15 June 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2768: out of the ordinary

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Mrs. Maggie Lee thought about it. She was a few months from being 35 years old, and was certainly no giddy girl any more. She was in her second marriage, and the first had ended with the loss of husband and daughter in a tragic accident. Silly newlywed stuff: she should have been past all that.

But Maggie Lee had become good friends with her husband's cousin-in-law Agnes “Aggie” Hamilton, who was in year 25 of her marriage to Major Ironwood Hamilton, and was still being laughed at by friends for having eleven children and still behaving like a giddy girl.

“They don't get it because they don't even know what it is about – when you love your husband, and you know he is not taking advantage of his distance from you to destroy everything you and he has built, and all he wants to do is come home and there's a world of enemies trying to stop him and an army not trying too hard to get him home either – when that gratitude to God hits because he made it home yet again, and your children see their father and are happy, it doesn't matter what other people say. You do what the love in your heart has you do. It's going to be out of the ordinary to people who don't understand a love like ours. Too bad for them.”

So, Mrs. Maggie Lee, having waited all week for her husband to come home from holding Big Loft, VA together from a police perspective after the politics and corruption centered in Lofton County's county seat finally blew up in the county's face, just ran down into the street to meet him.

Capt. H.F. Lee of the Big Loft Police Department, having served as unofficial police chief all week because of the extraordinary situation already going on at BLPD, was not expecting Mrs. Lee to do all that. He had not been a cadet during his first marriage, and officially he was retired from the U.S. army as a colonel by the time of his second marriage, so the “hero's welcome” had not been part of his life. Between deployments, he did not even often come home: the loss of his first wife and child in childbirth had shattered the whole idea of that. Most often he sang tenor with the U.S. Army Chorus between deployments. By age 45, all he had wanted was a quiet desk job with the Big Loft police in order to slowly transition through a kind of paramilitary experience to adjust back to civilian life.

That plan had backfired, spectacularly – but in the process he had met the police commissioner's one honest secretary, Mrs. Maggie Milano Thornton, and one thing had led to another until he had made her Mrs. Maggie M.T. Lee – but still, the pandemic was supposed to settle things down. Nope. The destruction of Bayard Heights had caused things to blow up again. The difference was, under Capt. Lee's unofficial police leadership along with that of Acting Sheriff Alexander, the blow up had been contained on the right side of the law in the week the anger had been highest.

When that was done – it was Sunday morning at midnight before things were fully clear – Capt. Lee had gone to the Big Loft apartment that he and Mrs. Lee still kept for trips into town, cleaned up, slept six hours, and then hit the road to Tinyville where his wife was. Half his mind was still on the job he was going to be doing remotely; as a newlywed, he still had not fully adjusted to the reality that he was going to run headlong into the arms of love.

Reality hit Henry Fitzhugh Lee like a lightning bolt when he pulled up and got out of the car at 7:00am in front of where he and Mrs. Lee were staying in Tinyville, got out of the car and started up the walk to see Mrs. Lee running out of that house toward him. He barely reacted in time, he was so shocked – but opened his arms just in time.

“Harry!”

“Maggie … oh, Maggie!”

Capt. R.E. Ludlow next door looked out his front window and smiled to see his Lee cousins embracing and weeping together.

“Lord, please bless them to never take what they have for granted,” he said. “I pray for them what I ask for myself and Thalia.”