“I saw you from a distance at first,” Benjamin said. “You were on horseback, riding across those gorgeous hills, through the pines. Your hair was whipping out behind you. You looked so strong and alive and free. You looked different from the way you did when we were raising kids, which, maybe, was obvious. I know that time was hard on you. I know you put up with a lot, especially when it came to me.” Benjamin blinked. “But it looked like you’d survived something. I took a step back, wondering what I was doing there and if you even wanted me there at all. For the first time, I really considered what you wanted. I hate myself for not thinking about that for so long.
“As I sat in my car, watching you ride, I realized another person on horseback was chasing you. He was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t make sense of it at first. When you both stopped your horses, you leaned in together and kissed. It was a beautiful picture. But it was then that I realized who it was. Jefferson Albright! The man I hired all those years ago. The man who tookone look at you in 1978 and fell in love.” Benjamin took a breath. “Not that I can blame him. That’s how it happened for me, too.”
Francesca closed her eyes, imagining herself and Jefferson whipping through the hills, living out the remainder of their days together. It was hard to believe that she’d ever looked so beautiful and free, especially when compared to now. Her body was broken and bleeding. She’d had her breasts removed. She was headed toward chemotherapy. So much time had passed.
“I drove as fast as I could back to Rome and flew away,” Benjamin said, laughing at himself. “I don’t know why I thought I could get you back. It took me a long time, but I realized that I was happy for you, that I was grateful that you’d found another story, one that had nothing to do with me.”
Francesca’s voice cracked. “Did you find another story?”
“A few,” Benjamin said tenderly. “Nothing is as good as ours.”
Francesca smiled and glanced at the black bag in the corner of her room. “Do you see that bag? There’s something in the side pocket, something you need to see.”
Benjamin’s smile melted off his face. “Divorce papers?” he guessed with a wry laugh. “You’d have every right.” He walked to the corner, dropped down, and unzipped the pocket from which he removed a purple folder. “This?”
“Yes,” Francesca said. “Come over here and open it. There’s something inside.”
Benjamin returned to her bed and removed a fragile and yellowed piece of paper, one that looked on the verge of crumbling to dust. Francesca couldn’t believe it had made it all the way back to Nantucket. She watched as Benjamin studied what was drawn on the paper, watched as his face transformed from confusion to wonder. His eyes flickered toward hers.
“Is this what I think it is?” he asked her.
Francesca nodded and laughed, sending spasms of pain through her chest. She calmed but kept smiling. “It’s a treasure map,” she said. “X marks the spot, if we can get there.”
Benjamin turned the map around so she could look at it again: the tunnels and tunnels beneath the White Oak Lodge, the last-remaining proof that Jefferson’s great-grandfather had discovered treasure before his departure to England. Benjamin’s eyes glowed.
“You know?” he began. “I’ve never been that far into the tunnels.”
“I guess it’s about time you go,” Francesca said.
Benjamin cleared the distance between them and kissed her on the forehead. “My darling wife,” he said with a laugh. “This map is your discovery. It’s yours. I won’t go into the tunnel without you. We’ll wait till you’re healthy and ready again.”
Chapter Twenty-One
2020, Italy
It was February of the year 2020, and Francesca Accetta Whitmore’s sixty-eighth birthday party. Attending were her darling daughters Allegra and Lorelei, their children and partners, Francesca’s very old but still-spry parents, and her old roommates from Rome, Rosa and Barbara, plus their husbands. Their husbands were different from the ones they’d married in their twenties. Their firsts had both cheated on them and run away with younger women who’d similarly disappointed them down the line. But with their second husbands, Rosa and Barbara had found a freedom and a happiness that felt entirely based on twenty-first-century women’s rights. These men cared about their emotions and their hearts. They thought of them before everything. Francesca was entirely grateful to have watched the world change.
Over dinner that night, in near-perfect Italian, Francesca’s partner of twenty years, Jefferson Albright, made a toast to Francesca. “She is my greatest love and my greatest treasure.I never thought I’d fall in love, but she came into my life and changed my opinion about everything. Cheers to you, my darling.” Jefferson kissed Francesca on the cheek as her friends and family cheered.
After dinner and before dessert, Francesca and her mother watched as Jefferson played card games with her grandchildren, Pino, Aurora, Nadia, Tatiana, and Teresa. He cracked jokes with them easily and laughed at theirs, throwing his head back. They called him “grandfather,” because in every sense of the word, that was what he was. Francesca’s heart was full.
“He’s a good man,” Francesca’s mother said, touching Francesca’s shoulder. “I’m so glad he came back into your life when the time was right.”
“I don’t know if the time is ever right,” Francesca said.
Her mother sat on the nearest sofa and rubbed lotion into her veiny hands. “It is so wonderful to get old next to someone else,” she said. “It is remarkable to watch yourself and your relationship change. It is so nice to feel the coziness that exists only with one other person.”
Francesca sat beside her mother and followed her gaze to her famous director father, a man who told stories to Allegra and Lorelei in the opposite corner. She was overwhelmed with love for the people around her, for Jefferson, for the Italian countryside, for the plentiful food. But as ever on her birthday, she felt that something was missing. Alexander, Charlotte, Jack. Even Nina came into her mind from time to time, little Nina who seemed always underfoot.
“It is strange to regret so many parts of my life,” Francesca told her mother now.
“You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t,” her mother said.
“What do you regret?” Francesca asked.
Her mother closed her eyes and let her head shift from side to side. For a moment, Francesca thought her mother was goingto faint. But then she opened her eyes. “I don’t know that I gave your brother all the love he needed. I don’t know that I stood up for him when your father put so much pressure on him to succeed. Sometimes I stay awake at night, playing over the events of Angelo’s childhood and wondering what about it was my fault.”
Francesca’s chest seized with sorrow. As far as they knew, Angelo had died in the fire at the White Oak Lodge. What she hadn’t told her mother was her suspicions about what Angelo had been up to prior to the fire, how he might have wronged her family and tainted her life. She didn’t need to put that on her mother’s conscience.
