It wasn’t till they’d sat there for over an hour that Charlotte pointed out the obvious. “It’s the first time it’s just us kids,” she said. “Us kids without partners or our own children or Mama and Dad.” She raised her eyebrows in surprise.
Jack felt a crush of love for his siblings. Alexander popped up to refill everyone’s wine. While he had their attention, he updated them on the goings-on at the lodge and the building strategy for the next few months, weather-permitting. When he got to Jack, he eyed him and said, “What about you, Little Brother?”
“What about me?” Jack asked.
“Will you be around for the reopening of the White Oak Lodge?” Alexander pushed it.
Jack laughed nervously and filled his mouth with wine. Although he’d seen his siblings plenty since his return last Friday, he hadn’t gone into the specifics about his past, nor about his family and what they knew. He knew they all had separate stories and things they’d been hiding out from. Maybe they deserved to know.
“I want to. I do. But my wife and kids don’t know about any of this,” Jack offered sadly, rubbing his thighs with the heels of his hands. “I guess Charlotte and Nina already know this. Maybe some of you do, as well. I don’t know. But I've been going by Seth Green since the night of the fire. My kids know me as Seth. My wife, Addison—the love of my life—knows me as Seth. The reason I left them in Hawaii was to try to get Tio Angelo off my back. I wanted to keep living my life as Seth Green.” He swallowed and thought back to that glittering, warm ocean, that rocky island, his Hawaiian-born children. “My wife’s parents own a hotel. It was uncanny how similar the arrangement was. When I first arrived and worked as a handyman, Addison andher parents lived in the hotel's attached apartment. It felt like slipping back into a life I’d left behind.”
Jack’s siblings were quiet, sorrowful. They seemed to understand: how could you tell someone you loved them, loved them for years, and all the while lie to them about your identity? The only expression that stuck out to him was Charlotte, who seemed unable to look at him. He wondered why.
Alexander was the first to speak. Maybe he felt like he had to, since he was the eldest and the “leader” of the group of six. “Don’t you think you owe her the truth? Even if she throws it away?”
Jack closed his eyes and rubbed his chest.
“It’s hard,” Nina said in a small voice, although Jack guessed that she’d always told the truth, throughout her entire life, because she’d been too young in 1998 to know what it meant to run away from the past. She wanted to show him compassion. But she couldn’t understand.
Suddenly, Charlotte was on her feet. She strode to the speaker system in the corner, the one that had come with the vacation house, and began to play a song from their childhood—one that Francesca hadn’t been able to get enough of back in the early ’90s. It was “Smooth Operator” by Sade, and it got all the Whitmore kids to their feet to dance. For a moment, it was as though they’d managed to turn back time, to become themselves as children. Upstairs, their mother slept on, preparing her body for the healing that had to come.
Chapter Fourteen
It was two weeks before Christmas that Addison’s parents packed up their things and moved into Addison’s place. Lucky for everyone, there was a guest bedroom with its own bathroom on the first floor, which kept the grandparents at a slight distance from the rest of the family. But that slight distance didn’t keep Addison from hearing their arguments late at night, followed by their tears and slammed doors.
Addison still couldn’t believe any of this was happening. One minute, her parents had been conscious businesspeople, preparing to pass on the inn to Addison and retire in their own right. Now, apparently, they had nothing. They had so little that, in the days after the sale of the hotel, they were forced to sell the majority of their belongings, including many of the gorgeous antiques that had lined the rooms and halls of the Golden Sunset Hotel since Addison was a girl. Seeing other people load those pieces onto trucks and take them out of town tore at Addison’s heart. But what could be done?
Hugh hadn’t involved Addison in the sale of the Golden Sunset Hotel in the slightest. When Addison had asked her mother about this, about why her father was being so cagey about all the business goings-on when he’d previously broughtAddison into everything, Beth simply said, “Hugh knows what he’s doing.” Addison didn’t like that as an answer, but she didn’t know how to stand up to her emotionally volatile father, not now that everything seemed so complicated.
It had been quite a year. Seth had abandoned them for God knew what reason. On top of that, Seth wasn’t even his name. And now, her family had lost everything.
