Chapter One
Mexico City, Mexico
It was the last Thursday in November, which made it Thanksgiving Day on the other side of the border. But Jack Whitmore—who was still clinging to his false Seth Green identity, so many years after he’d adopted it—sat down at the little restaurant in the Roma district. He was all alone, with no family and no friends in sight. Although there were plenty of American citizens in Mexico City, especially after the great wave of them came across the border post-COVID, he hadn’t made any friends since his arrival. It meant there had been no turkey, no stuffing, and no green bean casserole. It meant that his heart ached with loneliness.
Jack had been to this bar before. It was a ten-minute walk from the studio apartment he’d been renting since he came to Mexico City in early summer, a studio with a bed, a dresser, and a desk. He paid the landlord in cash-filled envelopes, dropping them off at the carpentry workshop where the guy spent his days. The landlord never asked questions, not about where Jack had come from, nor about paperwork that other rentalagreements might have required. It made things simple for Jack. It also allowed him to tell himself that he wouldn’t be in Mexico City for long and that his operations would cease sooner rather than later. After that, he could return to his family. He could go on living the life he’d built for himself. He could affirm that the “lie” he’d been telling them would go on forever.
When you’d been telling a lie for most of your life, at what point did it become the truth?
Only a few other people occupied the restaurant, eating tacos and chips, drinking beer, and looking at their phones. Jack slid onto a stool at the counter and ordered chicken tacos, a bowl of guacamole, and a large beer. It hadn’t quit raining all evening, and his hair was wet, so he rubbed at his scalp and let wet droplets shoot across the counter.
In Spanish, the bartender asked him how he was and where he’d come from. Jack answered in Spanish, a language that he’d taken up rather easily due to knowing Italian. The two languages weren’t identical, but they were similar enough that he could understand almost everything. When the bartender heard his accent, Jack explained, “My mother was Italian.”
The bartender looked impressed. He swiped the counter with a rag and asked, “What part of Italy?”
Jack answered, “Tuscany, but I haven’t been over there in years.”
He remembered their trips to the Italian countryside to visit their grandparents. He remembered the rolling Tuscan hills, the secretive Tuscan pines that shot darkly into a billowing, cloudy sky, the mountains of pasta that his grandmother put in front of him, his famous director grandfather’s stories, and how happy his mother had looked, beaming at him and the rest of the Whitmore children as she showed them where she’d come from and what they were made of.
Jack knew that his mother had returned to Italy after the fire. She’d taken Charlotte, Allegra, and Lorelei with her. Charlotte hadn’t stayed long, a fact Jack knew because he’d lived much of his twenties by Charlotte’s side—mostly in Manhattan. He’d been going by Seth Green, then. Charlotte had been an up-and-coming documentarian, a brilliant artist, and a force of nature. Jack had felt on the verge of discovering where Tio Angelo was. He’d felt like a hunter.
Back then, Charlotte had been preparing to marry a man she called the love of her life. When Tio Angelo’s scent had gone cold, Charlotte begged Jack to reveal himself. “See our mother again. Prove to everyone that you’re not really dead.” Jack had considered it, but it had gone against everything he’d promised his father, Benjamin, on that fateful night when they’d lost everything.
But then, the accident happened. Jack had been driving, and Charlotte’s fiancé had nearly died. The spell had cracked open, spilling reason back into Jack’s mind. He’d left Charlotte, left the beautiful life they’d built. He’d committed once again to Seth Green, the protection he wasn’t sure he could ever give up.
Now, the bartender flicked through the channels on the big-screen television that hung at the front of the bar. American football had long since finished for the day, but there was still basketball, Jack guessed. But right when the channel landed on the news, someone called the bartender over to take another order, so the bartender left the news on.
Jack ate his chips, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders. Sometimes it felt as though he’d been in Mexico for many more than five years. He tried and failed to picture his family and what they were up to, what they were eating. He wondered if the kids were happy, if they asked about him, if they remembered his face.
On the news, they spoke rapid Spanish. There was a video taken from a helicopter, streaming out over a merciless ocean. Jack frowned and set down his chip. If he wasn’t mistaken, that ocean looked familiar. Oh, but didn’t all bodies of water look the same? He picked up another chip. But his frown deepened as the helicopter grew closer, closer. It couldn’t be, could it? It couldn’t be Nantucket Island.
