Third Time's The Charm

Chapter 16

Maya POV:

"Baby, I'm gonna go for a quick run," I whispered as I placed a gentle kiss on my sleeping wife's forehead.

"Mmmhhmm" she groaned in response, rolling over to face the opposite side of the room. Carina hated being woken up. She always argued that sleep was the most important part of the day and should therefore not be interrupted, and how interrupted sleep just threw her entire body out of whack.

 It was just before six a.m. when I woke up no longer being able to get myself back to sleep, my internal clock screaming for me to get out of bed. I made my way into the closet quickly changing into my running clothes. As I made my way downstairs I noticed that Ezra was also wide awake. He was sitting on the floor in his room playing quietly with a set of cars Carina had brought home for him after a quick trip to the store a few days ago. He had made a large track that resembled a city out of various sized shoe boxes. It seemed he had been awake for a while since the shoe boxes had also been made out to look like buildings. He had drawn doors and windows on each box, his sets of crayons and markers now discarded in the corner of the room.

"Hey bud, what are you doing up?" I asked. Ezra jumped a bit not having heard me walk up.

"Hi Maya, I couldn't sleep," he responded.

"Oh bubs, I'm sorry. Did you have a nightmare?" I questioned.

"No, just happens sometimes," he shrugged.

"Okay, next time come get me or Carina okay? Maybe we can help." I said.

"Okay, do you wanna play?" he asked me, handing me a toy truck.

"Sure, what are we playing?" I asked, carefully taking a seat next to him so I didn't topple any of his meticulously laid out buildings.

"So, sometimes when everyone is done with their homework, the big boys play Need for Speed on the PlayStation but they never let us play, so me and Brian made our own game, like this," he said, pointing at the cardboard city.

"Okay, let's do it," I said excitedly. Ezra set his car up next to my truck at his makeshift starting line.

"Ready, set, go!" he shouted as we both slid our toy cars across the wooden floor to see whose would go the furthest. Ezra won of course. We did this over and over for about an hour, using a different car for each race. I noticed Ezra had a bit of a competitive nature just like I did and took losing about as well as Carina did, which wasn't very good at all.

We were just about ready to start our next race when he asked me a question, "Maya, when am I going home?" he asked.

"Umm," I hesitated, unsure how to deal with the situation. Carina and I hadn't had the opportunity to discuss it any further since Ezra's hospital stay. It hadn't come up anymore so we hoped that the boy had kind of just come to the conclusion that he would be staying here from now on.

"Carina should be up soon, why don't you help me with breakfast and we'll talk about it when we are all together?" I suggested. Ezra nodded excitedly, accepting my answer. We made our way down to the kitchen and I set everything up for Ezra to be able to help me.

"Here, let me tie this around you," I said as I held up an apron, waiting for him to climb onto the step stool that I had set out in front of the kitchen island.

"What are we cooking?" he asked, his apron now around his body and a tiny chefs hat on his head. I had taken the liberty of ordering Ezra and Carina a set of matching aprons and chef hats, that both of them now wore whenever they were in the kitchen. I had customized them so Carina's had the word Bella embroidered onto the front of the apron while Ezra's read Bambino, similar to the ones worn by the competitors on Masterchef.