“Is someone at the front desk?” he demanded. “Have you left the lobby empty?”
Addison flashed her phone between them. “I have an alert set on my cell. It’ll tell me when someone walks in.” Why had he forgotten that? She’d set the same alert on his phone last year.
Her father groaned and pressed against his heart with his hand. Was he having a heart attack? Addison flinched at the thought of calling an ambulance to handle things. But she waited, unsure of what to do or say.
And then, he warbled with, “It’s over, Addy.”
Addison furrowed her brow. “What’s over?”
Her father gestured vaguely around them—at the coffee maker, the window, and the paintings on the walls. “It’s all over. The Golden Sunset. Our tenure here. It’s over.”
Addison gaped at him. He wasn’t making sense.
“We’re out of money, Addison,” her father continued. “We have nothing left.”
Addison coughed with surprise. It didn’t make sense. She knew how good her father and mother were with money and how steady the guests had been over the years. They made no enormous purchases. They did nothing that would have destroyed their financial standings.
“That can’t be right,” she said, drawing breath. Hadn’t she just looked over the books a month or two ago? Everything had been in order.
Her father turned and glared at her, as though she’d made a grave error. “You’ve never understood this business,” he said. “I know that now.”
Addison felt as though she’d been smacked. “Tell me how in the world you’ve lost all the money you had a month ago,” she said. “Tell me how I misunderstood what I’ve always known.”
But her father turned his back to her, went to the window, and began to sob again. Rage simmered in Addison’s chest. Again, a text came through her phone, this time from Charlotte, telling her how important it was that the entire Whitmore family come together. Addison couldn’t take it. She stomped through the apartment door and returned to the front desk, praying that her father was having some kind of minor breakdown from which he’d recover before nightfall. Maybe they’d laugh about it.
A little while later, Addison greeted the next employee—a woman named Mona—with a hurried goodbye and headed to the school to pick up her kids. As they piled into her car, they were red-cheeked and slightly sweaty, telling her about what had happened at their various practices and how hungry theywere. Addison drove them back to the house she and Seth had purchased all those years ago, the house they’d planned to get old in, and asked that everyone shower before dinner. Standing at the kitchen counter, listening to her children turn on the water and scamper to and from their rooms, Addison felt her heart pounding. Before she knew it, she’d called the pizza place down the road and ordered enough for all four of them, grateful she didn’t have to cook.
Throughout the evening, as she filled her children’s plates with pizza, monitored their screen time, and got everyone ready for bed, she kept wondering what on earth her father had meant. She couldn’t make sense of any of it.
When Addison’s children were tucked away in their beds, Addison checked her phone to find another string of texts from Charlotte. Annoyance shot through her. Maybe because of her stress levels right now, she wrote back.
Addison: Seth lied to me for years and years. I don’t know if I want him back in my life. And I have too much to take care of here in Hawaii to deal with all that.
She sent it, her ears ringing.
And then she called her mother, praying that Beth would tell her what had happened with her father earlier. The phone rang just twice before Beth answered. “Honey?” Beth’s voice wavered. “Honey, your father said he told you?”
Addison collapsed on the sofa and pulled her knees to her chest. “He told me that we’re going to lose the hotel? But it doesn’t make any sense.”
Her mother’s voice shook. “He told me we have to sell. We have to sell.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Mom,” Addison said. “You know the state of our finances just as well as I do. You’ve been doing this longer than I have. We’ve been more than conservative over the years. We’ve raised the prices along with inflation. We’ve?—”
But her mother interrupted her. “None of that matters now. Your father wouldn’t lie about something as important as this. It’s over, Addison. Our life here is through.”
Beth hung up the phone, leaving Addison in the silence of her living room. From the photograph on the television, a much younger version of herself in a wedding dress beamed down at her, arm in arm with her handsome husband, Seth Green. They seemed to mock her.
Chapter Thirteen
Francesca’s first day of chemotherapy was on the Thursday after Thanksgiving. It was also the coldest day of the season on the island, with temperatures dropping to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Jack parked his rental in front of Allegra, Francesca, and Lorelei’s vacation house, then hurried in, his skin still unaccustomed to the frigid air. Lorelei let him in and filled a mug of coffee for him, looking jittery and eyeing the staircase. “Mama will be down soon,” she said. “She’s with Allegra. They’re picking out an outfit.”
Jack smiled at the idea that his beauty queen mother wanted to look good for her chemotherapy appointment. That was just her way. She saw life as a sort of performance, a series of aesthetic choices. If Jack were facing death, as she was, he imagined he’d wear a big, ratty sweatshirt.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t all go?” Lorelei asked, twisting a random piece of paper from the kitchen counter into a cylinder.
“I told Mama I’d be the one to take her,” Jack said.
“Yes, but, Jack,” Lorelei interjected, “you haven’t seen her for years. Allegra and I have been in Italy all this time. We know her. We know what she needs.”