Page 1 of The White Oak Lodge

Chapter One

Nina

June 2025

Twenty-seven years after that Fourth of July night, Nina could still smell the fire. What once had been the White Oak Lodge—her home, her family’s iconic luxury resort—was very suddenly nothing but charred wood, diving boards melting into bubbling pools, singed drapes fluttering out of exploding windows, and echoing screams. Her entire reality was gone in a flash. She’d been eleven years old.

Twenty-seven years after that Fourth of July night—twenty-six years and eleven months, to be precise—Nina drove onto the ferry at Hyannis Port, cut the engine, and hurried to the top deck to watch Nantucket Island draw closer. She was terrified, which meant she couldn’t look away for an instant, like a child staring at the closet door to ensure the boogeyman kept out of sight. The wind was up and edged with a chill, and she tugged a dark blue cardigan over her shoulders, hunched over the railing, and furrowed her brow at the orange-lit sunset. Here she was,supposedly going home. But what did she really think awaited her over there? Answers?As if, she thought, because she was not naive. But she made no move to leave the ferry before the ramp was churned up and the ferry disembarked.

The ocean frothed and churned beneath the ferry. Tourists shifted around her, taking photographs of the sunset and talking about how excited they were, how much they needed a vacation, and how eager they were to spend the entire summer on the island. Finally, they were out of the city! Nina reminded herself that none of them knew her, that to them, she looked like a woman traveling alone—a woman in her late thirties without a wedding ring on her finger. Suddenly, she glanced left and right, cursing herself for removing the ring. She didn’t want any guy to get the wrong idea and approach her. But when she realized that every man around her was either taking a photo of or kissing his long-term girlfriend or wife, she laughed at herself. She wasn’t a leggy twentysomething any longer. Her life had never been easy, but what had happened to her over the past year or so had drawn fine wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, ones she hadn’t yet fixed with Botox or creams because, frankly, she’d been too exhausted to care. Love felt like something that had given up on her, and she had no plans to fight to get it back.A losing game, she thought.

When Nantucket Island appeared on the horizon, Nina felt a punch in her gut that soon dissipated, leaving her bereft. But what had she expected to feel? Nostalgia? Love? It was just an island—a beautiful island with golden dunes, bright green lawns, and cedar-shingled buildings, an island lost to another time. It was an island that brought in thousands of tourists per year, which played host to so many other memories and lives that didn’t belong to her.

It was also where her father and brother had died.

When the ferry approached the harbor, Nina hurried to her car, sidestepping an older married couple dressed in white. For a split second, Nina thought with horror that the man had been a friend of her father’s, a man who’d drank whiskey cocktails with her father and mother and all the other wealthy White Oak Lodge regulars on the glorious veranda that stretched across the sands, but she didn’t dally long enough to give the man’s face a second look. It was impossible that he’d recognize her. So maybe she was mistaken about him, too? It was too long ago to say for sure.

Nina drove off the ferry with a dangerously high heart rate. She drove extra carefully because being this frantic made her more susceptible to accidents. At the stoplight out of the harbor, she paused for a long time, letting traffic go back and forth until the SUV behind her smashed his horn. Tears filled Nina’s eyes. She took the next opportunity to rip her car out of there.

First stop: what was left of the lodge.

The drive from Nantucket Harbor to Siasconset took anywhere between twelve and seventeen minutes, depending on traffic. But because Nina had left Nantucket at the age of eleven, she’d never driven the route herself before. It was bizarre to snake along Polpis Road, to feel the wind sweeping in through her cracked windows to ruffle her black hair, and even more bizarre to do it as a woman—a middle-aged woman, no less, who wasn’t much younger than her mother had been last time she’d seen her. Nina’s mind filled with an image of her mother: the most beautiful creature she’d ever known, with eyes like an especially intelligent cat, black hair cascading down her shoulders, and bright red lips that made her Italian-olive skin glow. Francesca Whitmore. Nina’s heartbeat quickened even more.

Why did a part of her still believe that when she turned into the White Oak Lodge, her entire family would be on the veranda, waiting for her, like ghosts who’d never let the party die out?

It wasn’t rational.

