Eternal Vows. Rochelle Alers

for breakfast or lunch. The cooks claim they’re too busy cooking for the open house.”

      Breakfasts and lunches were always set up as a buffet, while dinners were sit-down with white tablecloths, flowers, and place setting with wineglasses and water goblets. Sheldon claimed he wanted to expose the farm’s children to the fine dining missing in family-style chain restaurants.

      Peyton often wondered what her life would’ve been like if she’d been raised on the horse farm. Would she have become a veterinarian? And if not, then what? Would she, like a few of the recent high-school graduates, get into their cars and drive as far away from the only lifestyle they’d known for seventeen or eighteen years?

      Before the establishment of the Blackstone Farms Day School all of the children boarded the school bus that would take them into town to the local schools and drop them off at the end of the school day. Their friends were farm children; they learned to drive tractors and other farm vehicles before reaching double digits, but there were also drawbacks to living in a self-contained community.

      Many complained about the lack of privacy. There were cameras everywhere, monitoring their coming and going. For the few seeking to form relationships they found themselves hampered either by the discerning eyes of adults, but also by the discomfort of having to see an ex every day if or when a relationship ended. Some stayed after graduating and many more left the farm. Lee Washington had become one of those who’d stayed.