A little snark, properly directed, can change the world.

... until Miri could not help it any longer and she laughed out loud. The sound broke the game. Peder looked at her. He reached out, and she thought he meant to grab her straw or perhaps yank her hair as he used to when they were little. But her put his hand behind her head and, leaning forward, pulled her face to his. He kissed her. One long, slow kiss.

She answered by standing and kissing him first and held his cheeks and closed her eyes and felt sure as bones and deep as blood that she had found her place.

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE: RAPUNZEL For horse thieving, kidnapping, jail breaking, and using her hair in a manner other than nature intended! REWARD

She touched the healthy folds of skin around the baby's neck, wrists, and thighs, the dark lines crying for life made in his forehead, and thought how people start with wrinkles and end with wrinkles, grow into their skin and then live to grow out of it again.

It was karma, it was kismet, it was magic. It doesn't matter how it happened, just that it did.

There you go...let it all slide out. Unhappiness can't stick in a person's soul when it's slick with tears.