Round 2: Li-Brennan

Lacey Li and her boyfriend Silas Brennan are Adults. Lacey’s daughter Winter Li is a Child, and Lacey and Silas’s daughter Phoebe Li is a Baby.

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Now that Winter and her mom had moved in with Silas, everything was different.

She knew she should be happy. And she was, a lot of the time. She had a real bed now, and a room of her own, even if she did share it with the baby. They had a refrigerator, with real food in it. She had a real house where she could invite friends over, instead of just asking them to hang out at the playground and pretending she would have to go home eventually.

But she barely even knew Silas, except for going over to his house a few times. And now all of a sudden they were living with him, and she had a baby sister. She couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t just been her and her mom, and now it was her and her mom and Silas and Phoebe.

And her mom was still the same as she had always been, but it was like Silas didn’t even notice when she talked to people who weren’t there. He just wanted to kiss her. All the time. Yuck.

Winter tried to warn Phoebe about what she was getting herself into, but she was probably too young to understand.

Phoebe was too young to do anything but cry and wake Winter up at night. She hated sharing a room with the baby. If it were up to her, her mom and Silas would be the ones who had to be woken up by the baby all the time, since they had been the ones who had decided to have a baby in the first place. But nobody had asked her.

It seemed like everything was making Winter mad these days. It wasn’t just the baby. She kept getting into fights with her friends even when they had always gotten along well before. Even she and her mom were fighting almost every day, and it was always her fault. It was like she just couldn’t manage to calm down.

Silas wasn’t helping. It seemed like he did nothing but yell at her all the time. She didn’t understand why her mom had wanted to live with him in the first place. Her mom said Silas was her knight in shining armor who had come to rescue her, but Winter didn’t get how anyone could even like him. He left messes all over the kitchen, he was always criticizing her for doing the smallest thing wrong, and he was mean for no good reason.

But with the baby it was like he was a totally different person.

There were some things going on that Winter didn’t even know about. She didn’t know, for instance, about the times when Silas was asleep after his night shift and his mom would have friends over in Winter’s room.

Her flirtations hadn’t gone anywhere serious. At least not yet. In Lacey’s mind, Silas was still her knight in shining armor. But sometimes it was just fun to play the game. And it was easy to let it go just a little bit too far.

Lacey had developed an inexplicable interest in cooking. She would cook all kinds of impractical things like heart-shaped cookies while she ignored the crying baby in the other room.

But she did bake a cake for Phoebe’s birthday, even though it tasted terrible.

At least having a sister who was old enough to play with would make life a little more tolerable. That, and no longer being woken up by a crying baby in the middle of the night.