Chapter 8
The Nantucket Sunrise Bakery was the number-one stop for Nantucket brides looking for gorgeous and scrumptious cakes. Alana had made an appointment with them to taste-test cakes the morning after Jeremy had proposed. Now, they were seated in the front room of the bakery before seven different cakes, all divine, with thick layers of frosting and little flower decorations and candy pearls. Jeremy had just taken a big bite of cake, which was terrible timing because the baker—Agatha Smith—had just asked him a question about his work in the Nantucket Records office. Alana laughed and touched his shoulder.
“He loves his job,” Alana said. “But I think it’s safe to say he loves this cake a lot more. It’s going to be hard to choose!”
Agatha laughed. “If you can make this decision together as a couple, then you’ll stay together forever. I’ll leave you to it.”
Agatha disappeared in the back and flipped on the radio. Jeremy swallowed and turned pink. “That was embarrassing!”
Alana giggled and took a bite. It was in moments like these that she fully adored her life and had no regrets. She wasn’t thinking about acting or about abandoning her dreams. She wasn’t thinking about the wild, vibrant city she’d left behind. She touched Jeremy’s leg under the table.
“I can’t wait to shove one of these cakes in your face on our wedding night,” Alana joked.
Jeremy cackled and raised a forkful to her lips. “Bring it on.”
Outside, it was a beautiful afternoon in early June. Jeremy had taken a half-day off from work to indulge in “the best part of wedding planning.” After this decision, they were nearly done. They would float through the summer and wed the final week of July.
“By the way,” Jeremy said, “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what your mom said. Why do you think she wants to get to the bottom of what happened to Celeste? I can’t make sense of it.” He cut through the edge of his cake and held it.
“That’s the way my mom is,” Alana offered. “She thinks everyone has endless ambition. She can’t understand when people don’t meet their potential.” She sighed. “Maybe it’s the curse of being Greta Copperfield. She thinks everyone wants to be a famous artist. She thinks everyone wants to make literature, art or music that echoes the mysticism of the soul or whatever. And Celeste was apparently ‘brilliant’ enough for Greta Copperfield to get excited about. She blames herself. I don’t know.”
Jeremy cocked his eyebrow.
“What?” Alana asked.
“This question of meeting your potential is fascinating to me,” he said, his voice quiet. “That’s all anyone ever said to me when I was younger. ‘You have great potential,’ or, ‘Your future is bright,’ or, ‘You’re going to go far.’ It felt like people tied up their own excitement about their life with mine. As though, if I really went on to play at Notre Dame and then professional ball, I was proving something about them because they believed in me first.”
“People love to be involved in a story,” Alana agreed.
Jeremy palmed the back of his neck. “It made me sick to disappoint them after the accident. Isn’t that stupid? I was devastated, of course. But more than that, I couldn’t look people in the eye. They were much more disappointed than me, and I couldn’t bear to carry their disappointment.” He shivered despite the heat of the day.
Alana squeezed his thigh as empathy rolled through her. She would always feel marginally guilty for that crash.
“I just wonder what will happen when your mother discovers a normal story behind all this,” Jeremy went on. “Maybe Celeste decided she didn’t want fame or glory. Maybe she realized that settling down and getting married and having children was enough for her.”
“I don’t know if my mother is capable of believing it,” Alana said with a soft laugh. “But she’s writing a book about it. Comparing her own life and failures to Celeste’s. She’ll project whatever meaning she wants to on what she finds.”
Jeremy furrowed his brow. “You don’t sound happy about that.”
“My mother has an enormous capacity for emotion and creativity and truth,” Alana offered. “But one thing she’ll never forgive herself for is her twenty-five years of ‘exile,’ so to speak. I think she wanted to derive meaning from her own exile through Celeste Harding’s success. And the fact that that didn’t go to plan startles her.”
Jeremy took another bite of cake and pointed at it with his fork. “This is the pinnacle of success for me. This cake. My beautiful bride. My wonderful and talented daughter.” He smiled. “Losing that trip to Notre Dame was so painful. But it was also the best thing that ever happened to me. It gave me Sarah. It kept me here so I could meet you again. Life doesn’t end when you’re twenty-two.”
“I felt so sure it would,” Alana remembered. “That’s what being a model was all about.”
“But look at us now,” Jeremy said. “Getting closer to fifty every day.”
“And laughing in the face of it.”
Even as Alana said it, her stomach seized with worry. If she was lucky, she had thirty years left. She spent thirty years showing the world what she was truly made of and proving to her mother that she was a sensational actress and a worthy performer. But no! She fought back against her own thoughts and took another bite of cake. She was getting married. Jeremy was right. There was such sublime happiness in acceptance.
Alana and Jeremy selected their cake, thanked Agatha, and stepped out to enjoy the rest of the day. They had dinner reservations for seven-thirty and decided to wander around and kill time and work up their appetites again. Downtown, they ran into Quentin and his wife, Catherine. Catherin was laden with bags from a boutique a street over, and Quentin was speaking enthusiastically about something.
