Dreams of the Golden Age (Golden Age 2)

She swallowed the lump in her throat and stilled her racing heart.

“Please don’t do that,” he said. The emotion had lasted for only a flash; he was back to stone now. “She’ll tell you everything when she’s ready, I promise, but for now”—he pursed his lips, his hand tightened—“please wait.”

She didn’t know what she was going to do. Two paths opened up, one in which she confronted her supposedly absent mother, one where she didn’t, and neither option looked right. What she did know: Confronting her mother meant revealing her power. How did you follow your gut when it was telling you two different things?

Out of a sense of directionless rebellion she said, “You going to stop me?”

He could. He had the power to control minds, and if he controlled hers, would she even know it? But he drew his hand away from her.

She strode off—but not to go to her mother, and Arthur would have known what she would do as soon as she made the decision. Instead, she stormed to her room, slammed the door, and stayed there the rest of the night. She didn’t speak, because she knew he’d see it all written plain in her mind, and he wouldn’t be able to fix it any more than she could.

SEVENTEEN

“ANNA knows,” Arthur said.

Late at night, he came to stay with her in the guest room. Nurse her, more like. She was too cranky and in pain to sleep, so she propped up a laptop on pillows next to her, thinking maybe she could get some work done. She couldn’t just lie there, could she? But she was having trouble focusing on the screen. Reading a single e-mail seemed to take an hour, so she ended up just staring at the device, pretending, too woozy to do anything else.

However angry Anna might be with her on general principle, Espionage came through, using an anonymous e-mail address to send a pack of information on the McClosky and Patterson firm. Now if only Celia could concentrate enough to read. But she was supposed to be delegating, so she forwarded the packet on to her law team. The initial court hearing was in a couple of days; the info had arrived just in time.

Her little nudge had worked, and she resisted feeling guilty about it. She was a terrible mother, just awful. Either that, or she was successfully encouraging her daughter in her current interests. Sure.

She was frustrated and depressed. “One day at a time” had turned into “one hour at a time,” and Celia could imagine a point when it would become “one minute at a time,” just trying to breathe enough to make it to the next day. She’d recover soon enough. She had to. She refused not to. But for this particular round of treatment, she would just lie here, weakly fuming.

“Anna knows what?” she murmured.

“She knows that you haven’t really gone away. That you’ve been here the whole time.” He sat on the edge of the bed, delicately, like he was afraid of disturbing her. She wanted him to hold her but was afraid that his touch would hurt. So he kept back.

“How could she possibly know? What is she doing, hacking into the building’s security cameras? Spying on me?” But she stopped, stared a moment, and the pieces fell into place. A roiling sense of discovery. “It’s her power, it’s mental. Telepathic, like you.” Squeezing his hand made her ache, but she did it anyway, because his touch was more important than pain right now. “How long have you known?”

“About three years. It seems to have started then. She’s only really been learning how to use it in the last year. It’s not precisely telepathy, more like what I’d call psycholocation. She knows where people are.”

Celia put her head in her hands. So many pieces falling into place.

Arthur went on. “I’ve been waiting for her to say something, encouraging her to talk about it. But she’s only retreated, burying it all deeper and deeper. She’s gotten very good at blocking me. If I didn’t know her so well already I wouldn’t be able to read her at all.”

“You sound proud of her,” Celia said.

“I am. She … I think she wants to see if she can do this on her own. She wants to live up to some kind of ideal she’s invented for herself. Sounds like someone else I know, eh?”

“This is my fault, isn’t it? I’m a terrible mother.” She snuggled closer to Arthur, and he took the cue, putting his arms around her, holding her. The pain faded.

“No, you aren’t,” he said dutifully. “Celia, she’s going to continue asking what’s going on. I don’t know what to tell her. I can only put her off for so long. It’s not really fair to her, when I keep asking her to share her secrets. Suzanne is worried, but she’s very sensitive about giving you space. No one wants to pressure you, but the fear is there.”

She thought for a long time. Thinking had become difficult. “My parents never kept secrets from me. I always knew who they were and what they were doing.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell her. I’ll tell everyone. Let me get through the court hearing. Let me get well again, and I’ll tell.”

“I love you, Celia.”

“I don’t deserve you, Arthur.” The guilt crept into her voice because she was too weak to hold it back.

He touched her face, tipped her head back, kissed her lightly, knowing exactly how much pressure he could use before she started hurting. His love washed through her like a drug, one that burned fiercely but left strength behind it instead of weakness. She could change the world with him standing beside her. All his love said that yes, she did deserve it. Somehow.

* * *

When Anna was about six and Bethy was three, Anna fell. Celia had been carrying Bethy and, arms full of squirming little girl, didn’t see exactly what happened, but they’d been descending the stairs outside the Natural History Museum on a summer outing, and Anna was running too fast. Celia called to her to slow down, but Anna didn’t listen. Celia hadn’t really expected her to, but the calling out had been an instinct. You did it because at least then you’d tried. The alternative was keeping the kids on leashes, and while Arthur joked about her being controlling, she wasn’t that bad, she hoped.