Chapter 21
On the long walk back to town, Minnie told herself not to panic.
She inhaled, exhaled, and counted her steps, focusing on the beautiful, fluffy clouds above and the breeze fluttering through the leaves overhead.
She reminded herself that she hadn’t lied to her mother, not fully.
She really was going to find Viggo just now.
She wanted to talk to him before she saw her father again.
Of course, she had no idea what she was going to say.
If Minnie told Viggo the truth—that her father had come out from hiding to take Minnie away to some other life, where she had to go by another name and pretend she’d never been Minnie Moore in the first place—she imagined that Viggo would not accept it.
He would ask her to listen to reason. He would point out things that her over-anxious, Hannah-adjacent mind was already pointing out that this was strange.
But that feeling fought continually against her love for her father, and her belief that her father’s love was always better than other kinds of love, if only because it was harder to get.
Initially, Viggo had told her that he would pick her up from home later this morning, that he wanted to clean up the boat for a sailing expedition.
But Minnie hadn’t been able to stay at home in her room, listening to her mother sing as she made an omelet.
She hadn’t been able to sit, thinking about what she was about to do.
So, here she was, walking the forty-plus minutes to the harbor, feeling cursed.
There was no older woman to hitchhike with this time.
When she reached Viggo on his sailboat, she found him shirtless, his long hair pulled back so that he could focus on sanding a piece of wood.
He looked so rugged, so grown-up, that Minnie nearly broke into tears.
This person had decided to fall in love with her.
And now, she’d decided to reject that love. Was she insane? She began to shake.
It was then that Viggo spotted her. Hopping off the boat, he wrapped her in a hug, then burst with excitement, telling her about everything he’d gotten done that morning.
“What are you doing here, by the way?” he asked when he remembered.
“I was going to come pick you up! I thought we could go get bagels.”
“My mom dropped me off,” Minnie lied. She reached around to pull his hair from its ponytail, then watched as it spilled over his neck.
She swallowed at her feeling of love for him, and then she kissed him with her eyes closed.
She knew she needed to tell him that she was leaving, that they’d probably never see one another again.
She wished she could at least tell him about her new identity.
Maybe he could find her one day. Maybe he’d never forget her.
That was laughable, she knew. They were sixteen years old, with so much life ahead of them.
“Listen,” she said, her voice shaking. “I know I said I could hang out all day today, but something came up. My mom. She needs my help with something. And yeah. We’ve been fighting, as you know. So.”
Viggo looked deflated but not overwhelmed. “That sucks, but I get it.”
Minnie kissed him again, telling herself it would be the last time. At that moment, as though he sensed how desperate she felt, Viggo put his hands on her cheeks and looked her dead in the eye. “I don’t know where I would be without you, Minnie. You coming to Nantucket saved my life,” he said.
Minnie couldn’t tell how much he meant it. Maybe this was just an overdramatic, teenage sentiment. Or maybe it was the biggest emotion anyone had ever had about her.
Minnie said it as quietly as she could. “I love you.”
But rather than wait for Viggo to answer, rather than wait for the words she so needed to hear, she turned on her heel and ran from the dock.
Tears drained from her eyes and fell onto her dress.
It was the dress she’d selected because it was her favorite, the one she’d wanted to run away in.
She prayed that her father wouldn’t force her to get rid of it, along with everything else.
Kendall had told her that if she didn’t make it to the hotel by the evening, he’d leave her behind.
But it was still morning, long before her cutoff time, and Minnie hoped that Kendall would give her points for that.
She hoped he would forgive her for leaving last night and for asking for time to think it over.
When she entered the hotel, she flashed a smile at the bored twentysomething behind the front desk, then hurried upstairs to her father’s room.
After a knock, he opened it, bringing her into his world of strange smells and unmade beds and bags of chips, already mostly eaten.
The half-eaten protein pudding still sat on the counter.
It was disgusting. But what was worse was the way Kendall looked. His jowls hung on either side of his face, and his eyes were black and sinister and strange, like two long hallways she didn’t want to walk down. Minnie smiled at him. “I’m here,” she said. “We can go.”
Kendall grunted something that sounded like, “Took you long enough.” But Minnie couldn’t be sure.
“I didn’t pack anything, like you said,” Minnie said, although the truth was, she had a few twenty-dollar bills in the pocket of her dress, just in case.
“Good,” Kendall said. “Where did you tell your mother you were going?”
“Out with friends,” she said.
“Tell her you’re sleeping over,” Kendall said. He walked to the window and peered out from the curtain, wincing at the sunshine. “We won’t leave till midafternoon, when the heat drops a bit, and fewer tourists are out. I don’t want to be spotted.”
Minnie cursed herself for having come here so early.
She could have been out on the water with Viggo, soaking up the last of a Nantucket summer that was ending for her far too soon.
She could have been kissing Viggo, swimming in the ocean, sipping little bits of wine, and relishing the last uses of her name.
Minnie, Minnie, Minnie. She loved her name.
Kendall told Minnie he had a headache. He poured himself a glass of whiskey and told her to go downstairs and buy whatever she wanted from the bar.
She got a soda and a grilled cheese, which she ate sitting on his bed while he drank and looked at his phone.
Eventually, she got up the nerve to turn on the television, and they watched nearly all of Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was one of Hannah’s favorites.
Minnie guessed that Kendall didn’t even know that.
When it hit three thirty, Kendall snapped his fingers and told her to text her mother to tell her she was spending the night somewhere. “We want her off our backs for a while,” he said.
Minnie was frightened. But she saw the way Kendall looked at her, like he needed her to do this as soon as possible, so she typed out the text.
MINNIE: I’m going to stay the night at a friend’s place.
Hannah wrote back right away, as she so often did.
MOM: Who’s the friend?
MINNIE: You don’t know her. Her name is Bethany Briggs.
She picked the name of a girl in her art class who’d once lent Minnie a pencil.
They’d had very little contact besides that.
But Viggo had said that Bethany was “cool” and that they hung out sometimes, because Viggo liked Bethany’s boyfriend, who lived on Martha’s Vineyard.
More than that, she knew for a fact that Bethany’s mother worked long hours and probably wouldn’t answer the phone if Hannah somehow tracked down her number to corroborate Minnie’s story.
MOM: Can you give me an address? Anything?
MINNIE: We’re still at the beach and will probably be here till late. I’ll text u some details when we get to her place. Love you.
MOM: Love you too…
Minnie could tell that her mother was miffed.
But this was the best she could do, for now.
When the text conversation finished, Kendall got off the bed, took a shower, and said it was time to go to the ferry.
“There will be a car waiting for us on the mainland,” he said.
His hair dripped from his shower, but he seemed not to notice.
Minnie’s head rang with questions. The one that managed to escape right before they left the hotel room was, “Where are we going to live?”
Kendall had his hand on the doorknob. But he gave her the worst sneer she’d ever seen, then said, “Don’t be like your mother. Don’t ask so many questions.”