But before Benjamin found the energy to tell her Jack’s whereabouts and what had happened to him since 1998 (presuming he knew), there was the sound of a child’s euphoric cry. Francesca turned to see two kids, around nine or ten, rushing headlong across the grounds toward the beach. When they realized Benjamin wasn’t far, they diverted and cried out, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” before leaping on his lap and nearly spilling his wine.
Francesca made a quick calculation because these kids were on the younger side, she reasoned they were Nina’s. It meant that they weren’t her grandchildren, not by blood. Probably, they’d met Chloe Essex already. Probably, they’d begun to call her Grandma, erasing Francesca from the timeline.
But when Francesca glanced up at them, they were already looking at her curiously.
“Hello,” said the boy. “My name is Will.”
“And I’m Fiona,” said the girl.
“Are you related to us?” Will asked.
Francesca felt a smile on her face. Before she could answer, Benjamin found the relevant words. “She is, kids. This is your grandmother. You haven’t met her before because she lives in Italy.”
“Italy!” Will cried. “Do you live in Rome?”
“I used to,” Francesca admitted. “I was a young woman then.”
“Your grandmother used to make films in Rome,” Benjamin said, bragging about a past that often didn’t feel like her own.
“Did you meet movie stars?” Fiona asked.
“She did,” Benjamin said. “She met all kinds of Italian movie stars, and she wrote scripts and studied film. She lived an amazing, star-studded life, and then she decided to give it all up to move to Nantucket with me.”
Fiona giggled, and Will threw his head back.
“Do you think she regrets it?” Benjamin asked the kids, although Francesca knew the question was meant for her alone.
“No!” Fiona cried. “Why would she regret it? Nantucket is paradise!”
When Benjamin’s eyes flickered back to Francesca’s, she swallowed the lump in her throat and widened her smile. “I think you’re right about that, Fiona,” she said. “How could I regret such a beautiful life?”
Not long after that, Nina and Charlotte joined them, filling up their own glasses of wine and beaming at Benjamin and Francesca, together again. Nina looked stunning and sharp, and explained that she and her boyfriend, Amos, had woken up early that morning to meet with a tourism expert about getting the White Oak Lodge back on the map.
“Tourism has changed like crazy since the Lodge was a hopping spot,” Nina said. “I’m an anthropologist, so I can’t pretend to know much about marketing or tourism or money or anything like that. But I like the challenge.”
“We’re all enjoying the challenge,” Charlotte chimed in.
Benjamin beamed with pride. “I was thinking…” he began tentatively.
“Uh-oh,” Charlotte teased, digging her elbow into his arm. “What’s up this time?”
Benjamin laughed heartily. “So many of us are on the island, and there are portions of the Lodge nearly ready for use. We should have a little family party, something to celebrate a new era of the Whitmores.”
“Will there be cheese plates?” Charlotte teased.
Benjamin raised his glass. “Mark my words, girls and Will. There will be a whole lot more like this. We’ll eat and drink and dance the night away. Save the date.”
Chapter Fifteen
Spring and Summer, 1978
In the wake of Ronald’s drowning, everything at the White Oak Lodge changed. A tragedy like this was uncommon on the island of Nantucket, an island so idyllic that it seemed nothing bad had ever befallen its residents. More than 400 people attended the funeral, and flowers lined the driveway and porch of the White Oak Lodge, all from friends of the family who wanted to pay their respects.
Of course, Francesca knew that none of those mourners had known Ronald, not in the way she’d known him, not the way you were meant to get to know someone you’d grown up with or saw all the time. Ronald had been terribly and horrifically alone, so much so that she didn’t always know if calling what had happened to Ronald an accident was correct. It was more comfortable to say that the storm had overtaken the little sailboat, that he’d been lost in the waves. But Francesca remembered how hollow Ronald’s eyes had been in the weeks prior to the accident. She remembered how spry and alive he’dlooked the day he was going sailing, almost as though he’d decided on something. Had he known about the storm coming? Had he planned it?
Francesca kept these thoughts to herself. Benjamin certainly couldn’t handle any talk in that direction, nor could his father, mother, or little sister Quinn. For the week after Ronald’s death, all work at the White Oak Lodge ceased, which was something Francesca had never seen before. Benjamin stayed in bed for days on end, leaving Francesca to tend to the children, their meals, and any other household tasks. According to his mother, Elaine, his father, Charles, was behaving the same way, except he had painful and violent nightmares from which he often woke, screaming. “I don’t know what to do about him,” Elaine breathed, shaking her head, her eyes always tinged pink.
Sometimes Francesca wanted to yell at these people, the iconic Whitmores, because it was her assessment that they’d never properly gotten to know Ronald, that they’d never been there for him when he needed them most. But each time she thought this, she thought of her own brother, Angelo, of how lost he was, of how nobody in her family had seen him in months.Angelo might be dead, she thought,and we don’t even know.
