JEREMIAH
Chapter playlist:
Arrival at National Archives — Trevor Rabin
She's Always a Woman — Billy Joel
She came down the hallway and something in my chest quit working right. The moment I first laid my eyes on her, I forgot every word I knew. In both languages. I’d been dreaming about seeing her in that dress for days, and once the moment arrived, it was better than I could have imagined.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” Genius. Absolute genius, Jeremiah. Four years of college and that’s what I had.
She did a small turn, one hand on her hip, waiting for me to say something that wasn’t “hey.” I had nothing. My brain had left the building. It was black, it had stars on it, and I couldn’t put together a single sentence that didn’t sound like gibberish.
“You look…” I stopped. Started over. “I had a whole thing planned. I lost it.”
“Lost it where?”
“No idea.”
I did, though. That bare shoulder. She was stunning in that dress, her hair in soft waves, smoky eyeshadow, her complexion glowing, her lips a glossy berry.
But the hot-blooded Neanderthal in me had to go and fixate on that one spot. Exposed skin, soft and inviting. It took every ounce of willpower not to clamp my mouth around her shoulder and devour her all the way up to the column of her neck.
“You gonna offer me your arm, or just stand there?” she said.
I offered her my arm. I didn’t trust myself to speak again for at least thirty seconds.
The next hour went by in a blur. I remember the red carpet, and the sheer weight of having a woman like her on my arm.
I remember Hobbs, watching us from across the room the entire night, and Erica refusing to let it bother her.
She ate like she didn’t have a care in the world.
She bid on some ridiculous item at the auction.
She danced with me like the room had emptied out around us.
For a while it felt like the eye of a storm.
Then she slipped away from me, and I should have gone after.
Now I’m rushing down the hallway, frantically searching for her.
She’s been gone too long. This hotel has too many hallways, and every one of them looks the same.
A cart cuts across in front of me and I have to do a double take. It’s Zoe, Erica’s friend. She winks, grins a little, and keeps going like none of this is strange.
My brain snags on that for half a second. What is Zoe doing back here with a cart? I don’t stop to work it out. I file it and keep moving. Only one face fills my head, over and over: Erica.
I’m almost ready to give up and try the other direction when someone slams into my shoulder.
He stops, just for a second, long enough to recognize me, then keeps running.
It’s Hobbs. He’s come from somewhere in a hurry, and my stomach drops thinking about what that somewhere might have been.
His face is pale, ghost-pale, panic written all over it.
I want to turn around and put him through a wall. But I can’t. I have to find Erica.
If she’s hurt… No. I’m not letting my brain go there. I just have to get to her.
I shove through the courtyard door at the end of the hall and the noise of the gala falls away behind it. String lights loop overhead, small and white, making everything look soft.
And there she is.
She’s sitting on a stone bench with her hands folded in her lap. She’s hunched over, tapping the toes of those dang combat boots together for entertainment.
Then she looks up when she hears the door close behind me.
My voice comes out gruff. Like sandpaper. “Did that man touch you?”
She just laughs. “He wouldn’t dare. I told him my big strong boyfriend would use his head for a hockey puck.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
I fly to her, crossing the distance in two steps and crash my mouth against hers. Boyfriend. She called me her boyfriend. And I pour every ounce of myself into the kiss.
When I finally pull back, her hands are still fisted in my lapels like she isn’t planning to let go of them. I’m kneeling at her feet, checking for signs of duress on her face.
“You said you had to use the bathroom. Then when you didn’t come back, I thought…”
“What? That I’d leave without having dessert?”
“I didn’t think you’d left. I saw that Hobbs guy go after you. I stood outside the bathroom for ten minutes. Then those German-Argentinians walked by complaining about the woman with the black dress and pointed in this direction.”
“You used your spidey senses to find me.”
“My spidey senses are tingling right now. Were you running from Hobbs? What were you doing out here?”
“Exacting revenge. It would be very satisfying if I had a mustache to twirl right about now.”
I laugh, once, and it surprises me more than it surprises her. Then it dies in my throat, because I know exactly what she’s talking about, and none of it is funny.
“Revenge? For what he did to you when you were eighteen? Or for your father?”
“Both.”
She says it like the answer costs her nothing. I know for a fact it costs her everything.
I sit down next to her, close, my knee against hers.
