"It's okay, just would've scared me if you still weren't findable when I'd finished putting stuff away."

Yeah, she wasn't thinking, sorry.

(Sigh.)

"No big. I'm gonna get started on dinner, you wanna help? There's a 'stir constantly' step, it'll go faster if I can be cutting things up at the same time."

Sure, she can do that.

Julie gives her stirring and other motor-simple tasks and soon they have chicken in a mushroom sauce. Winona comes home.

Hi, Winona.

"Hi, Dusk! Helping out with dinner?"

Yep.

"Cool." Winona kisses Julie and goes off to do something elsewhere; she's back when the food's out of the oven.

Nom.

She doesn't really want to talk about this and it's fine if they don't either but she wants to make sure she's said it - if she leaves - and she's not like planning to or anything but she might - that's not their fault and they didn't do anything wrong. Also she will leave a note so they know what happened.

"- why would it happen if it did?" Winona asks.

The school thing. Or something like it, if there's other things like that that she doesn't know about yet. She's worried about the thing where she's making a tradeoff of doing something scary and dangerous and unpleasant in order to get something nice; the institution was like that, and making that kind of trade was really harmful, there. The scary dangerous unpleasant part isn't as bad this time and the good part is way better but she's still nervous about it, she doesn't like playing along with this kind of thing at all.

"If you absolutely can't go to school..." says Julie, then she trails off.

"My sister, Irene, doesn't have a day job, but I don't know if you'd get along with her kids and she lives in North Carolina when she's not in the Colorado house," says Winona, "it'd be a big trip to make every month..."

"There are other couples, if what you need is a stay at home parent," says Julie. "We're not the only people in the world, much though we'd love to have you join our family."

Yeah. Well. Maybe.

She likes them, though. And she doesn't want liking people to be yet another thing she has to be careful about because maybe it will hurt her.

"We might be able to just afford enough tutors," Julie says. "Paladin money is good, mortgage is almost paid off - we were helping Irene with the Colorado house but they can probably swing it for a few years till our mortgage wraps up -"

Maybe school will be okay. She doesn't know. She just doesn't like feeling trapped.

"Yeah, kiddo," sighs Julie. "Yeah. We can try the private schools and see if they're any better but they're basically all going to be on the model 'you show up in a building and there are teachers and they teach you things'."

Yeah.

She's not even sure it's a problem, she's just not sure it's not one.

"You also might feel better about it after a few months to decompress," Winona says. "We could probably get you something in the genre of medical leave for the rest of this school year, and then you'd have the summer, and then maybe it wouldn't be so scary."

- yeah, that might help.

Part of the problem with the two schools so far is that they look like the institution, maybe after a while she'll forget that a little and it won't bother her so much.

"The private schools might have nicer architecture," says Julie.

That will help, if they do, yeah. Or even if it's not nice but doesn't look like that in particular.

"They might also have wackier architecture. One of 'em has a barn. With horses and maybe other critters. For 4H stuff, I think," says Julie.