Prologue
Normality never came easy to me. Because I had never been normal before. I had been a starving young girl, a hunter, a provider, a criminal, a tribute, the Girl on Fire, an actress, a Mockingjay, an assassin, a crazy person.
And yet some of the hardest roles for me to assume now was that of wife, mother, lover, healer. We were at peace, the war was over. However, no matter how long the peace continued, it still felt as if we were acting again. Still felt like Peeta and I were playing house, still felt as if reality would come crashing down to tear it all away.
Because we were both broken. We were both trying to pick up the broken pieces of our lives and put it all back together. As we did, I realized there were pieces missing that I would never get back, pieces that had been changed and morphed and wouldn't quite fit, and pieces that were mutilated, bent and destroyed that would always be a black hole in my heart, never to be whole again.
But we managed. We tried. We held each other and did everything we could to give our children good lives. Sometimes Peeta would get pulled back into tremors of a hijacking episode; sometimes I would have intense flashbacks that tore at my mind; we would never be perfect.
There would always be darkness, no matter how long we lived in peace. Our lives were happy, but there were always the looming ghosts of the past at our backs. The pleasant moments greatly outweighed the dark ones, but when the darkness struck, we always had each other.