What a fantastic first half of a story. I'm not sure how you'll be able to wrap everything up in just one more part, but I am eager to find out.
By the way, if you wish to add italics into a story, put an open bracket-i-close bracket before the part to be italicized, and an open bracket-forward slash-i-close bracket after it, like this:
[ i] this[ /i]
You will need to remove the extraneous spaces I placed after the open brackets. I needed to put them in there, or else the MB would have italicized the word
this.
Joy,
Lynn