Page 32 of Nineteen Seventy-Six

Colleen nodded. “Catherine is due in late summer. We can check in on her and the baby on our way back.”

“I wonder… you know… what Amelia will be able to do,” Noah mused, a hint of controlled caution in his voice.

“To do?”

“Her… gift.”

“Like my healing you mean?”

“Like that.”

“I was just wondering the same actually.”

“When will we know?”

Colleen shrugged and played with the edges of Amelia’s thin blanket. Noah was trying, and his attempts weren’t forced anymore, just unsure. This world was new to him, and he was finding his footing. Anything other than patience from her would be unfair. “I don’t know. There’s so many different gifts in the family, and as far as I can tell, it’s not like other genetic markers where a child of healers is more likely to be one. I suspect that the marker is only the propensity for a gift, not an indication of who will be given what. But no one really knows, because everything we know about ourselves comes from within the family. Our knowledge is insular.”

Noah frowned in contemplation. “When did you know?”

Colleen withdrew her hand and leaned back into the rocker Kellan bought her for nursing Amelia. “I’m not entirely sure, because my mother, back then, acted like our gifts were courtesy of Satan and forbade us from using them. My father, who was like Augustus, didn’t discourage us, but he didn’t really teach us about ourselves, either. But…” Colleen rocked and closed her eyes, falling into the memory. “My first clear image of myself healing had to be at about three. I don’t think I was four yet, because it was around my fourth birthday that Dad moved us from Ophélie to Oak Haven, here in the Garden District, and the memory comes from Ophélie… a bit beyond the property, out in the swamp. Was just me, Mama, and Maddy, and Maddy and I were playing on a blanket while Mama was harvesting swamp cabbage and chicory—”

“Wait, your mother, one of the richest women in Louisiana, was foraging for food?”

“You’ve met her,” Colleen said with a raised brow. “She wasn’t watching Maddy and me that carefully, and Maddy was in a phase where she ran everywhere. All the time. Running. Well, she tripped over some cypress knees and went tumbling, hit her head on another knee, and when Mama’s face went pale, something spurred to life inside me. It’s hard to explain. I just… knew if I didn’t do something, Maddy might be in real trouble. So I ran to her, Mama shouting after me, and I put hands on her and I felt the energy transfer. I felt the blood pooling away from her brain, and the lifelessness dissolve away. I couldn’t have described it at that age, of course, but I sensed that whatever I was doing was making her better.”

Noah ran his hands through his hair. “That’s incredible.”

Colleen wrapped the shawl around her. Even in the summer, there were spots in The Gardens that held a permanent chill. “But it’s possible that happened before, and I just don’t remember. Mama didn’t address it at all, though I saw in her eyes she hadn’t missed a single thing. She knew. But was that because I’d done it before that? I’ll never know. She’s never wanted to talk about who we are.”

“Hearing you say that reminds me of how unfair it was for me to treat you the way I did.”

“You were in shock,” Colleen offered graciously, because it still hurt when she let herself pause too long on the memory. For her marriage to work, she could never pause too long in the dark places of their separation, and she suspected all marriages had these dark spots, smaller than the light but powerful if you let them in. “Mama likes to say she didn’t know what she married into, but she did. She spent over a year nursing my father’s first wife, and throughout that, they had family healers in and out all the time. She knew.”

“Why were they ineffective? Maybe that’s why she didn’t believe.”

Colleen gave herself a moment to think of how to describe what she was going to say next. “Consent is an integral part of the healing process. I know there are situations, like with you, where it isn’t possible, but when someone is alert, and present, and can make decisions, if they aren’t receptive to receiving what’s been given, there is a sort of natural defense that kicks in to prevent the healing from taking. Ophelia always said Eliza knew it was her time, and so she fought what she believed to be unnatural.”

Noah frowned. “But you were able to heal me because I was unconscious.”

“I won’t apologize,” Colleen said, her defenses kicking up. “Don’t ever ask me to. I’m glad you were out cold, because you might have fought me, and if you’d fought me you wouldn’t be sitting here asking me these questions. I don’t care if it’s against the rules we set for ourselves as Deschanel witches. I don’t care if it was wrong, Noah, I will never ever be sorry for it.”

Noah leaned against the wall, watching her. His mouth was curved, in seriousness, but it was soft, ready, thoughtful like his eyes. “I’m the only one who should be sorry… and always will be.”

Close the box. Leave the darkness inside. He loves you more than any man has business loving a woman, and for you to harbor resentment… for him to feel forever indebted and forever inadequate in his remorse… that serves neither of you. Neither, Colleen. It will only fester, like a cancer, and destroy the beauty in what you both are.

The voice, the words, were Ophelia’s, but she wasn’t here anymore, and Colleen didn’t know if she’d inherited the wisdom or just learned to predict it.

Colleen fought against her stubborn insistence to see him in perpetual penance. She shuffled across the carpet and folded herself into his arms.

“We won’t speak of it ever again, Noah. Not my hurt. Not your regret. We have Amelia now, and we have the experience to know we never want to be where we were a year ago. The scorecard has been reset. The balance is restored. We both have to let go.”

Noah’s arms shook as he held her; his pain transferred, not to her, but through her, releasing itself back into the universe. He wasn’t the best with words, so perhaps he’d never been capable of telling her the depth of his sorrow over his actions, but she felt it now, as she gave him permission to give it up, and herself permission to let go of her own anger and indignation at being the one who was wronged.

“I love you, Colleen. I can’t stand the idea that I only get one lifetime with you.”

Colleen pressed her lips to his heart. “If I ever find an immortal Deschanel, I’ll make sure to learn their secret.”

CHAPTER 9

---