But when Nina found the ornate iron gates that once sealed the “normal” world from the luxurious and elegant one awaiting them at the White Oak Lodge, she found that they were open, as though someone was expecting her. When she drove past the Condemned sign and down the cracked pavement lined with trees that stretched their overgrown boughs lined with bright green leaves, she came upon a White Oak Lodge that wasn’t as dilapidated as she’d always remembered. In fact, when she got out and gazed up at it from the angle of the left-hand side of the driveway, she could half believe that the White Oak Lodge was still operational or maybe just preparing for the summer season, its lawn needing an update and porch needing a good paint job. It was only when she cut across the parking lot that she saw the skeletal nature of some parts of it, the blackened wood and bricks, the busted windows, the tarps someone had hung and secured, presumably to protect as much of the structure from the wicked northeastern weather. Her palms were sweaty. Sitting there, half grand and half dead, the White Oak Lodge looked like something from a nightmare or a dream. Had this really been her home for the first eleven years of her life? Was this really the place that haunted her every day?

Nina walked around to the beach side of the property. The sun had dropped lower in the sky, and the sand had an indigo tint. Her stomach churned with hunger. When was the last time she’d eaten anything? Maybe that morning, with the kids, when they’d stopped at a fast food place for something greasy, something that made them smile and say,Mom, this is so weird. You never let us have this stuff. It was true. Nina was a “good mom,” or so she’d always thought. She forced them to eatvegetables, fruits, and whole grains. She cooked at home most nights. She made healthy snacks when they watched television, and she’d helped them understand the value—and the fun—of playing outdoors, getting exercise, and appreciating their bodies for the gifts they were. But that morning, there she’d sat at the fast food place, her lips just as greasy as her children’s, her heart breaking as the cheese melted on her tongue. Never had she imagined she’d take them to a summer camp like this, dropping them off for weeks at a time. Never had she imagined her family would break up.

Had her mother ever thought the Whitmores would break up? Had her father?Surely not, Nina thought, not with everything the White Oak Lodge stood for: family values and glorious days of pleasure, of laughing and playing games, of introducing their children to cuisines of all nations. There had been six Whitmore children. Francesca Whitmore hadn’t given birth six times just to throw it all away.

The fire had been the beginning of the end. But it was not lost on Nina just how strange that really was. For years, she’d turned it over in her mind, adding up the sequence of events like a mathematical problem in her textbook, gauging the how and the why. Even when she’d entered college, she’d kept herself up at night, adding theories to a notebook, trying and failing to make sense of the Whitmore family and all they’d given up on.

Buildings burned all the time. But when the White Oak Lodge went up in flames, that was it for her life.

Why?

There wasn’t a lot Nina could answer just then. She could pace around the old structure, kick at charred brick walls, and peel back tarps. But it was highly unlikely that her family’s secrets were still buried under the ashes. It was improbable that she’d discover her long-lost Whitmore identity, especially now as the inky-black night crawled over her. The wind picked up,throwing her black hair over her face, and when she raised her chin, she saw that the sky was spackled with bright and glinting stars. When she looked at her phone, she realized she’d let over an hour pass out here at the White Oak Lodge. There were things to be done, things to take care of if she was really going to hole up on the island for a few weeks and figure “everything” out.

If she couldn’t figure everything out, she thought she might go crazy with loss and sorrow.

Nina hurried back to her car and sped to the grocery store, where she purchased everything necessary for the first evening at the cabin she’d rented about a half mile down the beach from the White Oak Lodge: coffee, eggs, bread for toast, and a bottle of wine. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d shopped for herself and only herself. She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t thought of Fiona’s fruit snacks or Will’s chicken nuggets, and she laughed at herself, realizing, not for the first time, that Fiona and Will were changing all the time. Someday sooner than she knew, they wouldn’t even want to come home for dinner.I’m wasting the summer without them, she thought, cursing herself. When she got to the checkout counter, where she’d hoped to scan her own items and slip out unnoticed, she realized that the Nantucket grocery store still had an at-the-counter clerk, a smiley woman in her mid-fifties who wanted to chat.

“Are you here on vacation?” the woman asked. “It’s still a little early in the season, you know. Most people don’t make it out till late June or so. You should prepare yourself for a few days of rain and clouds, but I find this to be the very best time of the year.” She filled the paper bags deftly and noticeably checked Nina’s finger for a ring. When she didn’t find it, she perked up and said, “Are you here with a special someone?”

She thinks I’m here with a boyfriend, Nina guessed.

“I’m alone,” Nina said.

The woman raised both eyebrows. “Are you a writer?”

Nina blanched. “No.”

“Oh.” The woman shoved the paper bags over the counter and said, “Usually, women come out here alone to write their novels. I’m a huge reader. Crime thrillers, mostly. Do you read those?”

What with her responsibilities at the university, Nina couldn’t remember the last time she’d had time to read. She didn’t want to go into it with the cashier, but with a jolt, she remembered that she’d be here for weeks, which meant this wasn’t the last time she’d encounter the woman. It was better to be kind and open.

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