Chapter 19
But Shannon knew that tonight it was too late to help her mother understand.
Arietta was too upset; she’d had wine and made herself dizzy with laughter.
She’d been on an emotional roller coaster on all counts, up to the highest of happinesses before crashing to this.
Slowly, laboriously, Shannon helped her mother upstairs to bed, then went downstairs to tend to her father.
This was the first time she’d gone through the entire regimen: the bathing, the changing, the toothbrushing, all of it.
She felt dutiful and, as a result, a deeper connection with her mother.
This is what it means to show you love someone, no matter what, she thought.
But a deeper, more private part of her thought, We can’t keep doing this forever.
When her father was ready, Shannon pressed the automated button on his bed to ease him down for a night of rest. She turned off his light, then muttered into the darkness, “I do still love you. I always will.” But hearing herself say it broke her heart.
That evening, Shannon hadn’t managed to get into her father’s computer.
But she knew that her mother could be of help in this.
She knew her mother could find Fred’s passwords, and Shannon could crack this code if she wanted to.
Only then could they understand what Fred was hiding.
Only then could they decide what Arietta was frightened of and what the blackmailers thought they knew.
Shannon slept fitfully, as was her way. Circling her mind were thoughts of Mimi and Russell and, of course, thoughts of the blackmailers and what they were up to and whether they were watching the house.
She imagined that Mimi had already contacted Russell and told him she wanted him back.
Probably that was for the best, all things considered.
Based on the past few weeks, it was clear that Russell needed to be in a relationship.
He needed someone to eat brunch with and watch movies with.
Shannon had been that for about five minutes before she’d run away from him, frightened of her feelings.
If Cole called Shannon to ask her to get back together, what would she say?
Shannon almost laughed aloud at that. In the midst of her mother’s blackmailers and her father’s stroke and all the change and chaos around her, she would never return to Cole’s so-called love. She felt as though he’d tricked her, somehow. She would never let her guard down again.
Long before the sun rose, Shannon was downstairs again, writing a plan for herself in her notes app.
Step one was to figure out Dad’s passwords.
Step two was to go to the police. Step three was to call Isabelle and Felicity and tell them what was going on.
But she wasn’t sure step three was entirely necessary.
Maybe she and her mother could figure this out on their own.
Was there a world in which they could fight back against the blackmailers without letting her father’s dirty laundry be revealed to the public? Shannon was a scientist; she was terribly good at math and logic problems. Why did this seem like an equation she couldn’t solve?
When Arietta came downstairs, she had party makeup all over her face. She wore a big T-shirt, and her hair was in wild tangles all over her head. But behind the chaos, she looked focused. It was clear she remembered everything that had happened last night. She remembered the letter.
“Okay,” Arietta said firmly. “I have to make sure your father’s all right, and then I’m ready to get to work.”
It didn’t take long for Shannon to explain why they needed Fred’s cell phone.
But it surprised her that Arietta had brought Fred’s cell phone to Nantucket from Boston.
Although she didn’t ask for her reasons, when Arietta procured it from a kitchen drawer, Arietta explained, her shoulders drooped, “I kept thinking your father would wake up from this one day and want his phone. I even kept it charged. Look.” She showed it off: 83 percent.
The photo on the screen showed Fred and Arietta on vacation somewhere.
It took Shannon a minute to realize that the photograph had been taken in Greece, not long before her father’s stroke.
Her heart shook with dread. Was that the last photograph of her parents when they were happy and in love and fully conscious?
Then again, what if her parents had never really been happy and in love? What if that was what the blackmailers wanted to reveal? Could Shannon’s heart take it?
“All right, honey. Let’s get into your dad’s phone,” Arietta said.
Arietta reasoned that Fred kept his passwords on a notes app on his phone, just as so many people did.
To get into it, they had to use facial recognition software.
Shannon felt queasy, watching her mother flash her father’s phone screen in front of his face.
But of course, Fred was none the wiser about what was going on in front of him.
All at once, they were in.
“I hate this,” Shannon breathed, following her mother back to the veranda.
