“I should think so,” Francesca said. “This is your island, after all. This was where you were born.”
“I think I want to lie down for a little while,” Allegra confessed, touching her stomach. She often got sick after long plane rides.
“I’ll go to the grocery store.” Francesca felt livelier than she had since her diagnosis. “I’ll make dinner tonight. We’ll discuss our strategy while we eat.”
Lorelei groaned. “Okay. Sure.” Then she disappeared into one of the bedrooms. Allegra followed her lead.
But Francesca wouldn’t let her daughters’ lackluster attitudes taint her zealousness. Traipsing back down the stairs, she felt like a woman of forty rather than seventy-something. When she started the engine and backed out of the driveway, she wondered if she still knew the way to the grocery store, then laughed at herself, realizing that that was not something an Italian woman would ever forget.I always know where the food is, she thought.
Francesca parked the rental car in the lot in front of the grocery store, got out, and straightened her spine as she walked in. It was three thirty in the afternoon, late September, and the air smelled of autumn, of changing leaves, of school time and approaching chill. Inside, she grabbed a cart and kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on gathering food for her family. It had been ages since she’d cooked anything for Allegra and Lorelei, as the girls didn’t come to the villa often, and Lorelei’s husband was a chef anyway and tended to take care of that. ButFrancesca genuinely missed cooking for her children. Once upon a time, she’d had so many of them: Alexander, Lorelei, Allegra, Charlotte, Jack, and then, of course, Nina—Nina, who wasn’t really her own. Nina, who’d complicated so much before the true end.
Francesca stopped short in the aisle, her heart pounding. A woman by the pasta stared at her, her jaw slack. There was a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. For a long and pregnant moment, Francesca tried to figure out where she’d seen this woman before. She must have been around Francesca’s age, with a shock of white hair that made it difficult to register her in Francesca’s past. But it was the other woman who remembered her first.
“Francesca?” she breathed. “Francesca Whitmore?”
No one had used Francesca’s married name in ages. It felt like a warm hug from a once-familiar friend. Francesca took a step toward the woman, then realized, “It’s you! Margaret!”
Margaret Buchanon had been an employee at the White Oak Lodge for ten years before the fire had robbed them all of their purpose. Francesca remembered her fondly as a hard worker and a kind-hearted human who’d always remembered everyone’s birthdays and brought in cookies or cake. Now, Margaret abandoned her grocery cart, came toward Francesca, and said, “I can’t believe you recognized me. I look different, I know. It’s the hair. I stopped dyeing it, and now I look like a little old lady.”
“You don’t,” Francesca assured her, touching her own hair, which she kept dark.
Margaret smiled. “You’re here! I’ve seen a whole slew of them out and about as well. Charlotte. Handsome Alexander. Little Nina, who isn’t so little anymore. And of course, everyone knows Benjamin’s back, but nobody’s seen him. Nobody but the cops, of course.”
Francesca’s stomach thrashed as she imagined Benjamin in police custody, maybe with handcuffs on his wrists, his cheeks sallow.My poor darling, she thought before she could stop herself.
“You know,” Margaret said, “I never believed for a second that Benjamin burned down the White Oak Lodge. You know as well as anyone how much he loved that place. That was his family’s legacy. He lived for it.” She smiled sadly. “I’m sure a part of him would have rather moved to Italy to be with you than take over for the family, but he was never one for doing what he wanted.”
Not until Chloe Essex, Francesca thought darkly of Nina’s mother. But she quickly shook out the sentiment, knowing their story was far more complicated than a simple affair. And Nina’s birth was something she’d decided to forgive Benjamin for long ago. Now that she and Nina were on good terms, now that she’d acknowledged her very real love for Nina as one of her children, she couldn’t possibly demonize Benjamin and Chloe. It certainly wouldn’t be the first thing she brought up when she saw Benjamin again.
“Oh, but rumors have swirled across Nantucket since it happened,” Margaret went on. “Everyone knows I was there the night of the fire. Everyone knows I worked there for ten years. But I always disappoint them when I tell them I don’t know anything. Was the Lodge struggling? They ask me. And even that I don’t know! Benjamin kept the books close to his chest. And we always had guests coming and going, didn’t we? We couldn’t have been hurting too desperately.” Margaret was overly excited. A blush crawled up her cheeks. “I’m speaking out of turn,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. It’s just so strange to see you, Francesca. I’ve missed you, you know.”
Francesca understood. Once upon a time, she and Margaret had seen one another nearly every day of the week. They’dmanaged the front desk, they’d cleaned the long hallways, organized paperwork, and met for secret glasses of wine on the veranda after everyone else had cleared out. Margaret had seemed like family, sort of. She wondered what Margaret had thought of her brother, Angelo, but decided she wasn’t strong enough to ask.
