Thank you all so much for your patience! My break was much needed, and gave me time to deal with things that I very much needed to deal with. Emotionally it was... a lot, for various personal reasons, and I hope that it hasn't affected my writing quality and consistency.
I so appreciate your honest and genuine feedback, healthy criticism and comments are a great way to learn. Part of this was written sitting on a boat, trying to crank out as many words as possible before I used up too much of the battery (we used my laptop to watch movies at night and charging it could be tricky so I was on a very tight 'battery budget') and the rest was written at home, while fuming that the flow wasn't coming back as easily as I'd hoped.
I hope that this is a worthy, if shorter than usual, addition to the story. It's a bit of a bridge until we get to the more punchy emotional stuff. Like what happened to Bel.
Thank you all!
J