It's been a while since I added to this story so a very brief summary of how we got here is appropriate.
Five years ago, Ned returned to Australia from a Pacific cruise on his yacht with four women. During the cruise they shared an intensely sexual polygamous relationship, the story of which is told in my Unexpected Threesome series. Ned was close to 60, three of the women were about half his age, Liddy, the other was eight years younger than him.
Two, Amy and Liddy, stayed with him and continued the relationship. The others kept in close and constant contact but, as Ned encouraged them to do, found more appropriately aged husbands and became mothers.
When Covid struck and closed borders Liddy was trapped back in her native New York while visiting her recently born grandchild. Things turned nasty when Ellen's doctor husband died of Covid while treating patients. Unfortunately the surrounding publicity about the hero doctor had a bad outcome for Ellen, causing her to be stalked and harassed by a few unknown people who'd seen the photo of his very attractive wife in the news reports.
For safety, she, her au pair and toddler children moved into Ned's large house.
There, it became obvious to Amy that Ellen was in desperate need of more than just a safe shelter and, being the kind soul she was, she arranged for Ellen to rejoin the polygamous family.
This story is narrated by Ellen
...
As I lay alongside him and Amy in bed that morning, I knew Ned was right.
I wasn't yet confident of my place in our polygamous family and that was reflected in so much of my approach to everything.
And he knew, as much as I did, why that was the case. It was only human.
Amy and Liddy had been Ned's loving and faithful companions for all of the last five years since I'd left the family to marry Harry and have his children. Now when, as a doctor working on the front line, he died of Covid, Amy, being the generous, loving, beautiful person she is, organised for me to become part of it again. They didn't even require for me to want to be a permanent member. They allowed for the fact I might once again, in my own good time, seek a partner of my own, of an age closer to mine.
Amy has told me she wants me to be the same confident person I was before I left and that I was in every respect accepted as an equal partner. Now Ned has made to same point. Within the limitations of being a widow and a single mother of two toddlers, they want the old Ellen back, not one who feels she doesn't belong or is a second tier person in the relationships.
Of course, my mind is spinning with so many other considerations.
Am I betraying Harry by not allowing enough time to elapse for me to properly play the role of a grieving widow? I certainly grieved for his death. I still do. I was absolutely distraught at his death, both at my loss and at my daughters' loss of their dedicated and loving father. I felt alone in the world. I wondered how I could possibly cope.
Had that press story and photo not attracted attention to me and brought on such a stream of perverted calls and stalking suitors, I might still just be living with my daughters, rebuilding our shattered lives. But it had become dangerous for us all. That path wasn't going to be allowed to us, at least in the short term.
Ned and Amy - because Amy's role as the one who makes all this happen can't be forgotten - were definitely my saviours when they took us as guests into their large house. We were safe again.
And mere guests we might have stayed except for one major complication. A small matter of the extreme sexual and intellectual frission that exists between Ned and myself. It existed on the yacht cruising the pacific. It existed when we first came back to Australia and we all lived in Ned's house. It existed right through my marriage and manifested itself every time I was visiting Ned or crewing on the yacht with him. It was a frission so powerful that, once the decision was made I shouldn't sleep with Ned any more because of my newly developing relationship with Harry, I had to move out of Ned's house for the simple reason I couldn't stand to be living with him but not have access to his body.
In a way, it was a lovely frission, even after I got married. It made us both feel good and close to each other. It gave us a special relationship. But it worked because I had Harry and Ned had Amy and Liddy to drain any sexual frustration that it caused.
Harry knew about it and understood it. He saw every bit of my relationship with Ned in action as he too crewed on the yacht. He supported and encouraged it because he saw how valuable it was to me and recognised it offered him no threat or challenge. Neither Ned nor I were the type of people who would betray his trust.
And while I didn't realise it until after he died, it would seem he also recognised it as a safety fallback for me and his daughters if anything happened to him. And for some reason, looking back, I can't help but wonder if he didn't have some premonition that we'd need that fallback. He was in an almost obscene hurry to have children while we were still quite young by modern standards and there were certain things he did and said, even before Covid came along, that I thought were almost morbid in their intent. An important one was that I shouldn't let any memory of him hold me back from seeking the safety and shelter of a new relationship should something happen to him, with a broad, subtle hint that Ned might be that relationship.
That has helped me deal with the guilt; although not entirely with the grief and sense of wishing I'd had a more insightful reaction to his comments at the time.
Am I using Ned and Amy by rejoining their family when I know, one day, I might want to partner up and remarry out of it? Their kindness and understanding on this is beyond belief. After all, Ned has always encouraged us to seek more age appropriate partners rather than be burdened by him and still recognises that future. And yet that doesn't stop me feeling a sense of guilt. That I'm somehow failing to commit to them as fully as Amy and Liddy have to Ned and he to them.
And that's even before I try and address what I really want for the future. Do I want to leave Ned and take a risk with another man? Not wanting children, Amy made that decision five years ago. After a decade of violent abuse from her former partner, when she found someone who loved her and treated her as well as Ned did, she wasn't going to risk making another bad choice. She was sticking with Ned. She's never for a moment regretted that decision or wanted to review it.
