When she wakes the second time, purple is the first thing she sees. It takes her aback for a moment because she hadn't used this shade of purple, closer to lilac or lavender in quite some time. She hasn't kept it close to her since perhaps she was closer to five and ten than six and ten. She remembers that after she had met Colin, she had changed most of the colors around her to that near pitch black, indigo color of his eyes that no matter what she did, she couldn't stop associating with him. The fact that she was now surrounded by the color she had always truly loved as herself and not some mockery of her true preferences was refreshing. This afterlife may not be too terrible.
The next thing she realizes is that she is obviously lying in a bed, and not just any bed at that. The bed she is currently in is her childhood bed. Or perhaps a perfect replica of it. The bed itself is so high off the ground that she had to clamber up in a completely unladylike way every single day until she had been dragged to that horrible estate, but she wouldn't think about that now. This bed has nothing but happy memories. It was the bed her father had specially made for her when she used to have nightmares about giant bugs crawling onto her mattress. Her father used to call the bed the princess bed. Or the princess's bed. Just the thought of her father's ridiculous humor nearly brings tears to her eyes, but she is tired of crying. She has been tired of crying for so long now. Instead, she takes a deep breath and tries to maintain the sliver of positivity inside her.
"Aleah, my darling girl." She hears from beside the bed, and she turns.
It is not so much shock or fear that stops her from forming words this time but rather the sheer normality of the situation. She hadn't heard those words so many times growing up or seen the shift of her mother's worried face beside her as she woke and her mother's warm hands coming forward to grip her own. It all seemed so normal, so good, and so right. It seemed like before. It takes her far too long to be able to speak to her mother because everything's so confusing. Nothing is as it should be, and the fact that it isn't, makes no sense to her. All the words that come out of her mother's mouth sound like nonsense based upon what she knows and experienced, yet her mother has never once lied to her. A truly terrifying thought comes to her then: if her mother isn't lying, what does that mean for her? The shock of that realization alone sends her close to fainting into the mattress once more.
Aleah is not dead. In fact, she is very much alive. Her family is very much alive. Alive and young. She happened to be much younger, and none of her family, no one at all, knows a single thing about their future, or is it their past? None of them know anything; they all just sit there looking at her with this concerned look filled with fear when if they knew what she knew, they would just be better off killing her now! She thinks maybe a few of them would,, but if she was alive and they were alive, none of the horrors that had happened actually happened… Then, did they have to happen at all?