✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

18. Our Offer of Help

If this story was going to be a trilogy, the first book would end with Tess finding her little headspace for the first time. I've finally got up to that point, writing 35 chapters (50163 words) of The Last New Start, and 36 chapters (50313 words) of My Cousin's Keeper during November.

I did it! Does anybody want to say congratulations?

Of course, there's a lot more of the story still to come. But I'm happy to have reached this point, because if gives me a feel for how long the story is going to be. Thank you all for supporting me; especially the people who voted on the chapters they liked, and the people who are supporting me on Patreon so I can have more time to write. Thank you all!

I wasn't surprised on Sunday morning to hear Tess moving around in her room when the sun had barely risen. She'd gone to bed a couple of hours before us, leaving me and Ffrances to a somewhat drunken deliberation about the best place for a Captain Kairo figurine to live in all his faux-retro seventies glory. In the end we'd settled for pride of place on the TV stand, where a single spike of purple hair stood up in front of the screen. We'd agreed that it was perfect, at about the point in the evening where we had switched from nostalgia shows to a third rate porn channel with the sound off. For a while, we had tried adding our own dialogue for the excuse plot, reminding each other in stage whispers that we needed to keep our voices down so that we didn't wake the baby.

Later in the evening, we had both remembered that it was unlikely anything would wake her. She was on the far side of the house, even if she didn't have chemical assistance to remain asleep.

This morning my head was ringing. That was my own fault, as well. Captain Kairo had always had a strange moreish quality, where you think it would be good to watch just one more episode before bed. As a kid, that had been the thing that got me in trouble the most. As an adult I didn't have a real bedtime, but one more episode had been joined by one more glass, until the 1am switch to other forms of entertainment. And now it wasn't even eight.

Ffrances groaned, and mumbled something into the pillow. When I placed a hand on her butt, she just slapped it away. It seemed that we were suffering equally from my lack of self control.

"Tess is awake," I whispered. "More noise than most days. Think she's stripping the bed."

"We should help her." But she didn't move, except to grab another pillow and press it over her ears. I had nothing but sympathy for her, but knew I had to at least be conscious enough to make sure the child was okay. I didn't actually feel too bad right now, but I knew that would change pretty quickly in an hour or so, when I estimated I might be sober enough for the mother-in-law of all hangovers to really make its presence felt.

"Not yet. She'll deny she has a problem, and I think she'd get scared. If this is making her feel more comfortable, we don't want to be the strict adults scaring her into stopping. We need to let her tell us when she's ready to."