The doctor sighed and gave her a look that meant she needed to listen. “It’s your future at stake,” he pointed out. “You’re seventy-three years old. You have grandchildren. You have people who want you around.”
Francesca knew what he said was logical, but it was also easily swept to the side. She lived alone in her villa in Tuscany. Her daughters, Allegra and Lorelei, were both in Rome with families of their own, and the rest of her children were practically half the world away. She wasn’t sure how often they thought of her, but she guessed it wasn’t frequent. Of romance, she had very little of it. The version of herself who’d needed tender moonlit kisses and pledges of adoration and so on felt at a great distance away. She was Francesca Accetta Whitmore—still that Whitmore at the end, legally—and she needed no one, not even this doctor who offered surgery to save her life.
Perhaps if Alexander hadn’t called her that very afternoon, Francesca would have been too frightened to face her diagnosis and continued to pretend it wasn’t real.
“Mama,” Alexander said, his Italian accent growing lazier as he grew older. “How are you?”
Francesca felt a gush of tenderness toward her eldest, the one who called most often. “Hi, honey. I’m all right.” She sat in a fit of exhaustion on the back veranda, watching the wind sweep through the Italian pines. “Where are you? Did you go back to LA?”
Alexander’s voice was stiffer than Francesca remembered it during his last visit. “I’m back on Nantucket, actually. Charlotte and Nina convinced me to spend some real time here. The kids started school here. It’s all quite strange.”
Despite her fatigue, Francesca stood. “You’re all in Nantucket?”
Are they spending time together? Are they learning how to be a family again? Are they talking about their wretched mother, the woman who shipped Nina off to Great-Aunt Genevieve’s and took the rest of her daughters to Italy and away from the only home they’d ever known?
Shame bubbled in her gut. Ever since the fire at the White Oak Lodge, she’d struggled, sensing that how she’d handled the dramatic decades of her life hadn’t always been correct. Perhaps she’d messed up her children. Maybe she’d been instrumental in destroying their lives. But she wanted to point out that her life, too, had been a mess. Her little brother Angelo, her husband Benjamin, and her son Jack were dead. She’d had to start over.
“I have to tell you something.” Alexander again sounded frightened in a way she hadn’t imagined an airline pilot ever would, not when talking to his mother. “There was a major event over here. A cancellation of my name and career. It was said that I was the one who set the fire, that I put hundreds of lives at risk, and shouldn’t be a pilot.” He took a staggered breath. “But then Dad confessed.”
Francesca’s heart shot into her throat. “Your father?” At once, Benjamin’s face from 1969 floated in her mind’s eye, those big hands, those blue eyes, lit up by the fire. She couldn’t feel her feet and had to sit back down.
“He said he was the one to start the fire to save me, to protect me,” Alexander continued. “And then, well, he came out to Nantucket. He’s here now.”
Francesca’s eyes filled with tears of panic. She felt ripped through time.
“It’s been a crazy time,” Alexander said. “I haven’t known how to call you and tell you about it. But we’re rebuilding the Lodge, if you can believe it. The construction crews think that it’ll be ready for a grand opening by next summer. Dad’s helping oversee the reconstruction, and Charlotte and Nina have agreed to work here too. Nina’s boyfriend, Amos, and Charlotte’s boyfriend, Vincent, are here for the foreseeable future. So many Whitmore children are running around now, your grandchildren, all of whom want to meet you.”
Francesca’s pulse fluttered like tiny fish at her neck. “No,” she said in English, although she didn’t know what she meant. She pictured Benjamin’s grandchildren—her grandchildren!—swarming around, calling him Grandpa, and learning about the Whitmore family traditions and everything they’d built.
“Listen to me,” she said to Alexander sharply. “He abandoned our family! He faked his own death! He destroyed everything!”
Alexander sighed deeply into the phone, as though he’d known she was going to say that. “I know,” he said finally. “I don’t know what to make of it either, and he hasn’t said a thing about it yet.”