“I hate it too, honey,” Arietta said, squeezing Shannon’s wrist.
“Are you sure you don’t know what the letter is about?” Shannon asked.
Arietta nodded. “I don’t know a thing. If I did, I would tell you. I promise you that.”
Shannon wanted to ask her mother about the nature of marriage.
She wanted to know whether her mother and father had kept secrets from each other their entire lives, or if the secrets had built up over the years.
But instead, she watched quietly over her mother’s shoulder as her mother went through the Notes app, searching for numbers and letters and codes.
It didn’t take long to find a subfolder titled “PW.” “Here we go,” Arietta said, her eyes widening.
Upstairs, Arietta and Shannon hunched over Fred’s computer.
“I thought maybe we could start with his email,” Shannon explained. “It’s probably connected to his calendar.”
The third password on the Notes app was the email password: 1234MassState.
It felt anticlimactic. Shannon considered telling her mother that she’d tried all kinds of passwords, ones that had to do with their family and their birthdays, but she thought better of it. This was delicate enough as it was.
Inside Fred’s email, they found a pileup of nearly five hundred emails since his stroke.
Some of them, incredibly, were from people who’d actually heard about the stroke and wanted to reach out to see if he was all right.
Those headings said things like “Just checking in!” And “Get well soon!” They were ludicrous.
But for more than an hour, Arietta and Shannon scanned through them, looking for clues.
Shannon groaned and rubbed her forehead. “Dad’s job sounds so boring,” she said, trying to lighten the mood. “If I have to see another graph about financial outlooks, I’ll scream.”
Arietta grimaced. “We should eat something.”
They went downstairs and popped cinnamon bagels into the toaster, then refilled the coffee pot.
It was an overcast day, and seagulls squawked and swooped overhead.
Rather than go back upstairs to Fred’s desktop, they decided to log into his work email from Shannon’s laptop, and they sat on the veranda, scanning through more emails while eating.
It wasn’t till an email sent in late April—three days after Fred’s stroke—that they discovered anything of value. It was from a name Shannon recognized—Professor Tom Michaelson of Yale. It read: Let’s catch up when you’re here next week.
“Next week,” Shannon read aloud, her head pounding.
This meant that her father had had plans to come to Yale during the first week of May.
But if her father was coming to New Haven, wouldn’t she have known?
Shannon checked her own calendar—where she kept dutiful notes to keep up with the demands of grad school.
There were calendar reminders for assignments, lab reports, lab closures, dinners with friends (which she probably canceled due to Fred’s stroke), and various other campus reminders.
But there was no note anywhere indicating that Fred had planned to come to Yale.
“Maybe he was going to surprise you,” Arietta suggested.
“Maybe.” But Shannon had never known her father to surprise her at Yale. He was keen to tell her how busy his schedule was, how he was still so necessary at the office despite so many people thinking it was better to “work from home.”
Shannon searched through Fred’s calendar to find a dinner reservation at Anchor, not far from Yale’s campus, on May 4th. “Look,” she said to her mother. The dinner reservation was for two.
“That must have been where he was meeting Professor Michaelson,” Arietta said.
But Shannon wasn’t so sure. That particular restaurant was fancy. She’d never been, although Cole had suggested going there for their fourth anniversary, and she’d insisted it was too expensive. “But it’s romantic,” Cole had said, teasing her. “Who cares?” she’d shot back.
Now, alarm bells were ringing in her mind.
“What are you thinking?” Arietta demanded.
But Shannon continued to search for calendar reservations around Yale University.
From the looks of things, her father went to fancy and terribly expensive Yale-adjacent restaurants about three or four times a month.
She read the names of the restaurants aloud, if only to ground herself in that reality.
“The Wig Leaf. The Gratuitous Pig. The Tender Oak. Butter Knife.” The restaurant names felt so normal, since they were a part of her everyday Yale lexicon.
Why on earth had her father gone to them? And with whom?
Arietta’s eyes were the size of saucers. She leaned back in her veranda chair and crossed her arms over her chest as though to protect herself. Shannon quieted down, but she continued to read the restaurant reservations, which went back year after year.