Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Nina
June 2025
I t wasn’t till ten thirty that evening that Amos’s friend Calvin called back and gave them the name of the restaurateur and where to find him. “Ralph moved to the Vineyard,” he explained in a thick accent, one that suggested how tired he was after a long and arduous day flipping burgers and dropping fries at the diner. “Why are you looking for him?”
Amos had put Calvin on speakerphone and not told him that Nina was in the room, so Nina stood silently, her hands clasped, watching Amos as he stared down at the phone. “He might know a friend of mine,” Amos explained. “I lost touch with him years ago and don’t know how to get ahold of him.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Calvin said. “In the age of information and social media, I didn’t know we could still lose track of people.”
Amos laughed and said he knew what he meant. Calvin gave Amos Ralph’s number and said, “Ralph’s always up for a good time. Take him out, have a drink with him, get to know him. I think you’d really like him, Amos. And, you know. Stacy and I always talk about how you need to put yourself out there.”
Amos’s cheeks flared red with embarrassment. Nina shifted her weight and forced her eyes away. Amos’s laugh was false. He thanked Calvin and said he’d see them soon.
Amos got ready to leave. Nina sat at the kitchen table with the last bit of wine in her glass and listened to the wind as it howled against the cabin and made it shake on his stilts. Nina fought her urge to remind Amos that he didn’t have to help her find Jack, the man who looked like Jack or anyone at all. It wasn’t up to him to help her wade through the murkiness of her Whitmore past. But she had the sense that even if she told him to go, he wouldn’t. There was a way about him, a sense that he wanted to protect her, to quiet the exhausting voice in her head that told her on repeat that she wasn’t enough and deserved what had happened to her. What had happened to Amos to make him this way? Why was he so kind, so good, and so alone?
They said goodbye at the door and didn’t hug. After all, they’d only known one another for a single day.
Nina watched Amos disappear through the darkness, then locked her door, changed into her pajama pants, and cozied up on the sofa. She was too exhilarated to calm down, to watch television, to do anything but think about the immensity of what Jack’s potential life might mean. She could still smell the inside of that truck he’d had so long ago. She could still hear the utter chaos of his laughter.
Nina pulled out her phone and found two emails from her children within her inbox.
The first was from Will.
Hi MOM!!!!! Camp life is cool, I guess, and yesterday we went swimming and fishing, and i caught a BIG ten-inch bass and then I ate a piece of chocolate cake that I think you would not have let me eat. I saw Fiona at the canteen during snack time, and she had a huge face painting on her cheek, I think it was of a dog.
Nina couldn’t wipe the smile from her face. Although Will hadn’t gotten around to telling her he loved her nor saying goodbye, tears trickled down her cheek. Her son! How she missed him! When she went back to the inbox to find Fiona’s email, however, her phone lit up with a call.
It was from Daniel.
Immediately, her hands cramped up and her heart pounded. She shot to her feet and waited a full ten seconds before doing anything more because she wanted to be sure that Daniel wasn’t butt-dialing her or accidentally calling her out of habit. After all, they’d been married thirteen years, and old habits died hard. Anthropologists knew all about the nature of habits and why we formed them. But when the phone continued to ring, Nina filled her lungs and answered it. It didn’t take long for her to regret it.
“Nina, what the hell?” Daniel barked.
Nina sat down again and curled herself into a ball, thinking that if she made herself very small, he couldn’t hurt her. With Daniel, it was never true.
Nina fought back with soft sarcasm. “Daniel, good to hear from you.”
Daniel’s connection wasn’t very strong, presumably because he was already in South America. It was winter there, and she hoped he was bundled up in a chilly bungalow in a jungle, uncomfortable and wishing he was anywhere else. Unfortunately, she knew he was probably having the time of his life, investigating tribes in the Andes that other anthropologists hadn’t yet wrapped their heads around.
Because of that weak connection, Nina didn’t hear what Daniel said next, and when she asked him to repeat himself, he snapped at her and said, “You drop our kids off at camp like that? You make someone else parent them?”
Nina flared her nostrils and fought the urge to say, you were the one who left . But Daniel going out on an anthropological mission wasn’t the problem. They’d always promised one another that their work wouldn’t fall by the wayside, that they would further their research and raise children concurrently, that they would fight to be different from most academic couples who found themselves unable to balance both.
They’d made so many promises. Maybe it was impossible to keep all of them.
In the background, Nina heard a woman’s voice, and her bones went cold. Daniel pulled the phone away from his ear so he could answer her. Nina couldn’t hear what he said, but she could imagine it—that he was telling her he’d be off the phone soon, that they could go for that glass of wine or go out dancing when he was done ridiculing his ex-wife.
Ex-wife! Not that they’d filed the paperwork yet. Nina had the rushing sensation of disbelief.
“You could have asked my mother to watch them.” Daniel was back on the phone and angrier than ever. “She wants to be with them, Nina. Unlike you, apparently.”
“I have research to do, too,” Nina said.
Daniel balked at this and said, “That was never a part of the plan.”
“My plans have changed,” Nina said. “You should know what that’s like.”
For a second, Daniel was quiet, and then he said, “Listen, it wasn’t my idea not to give you tenure. Like you, I thought we’d both get it.”
Nina felt it like a sharp sword through her stomach. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
She said, “I don’t care about that.”
But of course that wasn’t true. For years, she’d fought for tenure. For years, she’d felt she was headed straight for it. Now, Daniel sat on the throne of tenure, lording over her. Even if Nina got tenure sometime down the line, Daniel’s original tenure would serve as a forever reminder of his greatness and her second place. She hadn’t realized until recently that she’d sort of enjoyed the competition between them—until she’d lost it altogether. Did that make her a bad person? Probably.