“What’s up?” Alana asked as she threw her arms around her brother.
“Quentin’s all fired up about this new job,” Catherine said with a smile.
“There’s this inn on Martha’s Vineyard,” Quentin explained. “They’ve just discovered a hidden room in the basement. Nobody knew it was there. It belonged to the Underground Railroad!”
Alana’s eyes widened. “That’s incredible. You’re filming there?”
“The History Channel reached out and asked if I wanted to be the face of the documentary,” Quentin explained. “You should see this quaint little inn. It’s called the Sunrise Cove. Just about the most romantic place.”
“What does the room look like?” Jeremy asked.
Quentin considered this and shifted his weight. “It’s about as creepy and damp as you’re imagining it. According to our findings, an ex-slave raised her baby down there for over a year before the war ended, and she was free to live upstairs.”
“It still blows my mind,” Catherine said.
“What are you two up to?” Quentin asked.
“Nothing as exciting as that,” Jeremy joked. “We just taste-tested seven different cakes. I’m so full!”
“That’s equally important work,” Catherine affirmed. “We can’t wait for the wedding.”
“Who said you were invited?” Alana teased.
“My sister never changes,” Quentin said. “Always yanking me around.”
Jeremy’s phone buzzed, and he pulled it out to see Sarah’s name. “She hasn’t called in a few days. I gotta take this.” He stepped away and answered it with a vibrant, “How is my actress doing in New York City?”
Alana watched him as his posture crumpled. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Honey, I can’t understand you,” Jeremy said tenderly.
Alana and Catherine locked eyes. They knew what it was like to be a nineteen-year-old young woman weeping over the phone. They knew it meant disaster.
“Have you heard anything?” Catherine asked.
“Just that everything was going well,” Alana whispered. “But things turn on a dime in theater.”
“Especially in New York,” Catherine agreed.
Jeremy got off the phone and staggered back to their little group. He was pale. Alana touched his shoulder and asked, “What happened?”
“She’s had a few difficult rehearsals in a row,” Jeremy said softly. “She’s having trouble memorizing her lines. I think it’s stress. Too much change at once.” He touched the back of his neck and looked on the brink of tears. “I knew it was too soon. She’s too young.”
Alana’s heart felt bruised. “It’s just one bad day. It was bound to happen.”
“She said she’s been crying all week,” Jeremy said.
Quentin and Catherine shifted uncomfortably. Nobody wanted to offer their opinion about Jeremy’s daughter, who was so far away in the big city. Nobody wanted to parent anyone else’s child. And it wasn’t Alana’s role, either. When she’d entered their lives, Sarah had needed her desperately; she’d needed help crawling out of the depths of her eating disorder. But she was better. She was going after something.
Alana was reminded of what Jeremy had said over cake, that some people were just happier with normality. Some people discovered that settling down, having children and having a normal job filled them with enough purpose to keep going. Was Sarah one of them?
“I have to go see her,” Jeremy sputtered. He looked resolute. “I’ll call in sick or something.”
“Let me go,” Alana volunteered, surprising herself.
Jeremy looked stunned. For a brief moment, Alana thought he was going to say, she’s not your daughter; stay out of it. But his face softened. “She would love that,” he agreed. “You know that world better than me. You can see if things are as bad as they sound over the phone.”
“I’m sure they’re not,” Alana said. “Sarah is an actress and a brilliant one at that. But actresses swing from one end of the emotional spectrum to the next. This will probably be just a blip in her memories by tomorrow.”
Jeremy’s face turned red. He glanced at Quentin and said, “I’m sorry. I must seem very foolish right now.”
Quentin shook his head. “I have two daughters. Scarlet’s all over the place, and Ivy’s in her first year at college. I feel panicked just about every second about their whereabouts and health.”
“You hide it well,” Jeremy said.
“It’s taken years of figuring that out,” Quentin said.
“She’ll be fine,” Catherine assured them softly. She squeezed Alana’s hand. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“My recommendation is to bring her favorite snacks,” Quentin said. “Something she can’t get in the city. Something to remind her of home.”
Jeremy thanked Quentin and led Alana to a wide range of Sarah’s favorite snack places. He wanted desperately to bring her favorite ice cream in a big cooler filled with ice, but Alana talked him out of it. They opted for her favorite cookies with frosting, a specialty-made trail mix from a little shop downtown, and some black licorice—which Alana and Sarah adored and Jeremy thought was “the most disgusting thing ever invented by man.” Back at home, they packed a bag with snacks and some trinkets that would remind Sarah that she was adored. Jeremy even wrote her a note that Alana didn’t read. She imagined it said how proud he was, that he was always with her, that she could come home to visit whenever she wanted. His compassion for his daughter made Alana love him that much more.
Due to the frantic nature of the afternoon and early evening, Jeremy and Alana called the restaurant and rescheduled for a later date. Alana made them pasta with homemade pesto and parmesan, and they ate on the back porch, watching the water roll up along the sands. “I love you,” Alana reminded him for perhaps the twelfth time that day. “I love you back,” he said.