I took out the intro, so I'll just give a pronunciation note: Élouase is pronounced Ay-loo-ahz, and Dupont (though that's not a name I made up) is pronounced Due-pon.

Prologue:

October 18th, 2008

Jacqueline Smith was 11 months old.

She was already able to walk (pretty well), and at 3:25 in the morning on October 18th, 2008, she was attempting to climb out of her crib.

She knew only four words: Daddy, Jackie (her father's nickname for her), no, and help. As she jumped and climbed the bars of her crib, she muttered to herself. "Daddy no help Jackie. Jackie no help. Jackie, Jackie, Jackie. No Daddy," stuff like that. But she didn't speak loudly. She was smart for a baby, and she knew that if she wasn't careful, her father would wake up, and then he would close her door so she couldn't get out. Then she would have been up for more than an hour for nothing.

Of course, she would have had trouble expressing these thoughts, although they were things that she knew for certain. She could form the words in her mind, but she couldn't get them out of her mouth. This was beyond frustrating to Jackie, who had so many thoughts running around her head most of the time that she wanted to scream. But she contained herself, because her father always thought something was wrong when she screamed. And it was annoying when he tried to feed her when she wasn't hungry, or when he put her to bed when she wasn't tired, or when he changed her diaper when he didn't need to.

After five more minutes of randomly jumping and climbing, Jackie decided that she needed to be strategic. She sat down in her crib and looked around. The top was a little higher than she could reach, but there was a bar that ran halfway between the top and where her mattress was. She could easily reach that. She would have to climb onto that bar and then climb onto the top. The only problem, then, would be jumping down. She would be relatively high off the ground, so she would need a soft landing. But there was nothing near the crib that she could jump on that would work! She looked around. Then she figured it out.
Jackie took all of her blankets and pillows and shoved them through the bars. Then she climbed up to the top of her crib and jumped down. She got herself out of the mess of blankets on the floor and stood up, smiling triumphantly.

At that moment, she noticed a figure in her doorway. She first thought it was her father, until she realized it was a woman. She wanted to say "who are you?" but she couldn't. She didn't scream.

The woman smiled down at her. "Well done, Jacqueline," she said. "That was smart of you to think of putting the blankets on the ground."

Suddenly, Jacqueline felt like she could speak. So she tried.

"Um, who are you?" she asked. The woman laughed.

"It doesn't matter who I am. But I understand why you want to know. You can think of me as your mother," she said.

"Mother," Jackie said thoughtfully. "Hello, Mother."

"Really, it's good-bye, Jacqueline. After all, I have to go now."

Jackie's mother scooped her up and put her back in the crib.

"Good-Bye, Mother," Jackie said.

"Good-bye, Jacqueline," said her mother. "I would advise you to look away from me. And, if you're able, tell your father that Athena visited in the morning."

"I will," said Jackie, before looking away. And in a blinding flash of light, her mother was gone.

Author's Note:

I hope you liked the prologue! I would do one for the other characters, too, but I thought that would be a lot of work. So I settled for just this.

Love,

Ivy Antionette (btw that's not my real name)