"J, WHAT ARE YOU CARVING ON OUR PUMPKIN?"

"A PALM TREE."

"Baby, a palm tree?"

"Scary faces are so overrated." He said with a goofy smile.

"You are too much, I think I might go a little more traditional on my gingerbread haunted house."

"What would the National Enquirer pay for a picture of this scene? Me up to my elbows in pumpkin guts. You assembling and decorating a kit I bought at target."

"I would never sell pictures of our private moments like this. There is so little we get to keep private. Simple things like the Halloween traditions of carving a pumpkin are family secrets that I will always hold dear to my heart. Even if the man I love carved a palm tree on our pumpkin. Now if I could just get the walls of this house to stand up so I can put on the roof and make it spooky I would be a happy girl, yes I would."

He watched her work with great patience as she tried to attempt the impossible. He waited for the right moment to step in to help. The orange icing from the kit was not thick enough to keep the walls together. So every time she let go a wall would fall in.

It was when all four walls fell down that he stepped in.

"I have an idea B." He walked back to her with four cans of foie gras.


"J how will four cans of goose liver help me here." He without answering her takes a can and supports each wall.

"So smart it’s scary."

"I don’t like to see you frustrated, now you can ice them together and help me while you wait for it to dry."

"But I want to decorate it all spooky."

"Patience Brit, after it dries you can turn it into the masterpiece you desire for it to be, bur right now help me with my pumpkin."

"Yuck, I don’t want to touch the slimy insides of a pumpkin."

Without touching her he slowly moves to her and kisses her still scrunched up face. He backs her against the counter slowly as they continue to kiss the intensity builds and began to lose control.

"J, we can’t do this, not yet."

"Gotcha, sorry forgot. In that case let me cool you off." He reaches behind her into the depths of the pumpkin, unknown to her.

"Soon, J we can be together soon, I promise."

Both hands now filled with pumpkinseeds, stringy, slimy, wet and smelly.

"For now." His left hand smothered her hair with the slimy mess while his right hand went down her shirt.

"Justin Randall." He was off like a light. Running from her, his laughter ringing throughout the kitchen.

She grabbed her revenge. Two hands full of pumpkinseeds and went after him.

"Justin" she screamed as loud as she could. Not acting like the twenty-year-old she was. More like the eleven-year-old who use to chase Justin all over the set of mmc.

"Brit, shh." He pleaded in a serious tone across from her in their living room.

"OOPS. I forgot."

She jumps over the back of the couch hands still loaded with her small wet weapons. He laughs as he takes off running. She follows him following farther behind with each step. He occasionally looking back to make sure she was okay. He did not want to push her. It had only been a month.

She could not believe what room he had just gone into. He was going to hide behind the one thing she would not go after.

As she rounded the entry to their master suite she saw a sight that brought tears to her eyes and chills to her entire being. It is a sight that she still had not gotten use to seeing. There stood something she dreamed of for so many years. Now it was a reality. Her reality. Her family. Her husband holding their four week old daughter, Pilar. Adorned in a pink dress she was being held snug to his chest with his right arm. His left arm was waiving one of her white baby blankets as a symbolic gesture that our "war" was over.