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By Root 153 0

himself up from his spot on the couch and walked down the hall to peek in on her. As he stared, he thought about lying beside her, if only to have an excuse to shut his eyes. He could use the rest, but he didn’t want to risk falling asleep just yet. Instead he watched as she shifted slightly, his mind drifting to the past. He thought again about the path that had brought them together. Who was he then? And who was he now? On the surface, those questions seemed easy. His name was Jeremy; he was forty-two years old, the son of an Irish father and Italian mother; and he wrote magazine articles for a living. Those were answers he would offer when asked. Though they were true, he sometimes wondered whether he should add something more. Should he mention, for instance, that he’d traveled to North Carolina five years ago to investigate a mystery? That he fell in love there, not once but twice that year? Or that the beauty of those memories was intertwined with sadness and that even now he questioned which memories would endure?

He turned away from the bedroom doorway and returned to the living room. Though he didn’t dwell on those events from long ago, he didn’t avoid thinking about them, either. He could no more erase that chapter of his life than he could change his birthday. While there were times when he wished he could roll back the clock and erase all the sadness, he had a hunch that if he did so, the joy would be diminished as well. And that was something he couldn’t contemplate.

It was in the darkest hours of the night that he most often found himself remembering his night with Lexie in the cemetery, the night he’d seen the ghostly lights that he’d come down from New York to investigate. It was then, however, that he’d realized for the first time how much Lexie meant to him. As they had waited in the blackness of the cemetery, Lexie had told him a story about herself. She’d been orphaned as a young child, she explained. Jeremy had already known that, but what he didn’t know was that she’d begun having nightmares a few years after the deaths of her parents. Terrible, recurring nightmares in which she witnessed the death of her parents. Her grandmother Doris, not knowing what else to do, finally brought her to the cemetery to see the mysterious lights. To a young child, the lights were miraculous, heavenly, and Lexie instantly recognized them as the ghosts of her parents. It was, somehow, what she’d needed to believe, and those nightmares never plagued her again.

Jeremy had been touched by her story, moved by her loss and the power of innocent beliefs. But later that night, after he too had seen the lights, he’d asked Lexie what she thought they really were. She’d leaned forward then and whispered, “It was my parents. They probably wanted to meet you.”

It was then that he knew he wanted to take her in his arms. He’d long since pinpointed that as the moment he first fell in love with her, and he’d never stopped loving her.

Outside, the February wind picked up again. Beyond the murky darkness, he could see nothing, and he lay down on the couch with a weary sigh, feeling the pull of that year draw him backward in time. He could have forced the images away, but as he stared at the ceiling, he let them come. He always let them come.

This, he remembered, is what happened next.

One

Five Years Earlier

New York City, 2000

See, it’s simple,” Alvin said. “First, you meet a nice girl, and then you date for a while to make sure you share the same values. See if you two are compatible in the big, ‘this is our life and we’re in it together’ decisions. You know, talk about which family you’re going to visit on the holidays, whether you want to live in a house or an apartment, whether to get a dog or a cat, who gets to use the shower first in the morning, while there’s still plenty of hot water. If you two are still pretty much in agreement, then you get married. Are you following me here?”

“I’m following you,” Jeremy said.

Jeremy Marsh and Alvin Bernstein were standing in Jeremy’s Upper West Side apartment on a cool Saturday