Continued
"How sure are you about that?" Mandisa asked taking a sip of the grapefruit juice though pulled her face at the bitterness.
"I read in the journal,"
Kacey told them about how Harold Troy had adopted her family after their house burnt down after a fire and how he changed their surnames from Newman to Troy.
"So your original surname is what's named after the mansion," Fitz thought gathering up the information.
"So I'm not biological related to Harold Troy," she stated and added that she doesn't even think she deserves to stay in the mansion.
"No, even if you not related, he left this place to you, you shouldn't feel like this isn't your home because it is," Colchester told Kacey and she smiled at his words of comfort.
January
"Look, it's snowing!" Jiro squealed wearing a thick black jacket and ran out the front door into the garden as white speckles of snow fell to the ground.
"Why's it snowing in January?' Colchester asked following closely behind.
"And this much snow at that," Fitz replies as she releases a handful of snow from her hand.
"The snow is happy to see me!" Kacey lifted her head up to pale blue sky as she walked to the rest of the residents in the garden.
"Okay now you just being dramatic," she said as a cold wind blew through her hair.
"Let's have a snowball fight," Jiro asked Akira while he was putting on his black gloves and told Jiro to do the same, passing him a pair of small black gloves.
Mandisa walked off to a pile of snow wearing a beige colored jacket and dove into like it was the deep blue sea as the other residents began to laugh at her. She turned around onto her back and made snow angels.
"I'm guessing this is your first time experiencing snow," Kacey says while bending down to lay beside her.
"Not actually there was one time it snowed in South Africa, it wasn't much but it was snow and now I realized how much I missed it," Mandisa said and stretched out her arms and legs swinging them back and forth against the snow.
Kacey closed her eyes while lying in the snow, staring at the shapes that formed behind her eyelids she felt light headed and got up from where she was laying. In the corner of her eye, something caught her eye, a butterfly sat on a decaying brown leaf and a stark contrast to the white background of snow from the garden. She followed it as it fluttered away to the nearby forest trees; she took note of its bright orange and red wings. She thought it to be a Monarch butterfly though thought otherwise as it had two large circles on its wings that seemed to resemble the eyes from that of a moth.
"Guys-" she says though paused by the cracking sound of a twig behind her, she slowly turns around and is taken aback by the sight of her friends holding a white birthday cake and singing happy birthday.
"Happy birthday, dear Kacey!" They sang for her and a few droplets ran down from her eye down her cheek.
"Aww, don't cry," Fitz told her and ran other to her, her pink boots sloshing in the snow, giving her a tight squeeze.
Colchester had plates in his hands while Mandisa held the cake with white icing and four pink candles on top of it.
"Come blow out your candles," Eliza told her with a soft smile and a red balloon in hand. She walked over to the front door where they were standing and blew the candles out.
"Thank you guys," she said still sniffling and Akira and Jiro gave her a hug.
"Be thankful Fitz didn't come near it," Akira whispered in her ear and she let out a chuckle.
They went inside, played a list of eighties hits while Boogie Wonderland played and danced the night away as the butterfly flew away into the forest, landing ever so slightly on a tree branch or leaf, into the forest, past the cove where the large black dog Black Shuck slept and down the hills to the town where its people began to wake up including Mr. Fitzgerald.