Lucie.

LUCIE.

Lucie Maybelle Rousseau was raised on a steady diet of stories.
         
Not fantasy stories, like Snow White or Cinderella. Her Aunt Laramie told her those stories, when she had hardly qualified as toddler. She’d never paid much attention to those stories; her Aunt Laramie had also been the one who told her stories about Fluffy Bunny families who lived in Sunny Hillsides, with Papa Bunnies and Mama Bunnies and adorable pink and blue Baby Bunnies. Lucie, at age two, knew full well there were no such rabbits in existence, and was well aware that a great deal of families, bunny, human, or otherwise, were not so happy, even if they did have both a Papa and Mama. As a Rousseau, she had been exposed rather early to the less sunny side of families, and as the daughter of Lydia Rousseau, she’d learned that a great deal of Papa Bunnies hopped away from both Mama and Baby without so much as a backward twitch of their noses.
         
The stories Lucie loved, savored, and devoured more than those of sleeping princesses and fuzzy creatures were the stories fed to her by her uncle and aunt, Laurent and Octavia Rousseau, or, Uncle Laurent and Auntie Vee. She craved those stories more than anything; when she was youngest, she begged for them. As she got older, she memorized them. And when the time came for Lucie to think seriously about her own future, her own story, she listened to those stories once again, sitting in the kitchen with her Auntie Vee, and wrote them down.