“The kids are great,” Nina said. “They emailed me today, and they’re thrilled to be there. Will caught a fish.”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling you,” Daniel shot back. “Will emailed me to tell me about the fish.”
Nina slapped her thigh and brought Will’s adorable face to mind. Her plan had been undone by Will’s love for his father, which, ironically, made her love Will even more. He had a good heart. Maybe he wouldn’t turn out like Daniel.
“He asked me if we’re getting divorced,” Daniel said.
“Well, aren’t we?” Nina asked.
“I don’t think this is something you should bring up with the kids until we discuss it more ourselves,” Daniel said.
Nina rolled her eyes. “I didn’t bring it up with them. People are gossiping around them. Their friends have questions. They’re people, Daniel. It’s only natural for them to be curious.”
“Are you suggesting that I don’t understand how people operate?” Daniel’s voice was guttural. “I’m an anthropologist, Nina.”
“You’re also a terrible person who lacks empathy,” Nina said.
There was the sound of static, a violent rattling, and then Daniel’s voice asking her to repeat herself. “It’s a bad line,” he explained. “I’m in the jungle.”
“I have to go,” Nina said. She hung up.
That night, Nina couldn’t sleep. She rolled around her cabin bed, listened to the rush of the water and the angry wind, and hoped and prayed that her children were snug as bugs in rugs at summer camp. By contrast, she hoped Daniel had bed bugs or was bitten by a jungle animal—not one that would kill him, necessarily, but one that would put him in the hospital for a day or two. Ugh, but that brought to mind her by his bedside, nursing him back to health, telling him he was so brave and strong and blah, blah, blah. Nina’s stomach clenched.
She got up and went back to the sofa to open her laptop and tap Ralph’s name into the search bar. But there wasn’t a whole lot to learn about him. He’d either worked at or owned restaurants all his life—from the french fry stand of his youth to the high-end glass-walled restaurant of adulthood. According to a lifestyle magazine, he was something of a recluse and often spoke of moving to Maine to “get away from it all.” But Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard were in his blood. “I can’t get away,” he said.
In the online photographs, he was a man in his forties with streaks of gray in his dark blond hair. He was handsome and tan in a way that suggested he spent his winters elsewhere. In the photo Nina had stolen from his restaurant in 2012, he was seated two people away from maybe-Jack, his smile crooked, his head tilted as though he were listening to what someone said.
Nina buzzed with an excitement she hadn’t had since the last time she’d been out on the field doing anthropological research.
I’m going to get to the bottom of this , she told herself, her heart pounding. It was time to reckon with the past.
Suddenly, for the first time since the late 2000s, Nina found herself with the urge and the courage to use the internet to look up one of her siblings. To her, they were like fictional characters in a book she’d read twenty years ago. Why didn’t they reach out? Why did they let me rot away in Michigan? But her anger had dissipated and paved the way for curiosity. Curiosity and pain, of course. But there was always pain, no matter what she did, no matter how fast and how far she tried to run away from the truth.
She decided to google Charlotte first. Charlotte was the sister closest to her in age—just eight years older, born in September 1979, and therefore now forty-five years old. Nina braced herself to see an aged-up version of her beautiful sister’s face and clutched her knees as the Google images rushed over the screen. But not a single Charlotte Whitmore who appeared looked anything like her sister. Her head throbbed with the realization that Charlotte had probably gotten married and dropped her maiden name. Nina remembered, now, how rigid she’d been about keeping her maiden name alongside her married one, telling her anthropology colleagues that she needed to be written up as “Nina Whitmore Plymouth” in every scientific paper and every newspaper article. She wondered now if that was because she’d wanted to make it easier for her family to find her. Maybe they never look me up , Nina thought darkly, flicking from Google page to Google page, still unable to find Charlotte. Charlotte had been nineteen at the time of the fire, helping their parents with the logistics of handling one of the most sought-after hotels on the East Coast. Where had she ended up?
Nina began to type a name into the search bar: Francesca Whit… But she quickly deleted it, her hands clammy. It frightened her the most to find her mother. She wasn’t sure why.
She decided on a safer bet: her eldest brother, Alexander.
Of all the Alexander Whitmores in the world, Nina’s brother was the first to pop up. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the fire, he’d become incredibly successful, going first to undergraduate school at the University of Massachusetts and then to flight school at Purdue University, one of the best in the country. By the age of thirty-one, he’d been named a pilot for United Airlines and, according to LinkedIn, had since worked for everyone from Lufthansa to Turkish Airlines to British Airways. In the first photograph, he wore a pilot’s uniform and looked in his mid-forties with penetrating dark eyes and a firm jaw. He was the sort of man you wanted to see enter the cockpit, the sort you were sure would get you home safe. Nina’s heart felt squeezed, and she closed her computer and forced herself to take deep breaths.
But her brother looked like their father, Benjamin, so much so that Nina found it difficult to shake off the idea that she’d just seen her father’s ghost.
Suddenly, she remembered what her uncle had told her on the final birthday she’d spent on the island. Tio Angelo had said that Alexander didn’t want to take over the family business and wanted nothing to do with the hotel. He wanted to go his own way and build the life of his dreams. It was clear that he'd done exactly that in going to flight school and moving all over the world.
A thought rang between her ears, one she wanted to dismiss: Did Alexander burn the hotel down so he could escape the family?
But now that she’d brought the idea into the world, she knew she had to entertain it. A good anthropologist had no business eliminating a theory without evidence.
With a shaking hand, she wrote in a notebook: Possibility of arson? Alexander? Motive: he wanted out.