Over and over again, it echoed in her mind:I am not Francesca’s daughter.
It felt like a puzzle piece clicking into place. It felt like a resounding answer to the forever question of why her mother seemed not to like her. When she combed through her memories, she saw hundreds of eye rolls from Francesca, annoyed asides, and questions about why Nina was getting underfoot, why she was there at all. Nina had always thought Francesca was just tired of mothering. But the truth was far more sinister.
Whoever Nina’s birth mother was, she apparently wanted nothing to do with her.
Nina felt her heart breaking over and over again.
It was why it had been so easy for Francesca to let Nina go after the fire. It was why Nina had been raised in Michigan by her great-aunt Genevieve. It was why she’d been ostracized.
But I’m a real Whitmore! I’m my father’s daughter!
It left her reeling.
But the worst of it was that her husband, Daniel, had had this letter since they’d begun dating at Princeton. He’d carried knowledge about Francesca and Nina’s real relationship, and he’d kept it close to his heart until he could use it to manipulate her. It was the cruelest thing anyone had ever done to her. On the verge of a panic attack, she tried to steady her breathing and removed her shoes and socks to put her feet in the sea. The chilly water slowed her mind and forced her to think.
Daniel was sure there was something—riches or treasure—under the White Oak Lodge, or that there had been something there at the time the letter was written. It was why he’d come back and let her read the letter in the first place. He wanted her to help him get to the bottom of it. Why hadn’t he shown her the letter back in 2012? The only answer Nina could come up with was that he was afraid I’d leave him. Now, he thinks I’m too broken down to leave. He thinks I want him back so desperately, now that he “left” me for a younger woman.
Daniel was wrong. It wasn’t the first time.
Nina got up and walked barefoot through the sand. In the distance was a beautiful woman of about forty who walked hand in hand with a little girl with black hair, a little girl who looked so much like Nina that it yanked Nina back through time. She’d always thought she’d inherited her black hair from her mother. But now she knew she’d inherited nothing from her. Someoneelse had carried Nina in her womb. Someone else had delivered her into this life.
Who could it have been? A guest at the White Oak Lodge? A member of staff?
Did all of her siblings know? Had Jack known before the fire?
With a jolt, Nina remembered her initial plans. She’d wanted to drive out to Madequecham Beach and knock on the door of so-called Seth Green’s little house. She’d dreamed of staring her brother in the face and saying,Why are you on the run?Had she been delusional?
Suddenly, Nina was standing by the road. She barely remembered the entire walk. Abstractly, she thought of her children, watching television in her cabin bed. She remembered her horrible husband, who’d told her to come back soon. She remembered the kindness and warmth in Amos’s eyes. Cars whizzed past, and their drivers flinched when looking at her.
She knew she didn’t look normal. She wondered if she ever had.
“Nina?”
A voice made her whirl around. Amos stood behind her with a big black dog on a leash. The dog panted with a pink tongue lolling out of his mouth. Nina fought to keep from falling to her knees.
“Amos,” she whispered, then hurried over to throw her arms around him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know.”
Amos’s hug was firm and powerful and sure. Nina felt protected. The horrible voice in the back of her mind quieted down. When she finally pulled back, she raised her chin to look at him and said, “There was so much I didn’t know. How could I go around believing so many lies? How could I live like that?”
What Amos said would stick with her forever. “People tell themselves all kinds of lies. It’s living in the truth that’s harder.”
Nina steeled herself. “I want to live in the truth. Even if it hurts.”
Chapter Sixteen
Nina
July 4, 1998
Nina’s great-great-great-grandfather built the White Oak Lodge in 1862. It was another time of American Civil War unrest, when even Nantucket boys were being sent off to fight for the Union. It was also a different time in terms of home technology. Indoor plumbing had only recently been invented, but because the White Oak Lodge was in no way luxurious by that time, it wasn’t featured in the lodge itself. More than that, things like smoke detectors weren’t exactly common. Nina’s grandfather eventually added it, but in the years after that, it was rarely updated, and rarely checked on, which meant that when the lodge caught on fire that hot and humid Fourth of July night so many years later, there were no smoke detectors to alert the guests nor the family members asleep within it. Some might say it was a tragedy waiting to happen. Others might say it was the perfect crime.
Nina was eleven years old and had been sent to bed at ten, where, after hours of eating s’mores and barbecue and drinking sickly sweet lemonade, she crashed hard and sweated through her sheets. She woke up to the smell of fire and the suffocating density of black smoke. She heard screams and fireworks exploding in the distance. It felt like a part of a nightmare. She bolted to the window, thinking that maybe the stables were on fire or something had gone wrong with the fireworks. But instead, she saw that the other side of the White Oak Lodge had erupted with orange flames.
Nina didn’t know what to do nor what to save. In school, they’d been taught never to think twice about belongings during an emergency, but what about the teddy bear she’d loved as a little girl? What about her journal, her notebooks into which she’d written her biggest fantasies and deepest thoughts? What about the photographs she’d taken of her family members, the one of her mother with a long cigarette between her bright red lips and the one of her father on his birthday? Nina tore through her belongings as her anxiety spiked. Finally, she threw a few journals and her teddy into a backpack and ran to the hallway. Smoke slunk around her ankles, and she pulled her T-shirt over her mouth. She screamed her siblings’ names, “Jack? Charlotte? Allegra?” but nobody answered. They probably hadn’t come in from their Fourth of July parties yet. Maybe Nina was the only one in the house.
Nina reached the kitchen and whipped out the door to find a large crowd had formed along the beach to watch the lodge burn. Nina staggered to a halt next to the kitchen staff, who had their hands over their mouths. She wondered if it had been an accidental kitchen fire. She pondered if something had gone wrong with one of the fireplaces on the hotel side of the lodge. But why would anyone build a fire on such a hot night? She searched the crowd for her father, her mother, or her siblingsand finally discovered Charlotte at the far edge, weeping. Nina ran over to her and tugged her sleeve. “Charlotte?”
Charlotte bent down to hug Nina close.