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ChapterNineteen
Call it nostalgia. Call it whatever you want. But on the morning after Alana’s forty-fifth birthday, Alana appeared outside the Nantucket Courthouse, armed with a freshly baked batch of Greta’s world-famous oatmeal raisin cookies, fully prepared to speak with Jeremy Farley. As she’d spoken about him the afternoon before, she’d fallen into the achy parts of herself that still belonged to both real and imagined memories with Jeremy. Jeremy, kissing her outside the football field after the state championship. Jeremy, carrying their firstborn baby around the house until she stopped crying (oh, how she wished for it). Jeremy, in a million different versions, none of which belonged to her anymore.
She had to convince him to give her and Julia the paperwork. Marcia Conrad’s purchase of the painting had taken it all too far, and the two elder Copperfield daughters were ready for revenge.
But more than that, she had to convince Jeremy not to hate her anymore. She couldn’t take it.
Jeremy’s number-one fan, the receptionist named Jane, was hard at work at the coffee kiosk, whistling to herself as she created bad cappuccino after bad cappuccino with the press of a button. Alana tip-toed across the foyer like a woman in a spy movie and disappeared through the door that Jeremy had come out of last time. In a flash, she was in the dark shadows of a stairwell, one that creaked with each footfall.
When Alana reached the bottom of the staircase, she peered out across a thirty-foot-by-thirty-foot basement supported with cement pillars. The basement was like a library of files, most of them thick and yellowing, aged with time and bad air. It seemed like a prison sentence to live out your career underground like this, especially when people like Asher were allowed the gorgeous Thailand sun.
“Hello?” Alana called, stepping through the dust-filled air.
No one answered. Her heart seized with worry.Maybe Jeremy wasn’t even at work that day. What would she do, then?
Alana continued to walk through the aisles, scanning the labels over sections of files: BIRTH CERTIFICATES 1850-1870. WEDDING RECORDS 1912-1917. BUILDING CERTIFICATES 1950s.What kind of person did work like this?It was hard to envision her football-playing high school boyfriend filing paperwork like this.
At the far end of the hallway, she caught sight of a hunched-over figure with a thick pair of headphones over his ears. He bobbed his head in time to whatever music it was(Nirvana? The Smashing Pumpkins? Did he still like the same stuff?)as Alana approached. She didn’t want to frighten him. That would make him even angrier than he already was.
A few feet away from Jeremy’s desk, Alana paused and took in the full sight of him— this broad and muscular man in a pair of khakis and a dark button-down, his foot tapping against the floor. He jotted notes about whatever he looked at, documentation from one century or another. Alana tried to remember the last time they’d been totally alone, just the two of them, but could only imagine false memories. Car drives. Kissing on her front porch.
Alana took a tentative step forward, daring herself to take charge of her life. But that moment, her shadow flashed across his desk. Jeremy leaped from his chair, casting it back toward the wall. His hands stretched out wide on either side of him, prepared to fight or push back. Only his eyes took in the sight of Alana, a woman who, somewhere in his heart of hearts, he had to have remembered being in love with. He had to.
But a split-second later, his face crumpled up with pain. He collapsed at the edge of his chair and placed his hands on either side of his thighs. After a long moan, he removed his headphones from his ears and whispered, mostly to the ground, “What do you want?”
Alana hustled to his desk, placing the platter of cookies off to the side. “What’s wrong, Jeremy? Are you okay?”
Jeremy shook his head. He looked too exhausted to be angry. “It’s just this old injury. It finds a way to affect me almost every day.”
Alana’s voice was terribly quiet. “I am so sorry to hear that, Jeremy.”
Jeremy drew his eyes up toward hers. They held one another’s gaze for a long time.
“I wanted to tell you that at the hospital,” Alana whispered. “So many times.”
“I couldn’t take it.”
Again, silence. Alana had the sensation of walking backward in time. She stepped away from his desk and removed the top of the cookie platter, saying, “Mom baked her famous oatmeal cookies. I remember how much you used to like them.”
Jeremy eyed them as though they were a bomb about to go off.
“They’re not poison. I promise,” Alana joked.
Jeremy selected one of the larger cookies and took a tentative bite. His eyes closed, he breathed, “Damn. That taste really takes me back.”
“It’s wild, isn’t it?” Alana agreed, taking one for herself. “I hadn’t had one of my mother’s cookies in twenty-five years. I nearly wept when I took my first bite.”
“Nobody around here thought the Copperfield siblings would come back to Nantucket,” Jeremy said quietly.
“I never thought I’d come back to Nantucket, either,” Alana stated.
Jeremy brushed a bit of cookie from his lip. After another pause, he asked, “How’s it been? Being back, I mean.”
Alana was genuinely shocked that he’d asked her such a question. “I feel like I’m in limbo. A lovely, cookie-filled land of limbo. No idea what to do next.”
Jeremy nodded as though he could understand. Again, Alana noted his empty fourth finger on his left hand.Did he have anyone to speak of? Was his family still alive?
“I guess you know that my father came back after being released from prison,” Alana continued, crossing her arms over her chest.
