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“Let’s get you up,” Grandpa Bernard said, taking both of Anna’s smaller hands in his massive ones and lifting her. “Does anything hurt?”
Anna shook her head. “Just my ego.”
Bernard chuckled and brushed snow from her shoulders and arms. “Welcome to being an adult, honey,” he said. “We’re all nursing our wounds.”
Long after Anna returned to her bedroom, she could hardly breathe, remembering Smith’s eyes floating so close to hers. She felt like a fool.
Chapter Four
Julia decided to let Smith settle in over the next few days. She knew pushing any artistic process before it had fully percolated wasn't good. Anyway, she was lost in the throes of Christmas family reunions, eating cookies with Rachel, having deep conversations with Henry on the back porch, and taking care of Anna. Being a mother was always her number-one job—and she would soon become a grandmother. She wanted to relish this time before putting her full effort into work.
It was no surprise to anyone that Smith kept to himself. He was secluded in his room, cooking his own meals in the residency kitchen (mostly spaghetti, it sounded like) and hardly communicating with the other residency artists.
“I don’t know why I assumed the magic of this old place would work on him.” Julia sighed, leaning against the kitchen counter as Greta made a decadent sauce to go with the potatoes. “I figured he’d step inside and immediately feel, I don’t know, the energy you and Dad put into this place over the years. I figured he’d finish his memoir by the end of January.” She laughed wryly, realizing she was only half joking.
Greta arched her brow and stirred the sauce. Just that morning, Julia had shown Greta some of the pages of Smith’s manuscript, and Greta had remained quiet about them thus far. Julia burned to know what was on Greta’s mind. It wasn’t often she kept her opinions to herself.
“The kid has been through a lot,” Greta finally said, removing her spoon from the pot and tasting the edge. “It must be outrageous for him to see all the Copperfields together. He’s never known a big family like that. I mean, he’s never felt that kind of warmth.”
Julia rolled her shoulders back, remembering the scene Smith had painted of his home back in Pennsylvania. It seemed like something out of a nightmare.
“And you’re sure he’s okay with publishing all that? About his mother?” Greta asked tentatively.
“He sees it as a way of exorcising his demons,” Julia said, quoting Smith precisely. “He’s twenty-six going on fifty-five.”
Greta wrinkled her nose and gazed out the window, where another late December snowfall filled the edges of the windows.
That afternoon, Julia met with Smith in her office for the first time. He appeared in a ratty red T-shirt and a pair of loose jeans, with Luka hot on his heels and his tongue lolling from his mouth. As Smith sat, he patted Luka’s head gingerly and looked at Julia with full eye contact, which startled her. It was rare to meet someone so unafraid.
Julia clicked her pen and glanced back at the manuscript pages she’d printed to go over with Smith that morning. She wanted to discuss the story's arc, where to position the backstory to enhance the emotional effect, and how best they should proceed strategically now that Smith and Julia were under one roof.
“This is such a pleasure for me, Smith,” Julia began, stuttering slightly. “It’s rare I get to spend so much one-on-one time with one of my writers. And like I’ve said a million times before, I see real promise here. I could imagine it at the top of every best-seller list, selling at airports and traded between everyone from fifteen-year-olds to eighty-five-year-olds. But we have to get in gear if we’re going to make that happen.”
Julia put an authoritative slant to her voice, one she’d previously had to use occasionally with Henry when he’d been an unruly teenager. It felt funny to return to this version of herself. She’d thought she’d left this particular Julia in the suburbs of Chicago.
Smith remained quiet, petting his dog as he gazed at Julia baldly. Julia swallowed a lump in her throat.
She tried another tactic.
“How are you liking Nantucket so far?”
Smith blinked. “It’s obviously beautiful.” He said it as though it were a ready-made fact.
“Yes.” Julia stuttered. “I loved growing up here.”
That was a lie in many ways. If Julia was honest with Smith, she would tell him about Marcia Conrad framing her father, about how she’d run away at seventeen, and how miserable she’d been when her family had fallen apart.
But Smith came from a family without pieces to put back together again. She didn’t want to force him to compare and contrast stories.
“Who is that?” Smith nodded out the window toward the beach below, where a violent sea wind rushed off the water and crashed against the frame of the old house.
Julia followed his gaze to find Anna walking alongside a woman Julia recognized as Dean’s mother. Her heart lifted. Anna had said Violet would arrive today, and Julia was grateful everything had gone according to plan. Even now, Violet paused and placed her hand over her eyes as a shield, gazing out across the waves. She looked captivated.
More than once, Julia had tried to put herself in Violet’s shoes—to imagine that she’d lost her child instead. Each time had brought Julia to her knees. It was nothing a parent should ever have to endure.
“That’s my daughter, Anna,” Julia answered.
Smith nodded.