“Have they arrested him for burning down the Lodge?” Francesca demanded. But even when she pictured Benjamin behind bars, her heart burst with the knowledge that he was still here on earth with her. He was still alive. Maybe a part of her had always known he was, that something was overwhelmingly strange about the fire at the White Oak Lodge.
“A few cops came by and interviewed him when he first got here,” Alexander admitted. “I don’t know what Dad said, but apparently, it wasn’t enough to arrest him. Which is a good thing.”
Francesca squeezed her eyes shut. Together with her impending surgery and her fears of the future and her previous belief that she’d die in this villa alone, this felt all-consuming. So many of her family members were hanging out at the White Oak Lodge. It felt impossible. But only recently, she’d told Charlotte and Nina that she wouldn’t go back to Nantucket—ever. She’d felt so proud of that. She’d felt like only an insane person would return. But maybe she was beginning to think she was insane.
“Please, Mama,” Alexander said, again in his weak Italian accent despite Francesca trying to instill in him a love of the language she’d grown up speaking. “Please, consider coming out to Nantucket to meet my children and Nina’s children and see Dad again. There’s so much to discuss, so much to make sense of. But maybe we can do it together.”
Francesca sniffed and glared through the window, hating how weak and alone she felt. “I’ll think about it,” she promised her eldest. “But I have to go, Alexander. Please, be safe out there. There’s no telling what your father will do.” She couldn’t trust him anymore. She wasn’t sure she could trust anyone anymore.
When Francesca hung up, she went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of Primitivo wine, and stood at the counter, watching the orange light of the sky spread out across the rolling Tuscan hills. She’d lived in this villa since returning to Italy in 1998, immediately after the fire that had destroyed everything the Whitmore family had built. She would never forget the year the White Oak Lodge had been built: 1862, smack-dab in the middle of the American Civil War. Benjamin and the other Whitmores had drilled that year into her, along with the names of the Whitmores who had built it. Samuel and Daisy Whitmore. Their ancient photographs hung in a little room in the family side of the White Oak Lodge. It hadn’t been traditional to smile in pictures back then, but Francesca had grown accustomed to their serious expressions, gazing out from in front of the WhiteOak Lodge back in the old days. When it had first opened, it had served more as a lodge for fishermen and whalers, before one of the later Whitmores had decided to transform the lodge into a luxury resort.
After the White Oak Lodge had gone up in flames, Francesca had mourned the Lodge and the property as though it were an extended part of her family. It had felt strange that the long and excellent history of the Lodge should end when she was a part of it. But her story with Benjamin, the story they’d built within their marriage and with their children, had never been simple. Theirs had been messy and heartbreaking.Why?she wondered now. How had two young people who’d fallen so desperately in love made such a tragedy of things?
When Francesca mounted the stairs to go to bed that night, she paused briefly outside the room down the hall, the room she’d shared for many years with Jefferson Albright, Charlotte’s father. She could still see the things he’d left behind, stacked in the closet. But she couldn’t smell him any longer. It had been five years since he’d been around.
Five years without Jefferson and nearly thirty years without Benjamin. Her stomach thrashed with nausea. What if she were about to die of cancer? What if she died without ever saying all the things she needed to? What if she had never met her grandchildren?
Before she could stop herself, she scrambled to find her cell phone, which she used to call Allegra at home in Rome. Allegra was her third-eldest child, age forty-seven, who, as far as Francesca knew, had no interest in returning to Nantucket Island. She’d fallen in love with living in Italy. She was married to an Italian with two daughters—Tatiana, age twenty-one, and Teresa, age nineteen—both of whom Francesca adored. Allegra answered on the second ring.
“Ciao, Mama,” she said. Francesca could hear voices in the background and imagined that Allegra was out at a restaurant in Rome, maybe with her sister Lorelei.
“I just got off the phone with your brother Alexander,” Francesca said without saying hello.
She could hear her daughter moving away from the kerfuffle and into a quieter room.
