Chapter 19 #2
“Are you sure you didn’t go to some of these restaurants with your father?” Arietta asked.
Shannon would have remembered her father's grand displays of love and food. She would have remembered the deep, inspiring conversation over expensive dishes. But most of the time, she’d never even known her father was close by.
“Maybe he made the reservations for someone else,” Arietta suggested.
Together, they looked down at Fred’s phone, realizing that it was also a camera, and that maybe, just maybe, Fred had photographed some of the occasions out at these restaurants.
Shannon didn’t want her mother to be face-to-face with whatever potential mistress her father had had, so she picked up the phone first, went back to her father’s room, used his face to unlock the screen, and went through the images he had saved.
All of them were from Greece. All of them were of Arietta, looking beautiful on old-world balconies, her long hair flipped over her shoulders, her waist cinched in silk dresses.
It was impossible to imagine that the same man who’d taken these photographs, the same man who’d obviously loved his wife Arietta, had made so many dinner reservations in New Haven and hadn’t told anyone.
How could Arietta and Shannon fathom this?
At the sight of the photographs from Greece, Arietta went silent.
She spent the next thirty minutes going through them, amazed at the memories she’d shared with someone who could no longer speak about them.
“It’s awful,” she breathed. “But I remember this with your grandmother, too. It’s awful to carry the past by yourself.
It’s like the past no longer exists when the person you shared it with doesn’t hold on to it anymore. ”
Shannon sighed. She’d reached the point in her father’s online calendar when, back in November, he’d booked a resort hotel in Manhattan: a king-sized room with a sauna inside the room.
It was certainly possible that he’d booked that room for himself when he’d gone to Manhattan on business. But Shannon didn’t think it was likely.
Shannon felt it deep in her bones that her father was having an affair.
But Shannon was also not convinced that her father had had plans to leave Arietta.
People didn’t spend a bunch of money for a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary to the Greek islands unless they wanted to stay in their marriage.
People didn’t take photographs of their wife the way Fred had unless they were deeply in love.
Arietta had Fred’s phone flat on her lap as she rocked gently in the veranda chair and watched the birds overhead. Shannon realized they’d spent hours like this, going through her father’s things, his time commitments, his photographs, his life.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, getting up and hurrying to her bedroom upstairs. She didn’t want her mother to overhear her phone call.
Isabella answered on the third ring, then called Felicity in from wherever she was in their apartment so they could talk to Shannon on speakerphone. Shannon sat on the edge of her bed and willed herself to bring her sisters into this madness. She needed them.
“Why are you back on the island?” Felicity demanded to know where Shannon was when she explained.
“We think it’s a black hole,” Isabelle explained.
“Mom’s lonely,” Shannon said meekly. She couldn’t explain that she, too, was lonely, and that she’d alienated herself from her best friend Russell, that she’d needed somewhere to go. “And anyway, something is going on.”
She explained about the blackmail letters. “And Mom’s already sent them twenty grand! I think she’s afraid of what they know; she’s making up stories in her head.”
Isabelle and Felicity were speechless at first.
“She’s out of her mind,” Felicity whispered.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Shannon hurried to say. “She’s grieving. And she’s worried. She wants to retain Dad’s legacy or whatever. But the blackmailers are already asking for more.”
“Shannon? What the heck?” Isabelle cried. “Why haven’t you called the police yet?”
Shannon closed her eyes. How could she tell them that she’d been trying to respect her mother’s privacy? But it was true, now more than ever. Regardless of whether her father was having an affair; regardless of what he was up to, Arietta couldn’t let the past dictate the future, not now.
“Should we come to the island?” Felicity asked. Her voice was small, proof that she didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to be around their father or this madness.
“No,” Shannon said. “I can take care of it.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think Dad could have been having an affair?”
She’d expected her sisters to leap on the idea and call it nonsense.
“You know, I suspected something was going on for about a year,” Felicity said finally. “I found a necklace in his car once. It was in a velvet box. Gorgeous. Diamonds. I assumed he was giving it to Mom for her birthday, but when her birthday came and went, the diamonds never emerged.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” Isabelle asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to believe it, I guess,” Felicity went on. “That, and I figured that was Dad’s business. Men have affairs, especially men like Dad. Maybe it’s a part of that whole finance culture.”
“The culture you want to belong to, you mean. The culture you just graduated from college to join,” Shannon shot. Immediately, she regretted it. She didn’t want to fight with her sisters, nor belittle them, not now, when their only enemy was the man who couldn’t speak.
“I’m sorry,” Shannon added before anyone else could say anything. “It’s been a tense time.”
“You should have told us what was going on,” Isabelle said.
“I am now,” Shannon said.
She wasn’t surprised when Isabelle and Felicity said, “Keep us in the loop.” She couldn’t blame them for not wanting to enter into this madness.
Maybe, if she’d still been in a relationship with Cole, if she’d still had responsibilities back at Yale, she would have found a way to hide from all this, too.
As it was, this “logic problem” was her only project.
She had to save her mother.