“But you must be here for the reconstruction.” Margaret offered a secretive smile. “I had my son drive me by the other day. It’s been hard to see it like that over the years—condemned and covered in tarps, waiting. Now that bulldozers are running, men in hard hats are bustling around, and people are preparing for the future again, I feel a sort of hope. The White Oak Lodge has been on this island since 1862. It’s high time to open its doors again.”
Francesca was mesmerized by Margaret’s impassioned speech, so much so that she could do little but thank Margaret and make her way to the cash register to check out. To her surprise, her Italian bank card didn’t work on the machine, and she hadn’t yet switched her euros to American dollars, but the woman behind the register also recognized her and said, “I’ll write you a tab. You can pay it when you come back.” Francesca felt blown over by the small-town kindness, the kind she never felt in Europe.
When Francesca wheeled her groceries to the rental car, something out of the corner of her eye forced her to turn and look across the street. A teenager ambled down the sidewalk, adjusting his backpack over his shoulders and talking to a classmate. It looked as though they were walking somewhere after school—maybe the ice cream place down the road or the diner that sold greasy burgers. At first, Francesca panicked, thinking the young man was Alexander, that she was supposed to pick him up from school, and that she had forgotten. But a split-second later, she realized that no, the year was 2025,and Alexander was fifty-one years old. That meant that the young man across the street was Alexander’s son. There was no mistaking it. He was practically Alexander’s twin.
Francesca bit her tongue to keep herself from crying out a hello. Alexander’s children, all of whom he’d raised in Los Angeles during his career as a pilot, had never met her. Tears filled her eyes as she watched the young man turn the corner toward the diner and disappear out of sight. It took her ages to pull herself together enough to put her supplies in the trunk and get going. But with her hands on the steering wheel and her thoughts frantic, she knew she couldn’t go back to the summer house where Allegra and Lorelei were resting. She’d come all this way, and she wasn’t going to waste a moment of the time she had left.
Chapter Nine
July 1974
It wasn’t Francesca’s plan to be nine months pregnant smack-dab in the middle of the busiest season at the White Oak Lodge. After the wedding, Francesca had wanted to wait a little while to get pregnant, had spoken to Benjamin about being careful till she was maybe twenty-five so that she could focus on getting better at English, perfecting her roles at the White Oak Lodge, and getting accustomed to her homesickness, which was ongoing and seemed to get worse every day. But around Christmas of 1973, Francesca’s pregnancy symptoms had become impossible to ignore, and now, at age twenty-two, she waddled around the White Oak Lodge, terrified about the approaching months and how everything would change. Benjamin was overjoyed but similarly nervous. They’d been careful, they agreed, but not thorough enough.
Charles and Elaine Whitmore were overjoyed, expectant grandparents, although Charles had mentioned that a July babywas terribly irresponsible given what the Whitmores needed to do during the summertime.
On the afternoon of July 17th, Francesca was working the front desk, greeting customers, taking phone calls, fixing employees’ upcoming schedules, and monitoring her body for any signs of labor. Her feet were spiky with pain. Benjamin was somewhere, helping his father with a shipment of brand-new furniture, and Elaine was talking with the kitchen staff about a reported problem from some of the guests regarding a “salt” issue, too much of it or too little. Francesca hadn’t listened very hard as Elaine had complained about it, because she knew it wasn’t something she herself had to fix. That, and she’d been cooking her own meals lately, heaps of pasta and pizza, anything her baby wanted.
Benjamin’s little sister Quinn was spending the summer off the island, which was probably a godsend for her, given that she’d never been free of the White Oak Lodge. They saw very little of Ronald these days. Shortly after the wedding, Ronald met and fell in love with an islander named Bee, who lived in a little house not far from downtown. He’d moved in with her, telling Benjamin he wanted to get away from his parents’ permanently watchful eyes. He’d even gotten a job on the docks rather than at the Lodge, citing the fact that Benjamin would be taking over at the hotel instead of him anyway, so it didn’t matter if he carried on there. Francesca missed Ronald, missed making him laugh, and missed his hard-won smile. But she was happy that he’d chartered his own course and found a love all his own—even if it was a love his parents weren’t always pleased with. Bee had been married before. She even had a toddler with the ex. This wasn’t “the Whitmore way,” Francesca knew. Gossip ran wild.
Francesca dropped her pen and glared down at it on the floor, where it seemed to mock her and her pregnant stomach,which made it almost impossible for her to bend down and retrieve it. Muttering to herself as she searched for another pen (why weren’t there more here at the front desk? Were the Whitmores trying to save money?), she heard the door whip open, glanced up, and immediately forgot about the silly pen. Ronald Whitmore stood before her, drenched with sweat, his cheeks blotchy. There was something wrong.
“Ronald!” Francesca cried, walking around the front desk to put a hand on his shoulder. He was shaking. “Ronald, are you all right?”
Ronald coughed and sputtered. It was clear he’d run here. “Is Benjamin around?”
