Page 13 of Return to Whitmore (The Whitmore #2)

Chapter Ten

I t was the afternoon after Addison’s arrival to Nantucket Island, nearly five p.m., and Charlotte, Nina, and Addison were sitting quietly at the edge of a long and beautiful veranda connected to a seaside Nantucket restaurant, sharing a bottle of rosé.

They’d all confessed to not being able to sleep last night, their thoughts too twisted up in questions.

All morning, Addison had kept to herself in the guest bedroom, presumably resting.

The jetlag between Hawaii and the East Coast was a killer, Charlotte guessed.

There were so many things left unsaid between them. The air was thick as smoke.

Addison shifted nervously in her chair, eyeing Nina and Charlotte, her sisters-in-law, neither of whom had given her what she’d come here for: answers about Seth Green.

It was Nina who found the strength to speak first. “Addison,” she began, clearing her throat, “will you tell us the story of how you met Seth?”

Addison’s eyes brightened the slightest bit. Charlotte knew that everyone, regardless of their gender or where they came from, adored talking about the story of how they’d met the one they loved. Charlotte herself had never heard the story and perked up.

“Please, tell us,” Charlotte urged.

“Did you meet in Hawaii?” Nina asked.

“We did,” Addison said. “My family has been there for a few generations. My great-grandparents moved out there and worked in a hotel before opening their own. They were originally from California, with ties to the gold rush. Obviously, most everyone who moved to California for the gold rush didn’t get any gold out of it. ”

“You’re tied up in tremendous American history,” Nina said with a soft and coaxing smile.

Charlotte wished she had the softness of her little sister. She filled her mouth with wine and tried to match Nina’s smile, but it felt all wrong.

“I met Seth when I was twenty-eight years old,” Addison said. “It’s embarrassing to admit, but I was married before that and coming off a rocky and awful divorce, one that had broken me in half.”

“What was your ex like?” Nina asked.

“He was a scuba diving instructor,” Addison said. “In Hawaii people who work in the tourism industry are a dime a dozen.”

“Similar to here,” Charlotte said.

“Is it?” Addison’s smile dimmed. “I wish Seth would have told me that. Anyway, my ex, Chris, taught scuba and took me on some incredible adventures. He also took several other women on adventures, tourists who didn’t know anything about me.

Horribly, it was my father who told me that Chris was cheating on me.

He found out through the tourism-network-grapevine, or whatever you want to call it, because Chris always took his wedding ring off before he took women scuba diving. ”

“Fishy,” Nina said, shaking her head.

Suddenly, Addison burst into nervous giggles. “Was that a joke?”

Nina looked initially stricken, then realized what she’d said. “Oh! A scuba diving joke. No, that wasn’t my intention.”

But Addison was still laughing. Her cheeks turned bright red. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long time since Chris and I divorced. It feels like it happened to someone else.”

“I’m going through a divorce right now,” Nina said. “My ex was cheating, too. I hope I can laugh about it someday!”

Addison looked stricken and took Nina’s hand. “What a monster. They all are. I’m so sorry.”

Nina raised her shoulders. They glanced at Charlotte, as though hoping she would insert her own cheating story into the mix, but Charlotte had never been cheated on, that she knew of. She’d also hardly gotten close enough to anyone to let them hurt her. Maybe that wasn’t something to brag about.

Addison waved her hand and returned to her story. “So, anyway, I’d just moved back in with my parents at the hotel. We had an apartment attached to the side so we could be available for guests at all times.”

“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 and built 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 have enough 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 than Charlotte 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.

“I mean, when did he buy that house?” Addison demanded, gaining traction based on Nina’s anger. “Why didn’t he tell me about it?”

“He’s had it since his early twenties,” Charlotte said softly. “But he never told me exactly why he bought it.” There was a slight hint of sarcasm to her voice that she regretted.

“Was he living there?” Addison demanded.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “On and off. But it sounds like he met you and decided to build a new life.”

“He built a new life but maintained his old one,” Addison corrected. “He didn’t bring me into any of this.”

“It’s a dark and twisted backstory,” Charlotte breathed.

Addison smashed her fist on the table and glared at both of them. “I need to know, okay?”

Charlotte took a staggered breath.

She didn’t feel brave enough to say his real name—Jack Whitmore. But Nina’s anger conjoined with Addison’s and formed a powerful storm, one that demanded something from Charlotte.

“I haven’t seen him in years,” Charlotte admitted. “But things in my life were getting out of hand. The past few years have been a sort of blur of disappointments and failed relationships and medical scares. I’m forty-five, and I have very little to show for it, not like the both of you.”

Nina’s shoulders relaxed, if only slightly. Charlotte was surprised to feel that she was telling them the truth, mostly.

“During our early twenties, Seth and I hung out quite a bit in Manhattan,” she explained.

“After everything that had happened in our family, it felt like we only had each other. We had to hold on tight. We even lived together for a couple of years, working odd jobs here and there as we tried to make sense of the past.”

“That means he must have told you what happened,” Nina blurted.

Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears. She shook her head.

“What happened?” Addison demanded.

Nina looked at her directly. “The night of the fire. They told us our brother was dead.”

Addison gasped. “Seth? That Seth was dead? When was this?”

“In 1998,” Nina and Charlotte answered in unison.

Nina turned to look at Charlotte again. But all Charlotte could say was, “He wouldn’t tell me. Not everything. He wanted to start over. And he wanted to protect me.”

“That’s insane,” Nina said. It was clear she didn’t want to believe Charlotte.

Addison looked depleted.

“Why did you leave Italy in the first place?” Nina asked. Pain echoed from her eyes.

Charlotte’s voice shook. “You remember how I told you that Mom not being your mom was the tip of the iceberg?”

Nina nodded.

“Well, I found out that Dad wasn’t my dad,” Charlotte went on, her voice breaking. “I couldn’t take it. I was so angry with Francesca. I had to go.”

Nina put her hands over her mouth. Addison’s eyes slid from Nina to Charlotte and back again.

“Who is your real dad?” Nina asked.

“His name is Jefferson Albright,” Charlotte said. “But that’s not all.”

In bits and pieces, Charlotte explained what had happened to their father’s brother, Ronald—how, the year before her birth, he’d drowned in the Nantucket Sound, an event which had probably pulled Francesca and Benjamin apart.

When she finished, Nina, Charlotte, and Addison sat in stunned silence, plagued with more questions than answers.

It wasn’t clear how to go forward.

“But don’t you get it?” Charlotte whispered. “It means you’re not my real sister, Nina. It means we aren’t related at all.”

Nina scrunched up her face and grabbed Charlotte’s hands. “Are you kidding me?” she demanded, without hesitating. “You’re my sister, no matter what. I love you. Don’t you forget it.”