re real, exactly, but energy isalways mentioned in those. Even in those ghost-finding shows, it’s about the energy we leave behind. Sometimes, when people die horrible deaths, like when they get killed, the energy is amplified. That’s what I think, at least. Maybe that energy got to the device somehow, and it changed its purpose.”

“A lesbian love finder?” Violet joked.

Rachel laughed and said, “I don’t know. I like to think of it as it somehow tells you what you need to see or know at that point in time to make the decision you need to make. Or, it guides you in the direction you need to go, kind of like it guided you toward me.”

“That sounds nice, actually,” Violet said.

“Want to go order those cribs now?” Rachel asked and kissed her sweetly on the lips.

“Yes, my love,” Violet answered.

ORIGIN

“That was…” Iris let out.

“What do you meanwas? I’m not done with you yet,” her lover said.

“We don’t have much time, my love,” she replied.

“We have all the time in the world. He’s two hundred miles away and has no idea that you’re here with me.”

“I forgot.” Iris smiled.

Daphne’s brown hair had been let out of its clip and fanned over Iris’s thighs. They didn’t have opportunities like this very often. Iris’s fiancé was out of town for work for a few days, but he only took one trip like this annually, so it was their one chance to have three whole days to themselves. Unlike most unmarried couples in this small town, Iris and her fiancé, Edward, lived together, and it had been quite a scandal when she moved in. Prior to that, Iris had been living in a small apartment all on her own when they first met years ago, but her lease had been up, and she hadn’t been able to afford to pay the extra rent the landlord wanted to charge her, so when Edward’s parents passed away and he inherited the house, they’d agreed to deal with the rumors that she was pregnant, despite that not being the case, and she’d moved in with him.

It was her only option, really. While Iris wasn’t physically attracted to the man she’d marry one day next year, he was a good man. He treated her well. He didn’t mind that she worked, and he hadn’t had a problem when she’d introduced him to Daphne, a woman she workedwith. Daphne was seven years older, more sophisticated, had her doctorate, and was one of the most well-known female scientists in this part of the country. Iris was only a thirty-five-year-old secretary. She was also madly in love with this woman who had made her come undone so easily only moments earlier.

“So, we don’t have to go fast. We can take our time,” Daphne said with a soft smile as she stared up at Iris. “And we have three days because we both took time off work.” She kissed Iris’s inner thigh. “And my roommate will leave us alone.”