Free Just Once More by Rosalind James

privacy Drew needed. The place where he could relax, because anyone who got this far was a friend.
    Just like everybody who was sitting around the tables tonight. Everyone had come except Josie and Hugh, because they were having dinner with Josie’s family. Only two nights to go until the wedding, and Hannah thought she knew how Josie was feeling. A husband, and two kids as well. A lot to take on. But it seemed like the two kids were a bonus, and Hannah was glad of that for all their sakes.
    Koti was talking to her, and she brought her thoughts back to the present.
    “Potato salad,” he said proudly, holding the heavy glass bowl for Hannah so she could help herself. “This is mine. You need to have some, because it’s what Americanseat at a barbecue. Kate’s mum taught me to make it when we were over there visiting with the baby last year. I just about fell asleep during the baseball game her dad took me to, and I can’t make a cherry pie like George Washington, but I can do this, and corn on the cob on the barbie. I can eat watermelon and spit the seeds, too. Even sang along with the national anthem. Reckon that makes me a Yank, or at least half of one, just like Maia.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Kate said. “You blended right in. Must have been the tattoo. Didn’t stand out at all. None of my old friends was scooting her chair a little closer just to get a better look and hear your cute accent, for instance. And by the way, George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, he didn’t make a cherry
pie.”
    He just grinned. “Knew it was something to do with cherries. Though why that’d be something heroic to celebrate, I’m buggered if I know.”
    "I’ll tell you the fascinating story later,” Kate promised. “So you can pass it along to your child someday. As the half-Yank you are.”
    “Not a true story, actually,” Jenna said, laughing. “So Koti could skip it, if he likes.”
    “No, really?” Koti said. “Well, that’s a relief.”
    “It was in a book for children,” Jenna explained, “around the turn of the nineteenth century. A biography, but mostly made up, I’m afraid, and it ended up as one of those things that got passed down ever since. I guess the intention was a good one. That particular story is about not lying.”
    “It isn’t true?” Emma asked. “I never knew that.”
    “Jenna knows many things,” Finn said. “If it’s about teaching and kids, she knows it.”
    “Are you planning to go back to teaching soon, Jenna?” Hannah asked.
    “No,” she said, still smiling. “Not for a while yet.”
    “About five or six years plus two months of a while,” Finn put in, putting a proprietary hand on the significant bulge of her abdomen. “Minimum, because I take a fair bit of looking after. And oh, yeh. Four kids. That.”
    “Four,” Hannah said with a sigh. “I’ll admit, I’m a bit worried about three.”
    “Ah. Perfect opening,” Drew said. “What kind of help d’you have with that, Jenna?”
    “Plenty of house cleaning,” she said. “And a fair bit of minding the kids as well, when I need it. Because you can’t take three with you to the doctor, and four…” She shuddered. “I hate to imagine. And even though Finn isn’t gone as much now, he’s gone enough.”
    “Don’t need to justify that to me,” Reka said. “That’s why my mum lives with us, isn’t it. And why Josie’s auntie and uncle have moved into her old place, for that matter. To look after the kids when he’s gone and she’s working.”
    “And you don’t ever feel…” Hannah asked hesitantly. She wasn’t sure how to ask this without insulting Reka or Jenna.
    Reka looked around the table. “Who here’s got some help at home? Family, or somebody else? Everybody, that’s who,” she told Hannah. “Everybody with kids. I know what you’re saying. And no. I don’t. I’m a good mum.”
    “I know you are,” Hannah hastened to say. She could feel herself flushing. “I wasn’t meaning it