Page 3 of Return to Whitmore
“I love you, too.”
Charlotte hung up and ran to the front window to find that Great-aunt Genevieve and Nina were gone. Her heart dropped into her stomach. Again, she went downstairs to speak to her mother, but Francesca was just as uncommunicative as before. Instead of answering Charlotte’s questions, she raised her chin and said, “We leave in an hour.”
“Leave? To go where?” Charlotte demanded. It was too early to go to Italy. It was too early to leave. They hadn’t mourned their father, brother, and uncle yet. They hadn’t performed any of the rituals they were meant to.
And Charlotte had just promised to sneak out and meet Vincent tonight!
But Francesca didn’t seem keen on telling her anything. She got up and, with her long, slender fingers, traced the railing to the top of the stairs, where she stood in Allegra and Lorelei’s doorway and told them the same thing. Charlotte bucked up the stairs after her, then paused as Francesca spoke to Allegra and Lorelei in rapid Italian. Allegra and Lorelei were on their feet, gathering their few belongings, essentials they’d purchased in the wake of the fire. Allegra, who was so often the most obstinate of the Whitmore children, looked lost and meek. It was disconcerting.
Lorelei, the oldest of all the Whitmore sisters, asked their mother the question that was on all of their minds. “What about the funerals?”
But Francesca sniffed with disdain. “We will mourn your father, brother, and uncle from Italy. There is nothing to be done here but waste time. The time we have left together is precious. I don’t want to spend another moment of it here.”
“Where is Alexander?” Charlotte asked of their oldest brother, her voice hoarse. “Is he coming with us?”
Their mother looked washed-out and exhausted. “Alexander knows where we’ll be,” Francesca said. “But you know as well as I do that he had other plans for his life.”
“Other plans?” Charlotte remembered that Alexander, like Allegra, Lorelei, and Charlotte, had lived and worked at the White Oak Lodge. It was a family joke that he wanted to run off and be a pilot, but most had assumed he’d never do it. The money at the White Oak Lodge was too great—and he was the eldest Whitmore, which meant the Lodge would be his when their father retired.
Francesca told Charlotte she wouldn’t answer anything else.
“You’re either with us or you’re not,” Francesca said before disappearing into her bedroom.
So entrenched in the horror of what had happened, Charlotte limped back to her room and packed up her deodorant, makeup, hairbrush, and few clothing items. She thought of Vincent, eager to meet her that evening, eager to hold her face with his hands and kiss her till her pain floated away. But there was no mending a pain like this. Asking Vincent to draw himself deeper into the mess of the Whitmore family was akin to asking him to bury himself with their dead.He deserved better,Charlotte thought. He deserved to move forward with his life, meet someone else, and settle in Nantucket. He deserved the life she’d assumed would be theirs.
She considered calling him, but decided it would be too painful. Plus, she didn’t really know how to explain herself. She didn’t understand her mother’s decision. She didn’t comprehend why she couldn’t stand up to her, either.
On a piece of notebook paper, Charlotte scribbled a note to Vincent, which she slipped into an envelope and addressed to him. The bed-and-breakfast front desk sold stamps, which she purchased when her mother was still upstairs, preparing for their flight.
Charlotte wrote to Vincent:
I don’t understand anything anymore, but I can’t leave my family. They’re all I have left.
Love, forever. Your Charlotte.
The woman at the front desk agreed to mail her letter first thing the following morning. By then, Charlotte knew Vincent would have waited up for a long time at their secret spot, watching for her. She wondered how long he would wait before he realized she wasn’t going to make it.
Later, fourteen years later in fact, when Charlotte was thirty-three and experimenting with going to therapy for the first time, she’d talk about this final day on Nantucket with her family and say, “I think I left a piece of my soul on the island. I think myheart broke in an irreparable way. But it all happened so fast. I couldn’t figure out what to do.”
The therapist would raise her eyebrows in alarm. “You lost your brother, father, sister, uncle, boyfriend, and home in the span of a few days? And you’ve never been to therapy before now?”
And Charlotte would realize she was a fool for talking about that time of her life, a time of her life she’d meant to bury deep in the past. And she’d say, “Everyone goes through hard times. I know that.” She’d want to change the subject.
“Not like that, Charlotte,” the therapist would say. “We have a lot to talk about.”
But on that gorgeous evening in July, Charlotte, Francesca, Allegra, and Lorelei boarded a small aircraft at the Nantucket Memorial Airport and left Nantucket Island, presumably forever. Charlotte watched as the little island tightened to a speck on the deep blue ocean, marveling that somewhere on that rock sat the charred skeleton of the White Oak Lodge.
It was impossible to comprehend what would happen next.
But Francesca took the hands of each of her daughters and whispered, “We’re together. Remember, that’s all that matters.”
Chapter Two
Summer 2025
The day that Nina and Amos knocked on the door of Charlotte’s little cottage on Madequecham Beach was also the day Charlotte learned she’d lost funding on her most recent documentary attempt. It was the third time this happened in the previous three years, the third go-around with another producer and agent. This time, she’d really thought it would work. In the wake of their apology email, their let’s give it another go email, Charlotte’s head was spinning, so much so that when she heard the knock and answered the door to find her little sister standing there, she thought maybe she was going crazy. Nina? Nina, back on Nantucket? After twenty-seven years?
Seeing Nina like that, Charlotte wrapped her in a hug that nearly suffocated them both. They were sobbing and saying a lot of things that didn’t make sense. The last time she’d seen Nina, she’d been taken away from Nantucket by their great-auntGenevieve. Charlotte had meant to reach out to her. She’d meant to call.