But then, something impossible flashed on the screen. It was a photograph of the White Oak Lodge. It startled him so much that he nearly fell out of his stool. A few seconds later, the photograph transformed to one of the lodge mid-fire, orange flames churning through the windows, making the shingles pop. He could still remember what that night smelled like: burning wood, wet moss, horror, and the fireworks that continued to explode over the Nantucket Sound that July Fourth day. His throat closed up. Why were they covering this on Thanksgiving Day?
And then, all at once, they showed an image of the tunnels beneath the lodge itself. He couldn’t quite hear what the newscaster said over the speakers in the restaurant, but beneath the photo on the screen, he read: Pirate Treasure Discovered Under Old and Burned-Out Hotel on Nantucket Island. Historians Speculate There Are Millions of Dollars in Ancient Coins.
Jack’s jaw clicked off-kilter. He thought he might be dreaming. For how many times throughout his childhood had he speculated with his siblings about the so-called Whitmore treasure? It had been a rumor going back generations. But Jack had been down in the tunnels with Tio Angelo hundreds of times. He’d never seen anything to indicate a treasure.
How had they discovered it? Who had been down there, searching around? At first, Jack assumed it was kids who’d broken into the lodge and wanted to explore. Lucky kids. Buta moment later, he saw none other than Nina Whitmore on the screen. His beautiful kid sister, Nina, who wasn’t such a kid anymore. What was she now? Thirty-six? Thirty-eight? The math made his brain burn. On-screen, they called her an “anthropologist and member of the Whitmore family.” He couldn’t hear what she said. Oh, but he needed so desperately to hear! He flagged down the bartender and asked if the television could be turned up. But the bartender said no, because one of the regulars had requested this radio station, apparently, and he didn’t want to make him angry.
Jack could hardly breathe. On his phone, he googled “Whitmore family, White Oak Lodge treasure,” but the story was too new, and no news outlets beyond this one had apparently picked it up yet. He slammed his phone back on the counter, flustered, reaching for his wallet so that he could pay and get out of there and maybe find the news segment elsewhere.
But then, on-screen, they were interviewing someone else.
They were interviewing Francesca Accetta, Jack’s mother.
Jack felt all the blood drop from his stomach. He stood behind his stool with his hands on the counter, focusing on not collapsing. There was no denying his mother was older, but she was still beautiful and formidable, like an Italian queen. She was thinner than he might have liked, weaker, but she had her chin raised, and her eyes were like a cat’s.
It was then that the text beneath her face changed to read in Spanish: Francescas Accetta Sends Out a Request to her Missing Son, Once Presumed Dead: Come Back to Nantucket.
Jack’s eyes filled with tears. His mother knew he was alive! Oh, but who had told her? Who had spilled the beans? A second later, though, the camera panned back to show all of them: his mother, Charlotte, Nina, Allegra, Lorelei, Alexander, and even his father, Benjamin. Jack couldn’t fathom it. Of their nuclear family, Jack was the only one missing. And they were calling outto him through the only network they could think of. They had no idea where he was.
Not long after that, the news segment transitioned to a soccer story, leaving Jack bereft and no longer hungry. He bought another beer and took it out onto the street. He couldn’t do anything but wander, sipping his beer intermittently, wondering what to do.
The rain still hadn’t ceased. In fact, it felt as though it had gotten worse. His jacket was drenched, and his hair dripped and dripped. He wondered if he went home and checked in on his family, would everything he’d built out in Hawaii collapse?
Maybe not, he thought. Maybe he could visit Nantucket, then return to Mexico City and keep up his search. It was a search that had failed him at every turn, a search that had nearly ruined not only his mental health but his physical health as well. He’d received just enough information about Tio Angelo’s whereabouts, just enough to keep him here for this long. It almost felt like another of Tio Angelo’s jokes, another way of getting back at Jack for the past.
But Jack wasn’t to blame for what had happened. Tio Angelo had destroyed the Whitmore family. Tio Angelo had flicked the match and thrown it—casting their family to the far-reaching shadows of the earth and destroying the White Oak Lodge, everything their family had built. Tio Angelo needed to pay for what he’d done.