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Here in the chapel of the bed where they found each other, found their way back to each other, and found love wherever they looked.
Over and over again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LIONELADOPTEDBABYJules before her first birthday
“How can she be anything less than mine?” he asked.
“That’s how I have felt about her from the start,” Geraldine told him, smiling in that way that made her eyes gloss over with emotion.
He would have hated that once, but he was learning.
The presence of an emotion did not mean that the kind of excesses his father was so fond of would follow. It did not mean that, like his grandfather, he would take it upon himself to blow something up—simply because he could.
Geraldine had their second child before Jules was two. A sturdy, green-eyed little boy, who was already so charming, hisabuelitadeclared, that surely he would wrap the whole world around his chubby fist before he was five.
In the meantime, Lionel and his beautiful wife made their life together.
They spent time with her family, so that Geraldine’s parents could feel easier about the choices she had made. And while they would always be suspicious of his wealth and power—something he grew to appreciate—he thought that over time, they came around.
Then again, that was likely just the grandchildren.
Geraldine learned Spanish at a surprising pace and threw herself into cataloging the Asensio collection, which did not remain a private concern. It was so large and so fascinating that, eventually, they built it a building all its own on the part of the estate that bordered public lands. Then they opened it to anyone who wished to come and view it, and Geraldine got to run the entire operation.
“You have become quite a mogul in your own way,” he told her many years later as they arrived for one of the Biblioteca Asensio’s grand events that called in scholars and academics, celebrities, and intellectuals from all over the world.
“The thing no one ever tells you,” she said, smiling at him with all that laughter in her gorgeous green eyes that she still liked to hide behind her glasses when she was working—because she claimed she couldn’t resist the stereotype, “is that moguling is so muchfun.”
“That is a secret,” he admonished her, though he was smiling. “You must tell no one, Geraldine. We can’t have that kind of thing getting out.”
But the real secret, he knew, was love.
They loved each other. They loved their family. They added to it as the years passed. Another boy and then a little girl.
Who they got to watch Jules dote on the way Geraldine had doted on Jules’s mother long ago.
They loved each other, and they loved their children, so they never lied to Jules about her parentage. They never kept where she came from a secret, from her or the other children. And they decided that she should be the one to seek out her birth father if she wished. If he could be found.
Though she never showed the slightest inclination to do so.
“All I’d have to say to him is thank you,” Jules said when she was older. “He was so terrible, and treated poor Seanna so badly, that he accidentally made my life fantastic. I don’t need a single thing from him.”
“You,” Lionel told her, “are a marvel of a child.”
“I take after my mother,” Jules told him, laying her head on his shoulder as they watched Geraldine out in the garden, playing with the younger children.
Love was the point of all of it, and that was what Lionel told his grandmother as he sat by her bed as her last days seemed to come much closer than they had before, though she’d made it to the hundredth birthday party she’d vowed she would throw for herself.
She had even made her grandsons dance with her.
“It was a marvelous party,Abuelita,” Lionel told her, holding her hand in his.
“I certainly hope so,” she responded, with that same old satisfied grin. “Because how else should a life end if not with the celebration? That’s the point,nene. Love is always the point.”
And as the years passed, that was what Lionel remembered.
That life was meant to end, like it or not. And that being so, better that a life should be a celebration of love. Better that it should be marked with joy, and then remembered by those who lived on with laughter, with stories, and with love.
