When You Were Young

Once everyone had settled in for the night and gone to sleep, Prudence dropped onto her bed in the cabin. "This is going to be harder than I thought," she said.

Wendell rubbed his hands along her back as he said, "We'll get through it. There's nothing we can't do."

"You're right," Prudence said. She turned her neck to kiss him on the cheek. "We can make this a really wonderful place if we try. The kind of place Rodney dreamed about."

Wendell lay down next to her on the bed, frowning at the mention of Rodney. "Do you still love him?" he asked.

"Of course I do. He was my husband. I'll always love him, but not the same way I love you. You've helped me become so much more than I ever thought possible." She patted the bulge of her midsection, which had become so much less pronounced in the last three years because of her diet of love. "I love you, Wendell. Nothing can change that."

She rolled over to face him and began lifting up his nightshirt. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"I'm sure," she said. As she pulled the nightshirt off, she knew Reverend Crane no longer held sway over her life. The girl she thought had died in the forest had merely been sleeping in a glass coffin all those years, waiting for a man to come along and wake her. This man lay beneath her now and she would never let him go.