Page 19 of The White Oak Lodge

“You could have asked my mother to watch them.” Daniel was back on the phone and angrier than ever. “She wants to be with them, Nina. Unlike you, apparently.”

“I have research to do, too,” Nina said.

Daniel balked at this and said, “That was never a part of the plan.”

“My plans have changed,” Nina said. “You should know what that’s like.”

For a second, Daniel was quiet, and then he said, “Listen, it wasn’t my idea not to give you tenure. Like you, I thought we’d both get it.”

Nina felt it like a sharp sword through her stomach. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.

She said, “I don’t care about that.”

But of course that wasn’t true. For years, she’d fought for tenure. For years, she’d felt she was headed straight for it.Now, Daniel sat on the throne of tenure, lording over her. Even if Nina got tenure sometime down the line, Daniel’s original tenure would serve as a forever reminder of his greatness and her second place. She hadn’t realized until recently that she’d sort of enjoyed the competition between them—until she’d lost it altogether. Did that make her a bad person? Probably.

“The kids are great,” Nina said. “They emailed me today, and they’re thrilled to be there. Will caught a fish.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling you,” Daniel shot back. “Will emailed me to tell me about the fish.”

Nina slapped her thigh and brought Will’s adorable face to mind. Her plan had been undone by Will’s love for his father, which, ironically, made her love Will even more. He had a good heart. Maybe he wouldn’t turn out like Daniel.

“He asked me if we’re getting divorced,” Daniel said.

“Well, aren’t we?” Nina asked.

“I don’t think this is something you should bring up with the kids until we discuss it more ourselves,” Daniel said.

Nina rolled her eyes. “I didn’t bring it up with them. People are gossiping around them. Their friends have questions. They’re people, Daniel. It’s only natural for them to be curious.”

“Are you suggesting that I don’t understand how people operate?” Daniel’s voice was guttural. “I’m an anthropologist, Nina.”

“You’re also a terrible person who lacks empathy,” Nina said.

There was the sound of static, a violent rattling, and then Daniel’s voice asking her to repeat herself. “It’s a bad line,” he explained. “I’m in the jungle.”

“I have to go,” Nina said. She hung up.

That night, Nina couldn’t sleep. She rolled around her cabin bed, listened to the rush of the water and the angry wind, and hoped and prayed that her children were snug as bugs in rugs at summer camp. By contrast, she hoped Daniel had bed bugs or was bitten by a jungle animal—not one that would kill him, necessarily, but one that would put him in the hospital for a day or two. Ugh, but that brought to mindherby his bedside, nursing him back to health, telling him he was so brave and strong and blah, blah, blah. Nina’s stomach clenched.

She got up and went back to the sofa to open her laptop and tap Ralph’s name into the search bar. But there wasn’t a whole lot to learn about him. He’d either worked at or owned restaurants all his life—from the french fry stand of his youth to the high-end glass-walled restaurant of adulthood. According to a lifestyle magazine, he was something of a recluse and often spoke of moving to Maine to “get away from it all.” But Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard were in his blood. “I can’t get away,” he said.

In the online photographs, he was a man in his forties with streaks of gray in his dark blond hair. He was handsome and tan in a way that suggested he spent his winters elsewhere. In the photo Nina had stolen from his restaurant in 2012, he was seated two people away from maybe-Jack, his smile crooked, his head tilted as though he were listening to what someone said.

Nina buzzed with an excitement she hadn’t had since the last time she’d been out on the field doing anthropological research.

I’m going to get to the bottom of this, she told herself, her heart pounding. It was time to reckon with the past.

Suddenly, for the first time since the late 2000s, Nina found herself with the urge and the courage to use the internet to look up one of her siblings. To her, they were like fictional characters in a book she’d read twenty years ago. Why didn’t they reach out? Why did they let me rot away in Michigan? But her anger had dissipated and paved the way for curiosity. Curiosity and pain, of course. But there was always pain, no matter what she did, no matter how fast and how far she tried to run away from the truth.

She decided to google Charlotte first. Charlotte was the sister closest to her in age—just eight years older, born in September 1979, and therefore now forty-five years old. Nina braced herself to see an aged-up version of her beautiful sister’s face and clutched her knees as the Google images rushed over the screen. But not a single Charlotte Whitmore who appeared looked anything like her sister. Her head throbbed with the realization that Charlotte had probably gotten married and dropped her maiden name. Nina remembered, now, how rigid she’d been about keeping her maiden name alongside her married one, telling her anthropology colleagues that she needed to be written up as “Nina Whitmore Plymouth” in every scientific paper and every newspaper article. She wondered now if that was because she’d wanted to make it easier for her family to find her.Maybe they never look me up, Nina thought darkly, flicking from Google page to Google page, still unable to find Charlotte. Charlotte had been nineteen at the time of the fire, helping their parents with the logistics of handling one of the most sought-after hotels on the East Coast. Where had she ended up?

Nina began to type a name into the search bar: Francesca Whit… But she quickly deleted it, her hands clammy. It frightened her the most to find her mother. She wasn’t sure why.

She decided on a safer bet: her eldest brother, Alexander.

Of all the Alexander Whitmores in the world, Nina’s brother was the first to pop up. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the fire, he’d become incredibly successful, going first to undergraduate school at the University of Massachusetts and then to flight school at Purdue University, one of the best in the country. By the age of thirty-one, he’d been named a pilot for United Airlines and, according to LinkedIn, had since worked for everyone from Lufthansa to Turkish Airlines to British Airways. In the first photograph, he wore a pilot’s uniform and looked in his mid-forties with penetrating dark eyes and a firm jaw. He was the sort of man you wanted to see enter the cockpit, the sort you were sure would get you home safe. Nina’s heart felt squeezed, and she closed her computer and forced herself to take deep breaths.

But her brother looked like their father, Benjamin, so much so that Nina found it difficult to shake off the idea that she’d just seen her father’s ghost.

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