Chapter 2
PART 2:
For two weeks, Lucas had been away on base training.
Not overseas.
Not unreachable.
But Eleanor had made Sophia feel like he might as well have been gone from the planet.
It started the day Sophia brought the baby home.
Eleanor arrived with Audrey carrying grocery bags, blankets, and the kind of smile that looked kind until the door closed.
“You’re too young to know what you’re doing,” Eleanor told Sophia.
Sophia was twenty-four.
Exhausted.
Still healing.
Trying to nurse a baby who cried every two hours.
She thanked Eleanor anyway.
At first, she thought help was help.
But help turned into control.
Eleanor moved furniture without asking.
Audrey cleaned cabinets and muttered, “This place looks like a college dorm.”
Eleanor opened drawers.
Checked baby bottles.
Rearranged the nursery.
Then she took the house key off the counter and put it in her purse.
Sophia saw it.
She didn’t say anything.
She was trying to keep peace.
Lucas had always told her, “My mom can be intense, but she means well.”
Sophia wanted to believe that.
She wanted her son to have family.
She wanted Lucas to come home to calm, not war.
So when Eleanor criticized how Sophia held the baby, Sophia stayed quiet.
When Audrey rolled her eyes because Sophia cried in the laundry room, Sophia wiped her face and came back out.
When Eleanor said, “In my house, we do things properly,” Sophia swallowed the correction.
Even though it was not Eleanor’s house.
It was the home Lucas had bought before he married Sophia.
A small house near Fort Brighton.
Three bedrooms.
A fenced backyard.
A nursery Lucas painted pale blue with his own hands.
On the first night home, Lucas had installed a baby monitor camera above the crib.
Not because he didn’t trust Sophia.
Because he loved them.
“I want to see him when I’m stuck on night duty,” he said, smiling as he adjusted the angle.
Sophia remembered laughing.
“You’re going to spy on a sleeping baby?”
Lucas kissed her forehead.
“Every chance I get.”
But after Lucas left for training, Eleanor changed.
May you like
She stopped pretending.
👉 But the little camera Lucas installed out of love would soon become the one thing Eleanor forgot to fear.
