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“I agree,” Anastasia said.
Royce arched a questioning brow. “Shall we tell them we figured them out?”
“No.” Both women spoke simultaneously.
“I guess we have our answer,” Damen replied with a smile.
“I guess we do,” Royce acknowledged. Breanna reached over to take her husband's hand, Stacie and I had our dreams. We've realized them all. Let our daughters have the same. Dreams can carry you a long way. As our grandfather always knew.”
Upstairs, the two girls giggled as they changed into their nightgowns. They kept their voices low, since Wells and Hibbert were positioned outside the door, waiting patiently to be summoned for storytelling. “We did it,” Holly hissed. “We even fooled Hibbert and Wells.”
“That's even better than our mothers did,” Joanna declared proudly. “They only had Wells to fool.”
“Let's keep pretending until we go to sleep. That way it will really be an accomplishment. We'll have fooled Wells and Hibbert for an even longer time, and without a roomful of people they can say distracted them—if they ever find out about our game. Which they won't. But if we ever do decide to tell them ...” Holly dimpled. “Think how smug we can be.” “Okay.” Joanna's eyes sparkled, the notion of bestir Wells and Hibbert as appealing to her as it was to Holly. Her self-satisfaction, however, was short-lived, another, far less enticing, thought occurred to her
“We can pretend until we go to sleep,” she clarified, wrinkling up her nose. “But tomorrow I'm being me. I don't want to spend the day at the bank.”
“That's fine with me. I hate galleries, and I couldn't choose one frame from another.” Holly responded without
hesitation. “So we'll switch back by morning. ”
“Agreed.”
Squirming into her nightgown, Joanna wandered over to the window, staring out across the grounds that her mother had gazed at for so many years of her life. But what she saw held none of the fear and loneliness her mother had known as a child, nor the terror she'd known as a young woman of twenty-one.
What she saw was the true magic of Medford Manor, the magic her great-grandfather had hoped to convey to Anastasia and Breanna along with the coins, a magic he hoped they'd pass on to their children and their children's children.
High above, a silvery moon shimmered in the sky, and golden stars twinkled alongside it, the gold and silver hues dousing the world in light and love.
Holly came to stand beside her cousin, propping her elbows on the window sill and reveling in the same wonders as Joanna.
The two girls saw safety and security. They saw the place where they'd been born, the place in which they were growing up, the place they'd always come back to no matter what changes life wrought.
They saw exactly what their great-grandfather had always prayed they would see.
They saw home.
