Page 61 of Nineteen Eighty
“Figure out what you want from life. What you really want. Because I think you’ve spent thirty-odd years bouncing from one shiny thing to the next and don’t have a clue what happiness means.”
Colleen ran her hands through Amelia’s long white hair, which was stretched across her lap along with her daughter. Noah had both the boys with him, Ashley in his arms, Ben curled around at his side. His sleepy expression was lit by dancing colors of the exterior Christmas lights, which had gone up only a few nights earlier. The Gardens would be an array of seasonal showmanship until the new year, as it always was.
As it always was. These words had played an important role in Colleen’s considerations since the summer, when she’d moved her family home.
When she was younger, Colleen assumed—wrongly, she now understood—her family needed something only she could offer. That she was there to save them from themselves, to guide the moral center of the blood. Further harmful was her belief that her own meaning and place in this world could only be achieved through these means, and that to fail at this would mean to fail utterly.
“You went somewhere,” Noah said softly from his rocker. “Just now, in your head.”
“I’m always going somewhere.”
“Somewhere from before.”
She smiled. “You always know. I was thinking about the past, I guess. How much has changed.”
Noah kissed both his sons, gently so as not to wake them. “Everything, you could say.”
“Everything that matters.” She wound Amelia’s soft hair through her fingers. “I’m glad we came back when we did, Noah. But not before, is what I mean. That we waited. That we focused on us before we came back to the real world.”
“Nothing was ever more real to me than our years in Scotland,” Noah said. “But I understand what you’re saying. I’m glad, too. Everything is as it should be.”
“As it always was,” she whispered. “I don’t have big visions for my family anymore, but I do have them for the family. If that makes sense.”
“It does. The Council.”
“The Council.” Colleen leaned back in her chair. Her sweet Amelia stirred in her lap. “I want to make Ophelia proud.”
“I think you already have, love.”
“I hope so. But I always feel as if I’m chasing her vision, guessing at what she would’ve wanted, playing a game almost.”
“But wasn’t her vision for you to create your own?” Noah asked, and it broke Colleen completely from her reverie.
“My own?”
“That never occurred to you?”
“Well, yes, to some degree, but…” Colleen pulled the blanket up over her daughter. She’d been so accustomed to Ophelia’s tendency to communicate in riddles that she thought her charge upon her great-aunt’s death was to decipher one final, critical one. That of the future of the Council. But what if she’d had it wrong all along, and Ophelia’s final test had been one that only Colleen could set for herself?
And hadn’t she done this already? Letting Luther fly with his ideas? Letting Jasper work on new agendas? Breathing new life, new ideas. Was this what was meant all along?
“I love you, Colleen.”
Colleen looked up, drawn to the seriousness in her husband’s voice.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, instinctively. Because she could never, even now, quite shake the idea that real affection only preceded tragedy.
“Nothing,” he said with a soft, languid smile. “Only that I’m going to keep saying that, as much as I need to, until one day when you look up you’ll know everything is as it should be.”
CHAPTER 17
Second Chances
On order of the family priest, Augustus kissed his bride for the second time in his life. Unlike the first, where he’d been nervous and inexplicably smitten, this time he was content. Barbara’s pretty smile, full of the same happiness but devoid of expectations, greeted him when he pulled back, set to the applause of their immediate families.
Colleen had insisted on hosting them at The Gardens. Although they’d only invited their closest loved ones, Colleen had nonetheless gone to some trouble to make the setting lovely and ornate, even in the cool throes of winter. She’d wound all sorts of red and pink flowers Augustus recognized but could never name around the trellis and found a roll of crimson satin for the aisle. He wanted to tell her none of this was necessary for the type of marriage he and Barbara signed up for, but that wasn’t entirely true about the marriage. Practical though it may be, it was an investment in both their futures. It was a gamble, that two people looking for the non-traditional could find a traditional sort of happiness. Augustus needed a caretaker, and Barbara, someone for whom to care for, and if fate was kind, this would be the recipe for their own individual happiness.
And Ana’s.