“Can I ask you something? And I need you to actually answer it.”
“Depends on the question.”
I choose the next words like they’re the last ones I get to spend.
“Your job. The logistics thing. What is that, exactly? Because I’ve asked you probably six different ways over the last couple of weeks and I get six different non-answers, and I keep telling myself that’s just you being private, but…”
“But?”
My jaw works before anything comes out of it.
“But Hobbs cornered me in the hotel lobby yesterday and told me you were casing a museum. And I told myself he was lying. I still mostly think he was lying. But I need you to just… Tell me it’s nothing. Tell me straight and I’ll drop it.”
She goes quiet in a way I’ve never seen her go quiet.
“You really want to know? Right here. Right now? Before dessert?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? There’s layered cheesecake. Strawberry, vanilla, and blueberry. Red, white, and blue!”
“Erica, tell me. I’m a big boy, I can take it.”
She looks down at her hands for a second. When she looks back up, something in her has decided.
“Okay. Here goes.” She lets out a hard sigh and says, “Queen Victoria sent Mary Todd Lincoln a mourning necklace. From one widow to another.”
I open my mouth. Close it again. Brace myself for a history lesson, and let her keep going.
She tells me the necklace is known as the Friendship Jewel. The same one sitting on display right now inside the Corcoran Ballroom.
Mary Todd Lincoln’s own son had her committed to an asylum years later, unjustly.
And after she got out she spent a long stretch traveling Europe.
She didn’t travel alone. Her companion was a woman named Eleanor Armitage, from a wealthy family in Lexington, Kentucky, the same place Mary Todd herself came from.
That woman is Erica’s five-times-great-grandmother.
“Wait,” I say, counting on my fingers. “Your great, great, great, great… great grandmother knew the actual Mary Todd Lincoln?”
“Yes, now pay attention.”
She goes on to say that to keep the necklace out of her son’s reach for good, Mary gifted it to Eleanor.
For her unwavering friendship, she wrote.
Eleanor kept that necklace for the rest of her life and wrote about it constantly in her own diary, the friendship it stood for as much as the jewel itself.
Tucked inside the pages, folded small, she kept the actual letter Mary Todd Lincoln had written her about the gift.
Proof, in Mary’s own hand, that it had been freely given.
One friend to another. Both of Kentucky lineage.
Erica is a born storyteller. I’ve never noticed it before tonight, mostly because I’ve never seen her sit still long enough to tell one all the way through.
Grandfathers do this. So do scout leaders, hunched around a campfire.
She’s got that same rhythm, like she’s memorized an Oscar-winning script.
The jewel was guarded by the Armitage family for decades, until 1951, when a predatory lending company falsified loan documents and seized every piece of property the Lexington family owned.
Everything the Armitages had was taken by the loan company, and they were left with nothing, including the necklace.
It was never found again until the early seventies, when it surfaced as an anonymous donation to the Bellenden Museum of American History.
“Where Hobbs works now,” I say.
“Yes. Hobbs was the inside man on my dad’s crew. It was during the pandemic. It should have been an easy job.”
Then she tells me what happened six years ago. How her father planned for months, bringing Hobbs onto his crew against better judgment. Back then, it was all about the necklace. He was narrow-sighted, and maybe that’s part of why he failed.
But now Erica tells me how she will right those wrongs. How claiming the Friendship Jewel for her family is all she’s thought about for six years. And how tonight, at a hockey banquet of all places, is her one chance.
When she finally stops talking, I just look at her.
“Woah!”
“Are you okay?”
“When Hobbs said you were a thief I thought he was talking about wristwatches and cell phones. I hadn’t even considered… GRAND LARCENY. I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t that.”
“Please don’t hate me.”
“I could never hate you.” I brush a stray strand of hair off her face with the back of my fingers. “Sticky fingers. You already stole every piece of me. You don’t have to steal anything else.”
Her breath catches on that like she wasn’t ready for it.
“This is bigger than you or me.”
“Nothing is bigger than what I feel for you.”
“I… you…”
“Whatever this is taking over my heart… It’s making my whole chest hurt.”
I don’t know how else to say it, so I just say it.
“Erica… I’m falling in love with you.”
Her eyes glisten with the beginning of tears, but she keeps them at bay.
“I was afraid of that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m falling in love with you, too.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”