Page 6 of The White Oak Lodge

Daniel opened his arms and wrapped them around her, tugging her back to bed. “You’re going to love it,” he said, nuzzling her neck. “Don’t I know you better than anyone? Don’t I know what you’d like?”

What could Nina do but agree?

True to his word, Daniel didn’t tell her anything about their “mini-honeymoon,” save for which dates she needed to set aside. He opted for the final weekend in July, days of ravenous heat that had Nina running from her car to the air-conditionedlibrary and back again. “I hope we’re going to Antarctica,” she said, throwing sundresses and shorts and tanks into a suitcase.

To this, Daniel winked and said, “Don’t forget your swimsuit.”

Nina and Daniel packed up Daniel’s Porsche—a gift from his mother and father—and drove north. Daniel had a brilliant memory and required no navigation, and Nina did her best to avoid reading signs or paying attention to what highway they were taking and how far out they were going. They’d left Princeton at nine in the morning and stopped for gas and lunch three hours later, eating tuna salad sandwiches at a diner that played Elvis exclusively and had what looked to be no fewer than fifteen signed photographs of him. Daniel said, “I bet they’re fakes,” just as the server came up and informed them that, no, the king himself had signed each and every one of them. When she walked away, Daniel and Nina chuckled, and Daniel said, “I bet she doesn’t know she’s talking to a couple of anthropologists. We could get to the bottom of that claim if we wanted to.”

“I don’t know that I want to,” Nina joked. “Sometimes it’s fun to believe in a fake version of the truth.”

“Most people call that lying,” Daniel said.

Nina raised her shoulders and ate a potato chip. “I think for most people, lying and living are closely related.”

“What about for us?”

Nina smiled. “I think we’re all about the truth. For better or for worse.”

Daniel said, “That’s my wife.”

Such was her joy, and Nina thought she might float out of the diner.

Daniel paid the server in cash and tipped 30 percent.

But it was less than an hour later on the road when Nina saw the sign for Nantucket Island. It felt like a cold stone in her stomach. She jerked around to look at Daniel, who’d seenthe sign as well and wore a funny and handsome smile, one that told her that the assumption she had was right. They were going to Nantucket Island. Nina’s heart raced, and her palms were sweaty. The least he could have done was tell her—tell her they were going to the island where she’d been born, the island where she’d been raised with her five Whitmore siblings at the immaculate White Oak Lodge, the island where, after a mysterious fire on the Fourth of July, she’d been ripped from the foundation of her childhood and taken to live with her Great-Aunt Genevieve in Michigan. It was an origin story like something from an old Charles Dickens novel, she knew, but it was also her truth. She swallowed. Had Daniel’s mother put him up to this? Had she said,you need to dig around and see what’s really going on back on the island?

When Nina didn’t say anything for another five minutes, sitting in the passenger seat throbbing with fear, Daniel raised his chin and said, “We’re just going to go see what it’s like. We’re anthropologists. We don’t let anything remain uncovered. We stare the truth in the face.” He flicked his eyes toward hers and tilted his head. “Right?”

Nina closed her eyes and remembered the smell of the fire. She remembered the glass exploding in the window frames and someone screaming. Nina herself had already been outside; it was the Fourth of July, and she’d been watching the fireworks with the other kids staying at the White Oak Lodge, children her own age and children so much younger than the rest of her siblings. Nina’s oldest sibling, Alexander, was born in 1974—a full thirteen years before Nina and the others had followed dutifully after him. It meant that Nina had very little in common with her brothers and sisters. It meant that from a young age, she understood what it meant to be lonely.

Nina didn’t say anything else until Daniel drove the Porsche onto the ferry, cut the engine, and hauled around the car to openher passenger-side door. He leaned down and took both of her hands in his. “I’m right here,” he reminded her gently, his thumb tracing a line over her knuckles. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

Nina raised her eyes to his and reminded herself that showing fear was something she’d told herself from a young age never to do. She couldn’t let her older brothers or sisters know she was frightened because they would use it to their advantage. And when she’d moved to Michigan, she couldn’t let her new classmates recognize the bizarre nature of her previous circumstances, or else they would slap a “weird” label on her and give her a wide berth. Even still, she’d struggled to make friends and had decided, basically, who needs them? Studying people from a distance was always more interesting. It meant taking yourself out of the equation.

Upstairs, Daniel and Nina hovered at the railing and watched the island draw closer. There was a knot in Nina’s throat that she struggled to loosen. When Daniel made a joke, she remembered a split second too late to laugh, and it sounded false in her ears. Did Daniel notice?

They reached the island and drove to a quaint B&B not far from the Historic District and three blocks from the Sutton Book Club, where Nina’s mother, Francesca, had often dropped Nina off to read and talk about books with other children. Francesca had known Nina was bookish, but by then, Francesca had raised five other children and was exhausted and ill-equipped to nurture Nina’s intellect. At least, that was how Nina remembered it.

The B&B had a beautiful upstairs bedroom with European-style shutters and glowing white drapes and a king-sized bed with the fluffiest pillows Nina had ever felt. Daniel urged her to change into her swimsuit, and they hurried back to the car to drive to a beach she half remembered from her childhood—Sconset Beach, with long, sweeping sand dunes and gorgeousbeach dwellers. The Nantucket Sound was even more turquoise and grand than she remembered, and when she and Daniel held hands and ran into the waves, she felt a sense of euphoria she hadn’t since she was eleven years old.

For dinner, they had a four-course fish dinner with plenty of white wine. They talked about the children they were sure to have after they’d secured their positions as professors of anthropology. “Isn’t it wild,” Daniel said, cracking open a crab leg, “that we’re still at the beginning of our lives? It feels like so much has already happened. How do we quantify all of it?”

Nina smiled and agreed.

“It’s like, sometimes I just want to study myself or spend a good few years studying you,” Daniel said. “It’s like each human has within them a universe of decisions and memories and complications. Every human might require twenty-five research papers written just about them.”

Nina set down her fork and picked up her wine. Her heartbeat slowed. Above them was a densely black sky filled with what seemed to be hundreds of stars. Nina felt very small.

“I just think it’s a shame, you know,” Daniel said. “That you don’t know more about your past. You spend so much time studying everything else in the world, but in Nantucket, there is this great black hole.”

Nina’s thoughts swirled.Just let him talk, she told herself.He’ll tire himself out. He always does.

And then Daniel said, “I mean, you don’t even know why the White Oak Lodge caught on fire.”

Nina snapped the glass of wine back on the table and blinked at him. “I told you. It was a fire on the Fourth of July. It’s pretty clear to me that it was a fireworks accident.”

Daniel rubbed his palms together and leaned over the table. “But how do you know that for sure? Look at the facts, Nina.Your entire family scattered after that. Your father and brother died, but you didn’t go to their funerals.”

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