About a week before Christmas, Addison secured a job at another hotel in the area. She would have nearly as many responsibilities as she’d had at her parents’ hotel, but she’d be paid about 20 percent more. It was a very good deal and one that made her feel lucky and slightly guilty. When she returned from the final interview, she found her parents and her children in the living room, decorating the Christmas tree. Addison had been scrambling, looking for a job, trying to manage her life so much that she’d forgotten to decorate for Christmas.
“Look, Mom!” Gavin cried, pointing at the stockings they’d hung on the fireplace. “We hung up Dad’s just in case he comes home before Christmas.”
The sight of Seth’s stocking, dangling there, waiting, felt like a knife through Addison’s stomach. She grimaced into a smile and pressed a kiss onto Gavin’s forehead, then searched her mother’s and father’s faces for some sense that they’d hung the stocking to hurt her. They were emotionally all over the place. Maybe they weren’t sure what they were doing.
Then again, she wasn’t sure if she could bring herself not to hang Seth’s stocking, no matter what he’d done or not done. He was still her husband. She didn’t know how to fall out of love with him. She was grateful, however, that Charlotte had stopped writing to her. Apparently, the Whitmores had gotten the hint that she was a Green, and she couldn’t forgive.
Now that the hotel had been sold, Charlotte expected her parents to find a place of their own. But when she broughtit up to her mother, Beth shut her down. “We’ve given you everything,” she said, her voice high-pitched and strange. “Can’t you help us out?”
Addison didn’t like that. But she said, “I didn’t mean to put pressure on you, Mom. I was just curious about the plan.” Everyone kept her in the dark.
Six days before Christmas, Addison went back to the Golden Sunset Hotel. Although the new owners had already taken her father’s and mother’s keys, they hadn’t taken hers, which meant she could sneak in if she wanted to. The plan, she’d heard, was to refurbish the hotel and open it as a luxury resort the following year. Standing in the foyer, a place she’d spent an innumerable number of hours in, her eyes filled with tears. She couldn’t believe she’d never look out the window at their beach and watch her children running again. She couldn’t believe she’d never greet guests here, bring them to their rooms, and welcome them to Hawaii—the most glorious place on earth. She’d do the same at her new job, she supposed. But it wouldn’t be the same.
Addison explored for a little while, walking slowly down the hallways, feeling like a ghost. This was where she’d first met her second husband. That corner was where she’d sobbed when she’d known it was really over with Chris.
When Addison happened to enter the office, she was surprised to find that her father hadn’t sold off the desk, and much of his official paperwork remained in the drawers. It felt as though he couldn’t face the awful business side of things, the money of it all. Perhaps this was why he and her mother couldn’t answer her questions about it when they were moving out. Was he hoping someone else would simply toss it out? Addison began to go through the paperwork, curious. Could she find when, exactly, things had begun to crumble? She hadn’t been able to before, but maybe she hadn’t been looking in the right spot. Perhaps she hadn’t been desperate enough.
But no matter how tirelessly Addison looked, it seemed that the money coming in and going out had been the same as the previous few years. It didn’t make sense. Her head pounding, she searched again through her father’s documents until she discovered—on a Post-it of all things—her father’s banking information. She’d never taken her father for a liar. But what if what he’d written down in the physical books he kept didn’t match the bank records? What if there had been some kind of mistake?
She knew it was too late to save the hotel because the sale had already gone through. But if there had been foul play, if they were still being robbed of something, she needed to know. Maybe they could take legal action. Perhaps she could secure enough money for her parents to get their own place.
It didn’t take long for Addison to discover the leak.
It had begun in September of that year—three months ago. Throughout September, October, and November, her father had sent money to a mysterious bank account. The bank account’s address was listed as international, indicating it wasn’t in the USA. After a bit of googling, Addison discovered that the bank was located in Mexico City. Her heart throbbed with dread. Why on earth would her father be sending money to someone in Mexico City?
The worst of it was that the amount kept going up. At the beginning of September, her father had sent ten grand, but by December, the amount was 180 grand. In total, he’d sent 670,000 dollars.