Page 22 of Return to Whitmore
“Just like we did!” Nina cried.
“Is that right?” Addison’s eyes stirred with questions. She knew nothing about the White Oak Lodge. “Wow. Well, yeah. Then you get it. If you live with the guests, you’re never really free of them. It was a nightmare, sometimes, but it was also a wonderful distraction from my broken heart. At twenty-eight, I was pretty sure I would never get married or have children or any of it. My parents thought they’d failed me.”
“Twenty-eight is so young!” Charlotte said.
Addison shrugged. “Not when you are twenty-eight. You feel a million years old.”
Nina nodded sagely.
“Anyway, Seth checked in as a guest around that time,” Addison said.
“What was your first impression of him?” Charlotte asked, her mind’s eye filling with Jack’s gorgeous face, her ears filling with his laughter. What wouldn’t she do to hear that sound again?
“He was so funny,” Addison said, dropping her chin forward, as though the memory of it pained her. “He walked in with just a backpack on his shoulders and this swagger to him. It felt like he knew a secret about the world that I’d never been let in on. He bent over the front desk and whispered,Is this paradise? I think he meant Hawaii. I told him some people think so, but they’re wrong. Like I said, I was in a dark place. He laughed so long and hard after that. He asked me for a drink that night.”
“And you went out with him?” Nina breathed.
“Of course,” Addison said. “I couldn’t resist him.”
“What did he tell you about himself?” Charlotte asked, wondering how Jack had sculpted his lie.
“He told me he was a repairman, that he could fix just about everything, which was perfect because the hotel needed a variety of repairs,” Addison said. “He said he would do them for cheap, and we offered him a room and whatever food he wanted. I gave him a tiny room on the top floor with a view of the ocean. I happened to be standing in the doorway when he unpacked, and he had very little. A few clothes and several books. Jack Kerouac was a favorite, I remember. It still is.”
Addison’s face was suddenly pale, as though, in the midst of telling her story, she’d remembered that “Seth” was missing.
How would Charlotte and Nina tell her that Seth’s name wasn’t Seth at all—that the man she’d fallen in love with andbuilt a family with wasn’t who he said he was? Charlotte’s stomach sloshed. The fact that he’d carried Jack Kerouac with him felt like an indication that he’d wanted to hold on to the past, onto his old name, even as he entered a world where nobody knew it.
Addison continued, talking about how Seth’s work as a repairman on the island had deepened, how her parents had fallen in love with him, how he’d rented a little house on the beach and she’d gone to live with him there. “Those early years were the best of my life,” she said. “We did everything together. We sailed and fished and even went scuba diving together. We cooked and kissed and promised each other everything.”
“Did he ever leave Hawaii? Go anywhere else?” Charlotte interrupted, breaking Addison’s reverie.
“Sometimes he left to visit people on the mainland,” Addison remembered.
“Did he tell you who? Or where he was going?”
“His family.” Addison shrugged. “You, I guess? But when I pried for details, he always gave me vague answers. Sometimes I wondered if he had another family, a wife or something. But when I got pregnant, he was there all the time. I guess I was wrong.”
Charlotte’s cheeks twitched. It was hard for her to get the timeline straight in her mind. She’d first met back up with Jack in the autumn of 2001, when Jack was nineteen or twenty years old. By then, Jack was already calling himself Seth Green, a generic name that had allowed him to float through the United States undetected. He hadn’t met Addison till they were twenty-eight years old, long after he’d left Manhattan, and they hadn’t had any of their children till a few years after that.
Now, he was missing. He was forty-three years old.
Addison continued talking about their wedding, the births of their three children, and the fights they’d had. “We never haveenough money,” Addison said. “Hawaii’s getting more and more expensive, and my parents’ hotel has been struggling to keep up with the other luxury ones in the area. Seth hikes his prices, but he sometimes struggles to finish his projects on time, and he’s so easily distracted. When he left, he still had several projects lined up, and all of those clients are so angry with him, besmirching his good name.” Addison had finished her glass of wine and was staring at it.
Charlotte raised the bottle and refilled Addison’s glass, urging her to go on.
“You mentioned to me that there was an older man who came to visit him,” Nina said. “Was this man Italian, by chance?”
Charlotte turned her head to look at Nina, surprised. It was clear that Nina really did think that Tio Angelo and their father had survived the fire alongside Jack. It was something Jack had suggested, too—but she’d never really known whether to believe him or not. During all their time together, Charlotte had only pestered Jack about the fire, about what had happened and why he was still alive, a handful of times. Jack had told her that there were certain things he couldn’t tell her, for her own safety, but he’d told her enough to let her know how deep this went. Charlotte had said, stop acting like an idiot, and Jack, master of manipulation, had switched topics immediately and made her laugh about something else. Now, Charlotte cursed herself for not trying hard enough. She’d just been so happy to have her brother back.
“The man wasn’t Italian, no.” Addison furrowed her brow. And then, directly to Nina, she said, “I just learned that you’re all Italian. That a man called Seth Green is Italian. It’s the least Italian-sounding thing I’ve ever heard.”
There was a brief yet vacuous silence. Charlotte’s tongue felt dry. Suddenly, Nina twisted in her chair to look Charlotte directly in the eye. “Charlotte,” she said, her voice spikier thanCharlotte had heard it since their reunion, “you need to tell us more.”
Charlotte’s head pounded. This was what she’d been expecting, what she’d been dreading. She took a long sip of wine.
“Why are you living in Seth Green’s house?” Nina demanded. “What do you know about him? Come on. We need to find him. For the sake of his children. For the sake of Addison.”
Charlotte pressed her index fingers against her temples and closed her eyes.
