Free How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

I were their mother, war or no war, I'd be half dead with worry by now not having any idea how all my children were doing or even if they were still alive.
    Eventually Piper got quiet and I figured she was asleep so I went back into my own bed and started thinking my own thoughts for a while.
    Now that I was away from Edmond I could think more or less in private about all the changes that were jamming themselves into my life and one of the thoughts I had was how you could love someone more than yourself and any worry about getting stuck in the middle of a war and ending up dead was transferred onto worrying about keeping them alive.
    This was all confused by the fact that I loved Piper in a protective kind of way and Edmond in a slightly different way, to put it mildly, and given that I had about as much experience with sex and boyfriends as I did with brothers and sisters, it was pretty strange to find myself suddenly overwhelmed with attention from the world's biggest warehouse of magical misfits.
    And just to complicate matters perfectly, I was starting to feel responsible for their safety and happiness and got panicked at the idea of them being captured or corrupted by the outside world. Now this was a definite shift from where we'd started which was all about them bringing me cups of tea and holding my hand and exactly when the shift occurred I couldn't tell you.
    My head was kind of spinning from trying to clear this up and I wished there was someone I could have asked about it all since I'd never read about any similar kind of situation in all the magazines Leah and I used to buy which I guess either makes me or everyone else on the planet some kind of a freak.
    But for once my fate was crystal clear and wedded to Edmond and Piper's and even Isaac and Osbert's so that was that, and I just had to get on with whatever it required of me.
    This made me not quite as desperate as I had been and if I lay very still I could hear Edmond thinking about me wherever he was and I thought about him back and then the bond between us was complete.
    I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn't love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn't have to howl all night. Thinking of Edmond like that made the single bed suddenly seem too big so I crept in with Piper who didn't even stir she was so used to it by now and I could hear Jet breathing quietly under the bed.
    And so with all the ducks I had left in a row, I was ready to fall asleep too.

17
    P iper and I lived with the McEvoys like people living someone else's life.
    Because we were part of an army family we got a much clearer idea of what was happening in England, though a fair amount of it we could have done without knowing due to its not-entirely-cheerful nature.
    We spent a couple of days gathering information from Jane McEvoy who liked to talk and was pretty lonely especially since her son was away at school in the North and hadn't been heard of since the first bombs went off and she was desperately worried that something bad had happened to him which seemed fairly likely to me.
    I went down to get some water late at night and heard her in the kitchen with Major Mac and he was saying he was certain the boy was safe and We'll all be together again just as soon as this bloody mess is sorted. He sounded amazingly calm and reassuring but I could hear an occasional hoarse gasping kind of cry like an animal choking to death in a noose and when I looked through the door I could see Mrs. M shaking all over and him with his arms around her looking exhausted and patting her over and over saying Now now, love, and I decided to live without a glass of water that night.
    The next day her eyes were red but otherwise she seemed OK, and to make conversation she started telling us how proud she was of her husband and that one of Major McEvoy's big jobs was organizing a field hospital for