They shared a smile. Jack thought about the last times they’d shared, both before and after the car accident that had nearly killed her fiancé. Oh, that felt like a lifetime ago. He couldn’t believe that her fiancé had left her after that, that Charlotte had lived so much of her life alone.
Because he couldn’t think of what else to say, he asked her how her documentaries were going. Charlotte’s voice was like a string, but she explained that things had been really “hit or miss,” that she couldn’t always get funding for the projects she wanted to pursue. “But I think it’s getting better,” she said. “I mean, now that we’re all together, things feel easier. I can’t explain it.” She told him that she’d begun seeing her high school boyfriend again, Vincent, whom Jack had always liked back in the old days. “He’s a chef now,” she explained, smiling in a way that made her look like she was floating. “Running into him again made me feel crazy, but in a good way, for once. I never imagined I’d actually get married. I never imagined I’d actually do anything you were ‘supposed’ to do.”
“What is anyone supposed to do?” Jack asked.
Charlotte laughed at herself. “It’s funny. The more I learn about our family, the less I believe that conservative people raised us.” She wet her lips. It seemed she had a thousand secrets behind them. Would she tell him everything if he asked?
“But I need to know, Jack,” she whispered. “Where have you been? What happened to you?”
And so, there in the house he’d purchased so many years ago, a house that felt both homey and new at once, Jack decided he had to tell her what he’d been up to, how sure he’d been that he could end things himself, and what a failure he currently was.
Chapter Eight
Last Summer
It was the evening after Jack received the letter in the diner, the one that readTio will tell your family everything you did and who you really are. Jack was at his daughter Kennedy’s soccer game, alternating between needing to throw up and screaming congratulations at Kennedy, who’d already made two goals for her team. Everyone around him said Kennedy would be an important player one day. Addison was beside him, her smile aglow. It hurt him tremendously to see her like this, to know that the moment she learned what he’d done and who he really was and how much he’d lied to her, she’d never smile at him like that again. Maybe she’d never trust anyone on the planet again. He clapped harder and yelled Kennedy’s name louder. He thought he was going to pass out.
That night, he couldn’t sleep. He sat in his kitchen, sweating and watching the clock. The letter from Tio Angelo was still in the pocket of his jeans, so he found it and turned it over and over again in his hand. He couldn’t believe he’d tracked him down. He couldn’t believe he’d seen his father and heard from hisuncle, all in the span of a single day. But at around three o’clock that morning, something occurred to him. The handwriting on the note did not belong to Tio Angelo. It meant someone else had written it. Was this someone in cahoots with Tio Angelo? Would this other person lead Jack to his uncle?
It was the only clue he had to hang onto. He would do everything he could with it.
What Jack hated most about his uncle’s threat was that he felt like a caged animal. He felt like Tio Angelo could see him clearly and knew what he was doing, whereas Jack couldn’t see him at all. Jack wanted to turn the tables on his uncle. He wanted to track him, rather than the other way around.
He had to be smarter than his uncle thought he was.
The following morning, about an hour before Addison’s alarm clock went off, Jack slid into bed and wrapped his body around hers. He kissed her shoulder, her neck. She continued to sleep, so he held her until they all had to get up, pack lunches, say they loved one another, and leave for the day. Jack prayed that he’d be able to return tonight after tracking down Tio Angelo and ending this. But he kissed Addison as though he’d never see her again. He didn’t understand why he felt this way, why he felt that everything was about to collapse.
Jack brought the handwritten note back to the same diner where he’d bought the vanilla ice cream. Legs shaking, he sat in the same booth. The same server was working. She’d styled her hair slightly differently than she had yesterday, with a braid going all the way down the center of her back. When she took his order, she slapped her notepad on the table and wrote with a blue pen. He watched, captivated, realizing that her handwriting matched the handwriting on the notecard from yesterday. His heart hammered as she left to fetch his toast, eggs, and coffee. When she returned, he pulled the notecard out and set it on the table. She blinked down at it, her cheeks inflamed. She’d realizedher mistake. Almost immediately, she tried to turn around and leave, but Jack stood and said, “Please, I need to know why you wrote it. I’ll do anything. I’ll pay you.”
This stopped her in her tracks. Slowly, she turned to look at him. The eggs were steaming between them, and everything smelled like butter.
“I thought it was creepy,” she said of the notecard. “I didn’t want to do it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jack told her.
“I don’t want to talk about it here,” she said, her eyes darting this way and that.
Jack suggested they talk in a back room, somewhere private. She led him through the double kitchen doors and into her boss’s office, explaining that he never used it because he had two families and told his wife he was at work while he secretly spent time with his other kids. “But don’t tell anyone,” she said.
Jack softened. He saw that he’d scared the poor woman, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. He hated, too, that her boss made her keep his secrets. Jack tried to make himself seem smaller.
“The man who had me write this note was a regular,” the server explained, playing with her hair. “His name is Ricki. He’s a Mexican guy who lives near the beach. He always gets a big stack of pancakes and leaves enormous tips. Yesterday morning, he was here, eating his pancakes. You were here at the same time, I remember that. But I didn’t know you. I didn’t know you were anybody important.”
“I don’t come in often,” he agreed. He didn’t add that he wasn’t important.
“Ricki asked if I would do him a favor for money,” she said. “He asked if I had any paper in the office, so I came in here and wrote what he’d told me to write on a piece of paper and slipped it into one of the envelopes my boss has but never uses. I put iton the table in front of you a few minutes after that. He paid me two hundred dollars! I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t pass it up. I’m saving up to leave the island.”
The server looked worried. “You aren’t going to do anything to Ricki, are you? I don’t want him to be upset with me. And I don’t want him to get hurt or anything! I thought he was just a kind man. He doesn’t have family around here.”
Jack promised her that he wouldn’t do anything to Ricki, that Ricki would be fine. “You said he lives by the beach?”
After some hemming and hawing and after Jack promised he wouldn’t do anything to Ricki, the server gave him Ricki’s house’s exact location, then hurried out of the office to tend to her other guests. As he left, Jack slid a hundred-dollar bill into her hand, then shot to his car and sped off to Ricki’s place. It was clear that Ricki was involved with Tio Angelo. He wondered whether Tio Angelo was blackmailing Ricki and forcing Ricki to do what he wanted.
He couldn’t believe this nightmare had found him here, on this gorgeous island, where the sun beat down on the rolling waves, and the palm trees fluttered in the breeze.
Jack parked his car on the road in front of Ricki’s beachside shack. Pretending that something was wrong with his car, he got out, popped the hood, and peered inside, yet kept one of his eyes on the house’s front window. Ricki was in what looked like the kitchen, talking on the phone. Ricki was a middle-aged Mexican man Jack had never seen before, with a healthy tan and sculpted biceps. From the look of his garage, Ricki was rebuilding a car engine. Numerous other rusted-out car parts were strewn across the lawn and near the sand.
There was no sign of Tio Angelo. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t somewhere in the house, maybe resting in a back room, eager to tell Ricki what to do next. Jack prayed that this was theend of the line, that he could rush the house, threaten Tio Angelo somehow, and get him off his back.