It was then he heard his wife’s voice coming from the other side of the office, near the parking lot. It wasn’t such a rare thing for Addison to swing by his work to say hello, but Jack knew that her decision to do that was often loaded, given the fact that her doing that was what had led to her learning about her first husband’s cheating. Jack had never once considered cheating on Addison. But he knew that Addison struggled to get over her past trauma.
But who was Addison talking to? Jack strolled off the dock and headed for the parking lot, wondering if Addison had run into one of his clients. Maybe Jack had forgotten about a meeting he’d lined up for himself. He wasn’t always the most organized.
When he turned the corner, he found Addison face-to-face with an older man in his late sixties or early seventies, with black hair lined with silver. He was broad-shouldered and a little more than six feet tall, and he was watching a video on Addison’s phone and smiling.
“How about that?” the man said, shaking his head. “She’s a natural.”
“She’s talking about going pro,” Addison affirmed. “But her dad and I want her to go to college, of course. She thinks we’re old-fashioned.”
“Plenty of colleges offer soccer scholarships,” the man said.
The voice shot through Jack’s mind and tugged him deep into his memories. He felt frozen with shock. For there was no way he could mistake who that voice belonged to.
The man talking to Addison was his father. It was Benjamin Whitmore.
It was the first time Jack had seen Benjamin since the night they’d escaped the White Oak Lodge fire, the night they’dchanged their names and faked their deaths and started new lives.
Jack thought he was dreaming. He closed his eyes tightly, only for Benjamin and his wife to laugh again about something Kennedy was doing on Addison’s phone. This was a proud-sounding grandfather, Jack realized. This was Benjamin, trying to make up for lost time. Without fully understanding why, rage laced itself through Jack’s stomach and boiled to his tongue. He thought he was going to start screaming. What was he doing here? What did he want?
“Excuse me,” Jack interrupted. “Can I help you with something?”
Benjamin and Addison raised their heads to look at him. Addison smiled wider, then hurried over to brush a kiss across his cheek. “Hi, honey! This kind man was asking me about our kids, and I got carried away. You know how I can be.”
Benjamin laughed broadly, never once betraying that he knew who they were. “I’m a grandfather myself, and a father of six, if you can believe it. I know how it is.”
Addison grinned. “I came to say hey and bring you something to snack on,” she said, hauling a bag of chocolate chip cookies from her backpack and handing them over to Jack. He knew she wanted to make up for their argument from last night.
Jack heard himself thank her. He gazed into her eyes and wondered if she suspected anything. But Addison turned to look at Benjamin and said, “I’d better get back to the hotel. It was wonderful to meet you, Mr….?”
“Mr. Hudson,” Benjamin lied. “Pleasure to meet you as well.”
“My husband can fix anything,” Addison said, squeezing Jack’s shoulder a final time before she headed back to her car to drive away.
Even with Addison out of earshot, Benjamin muttered, “I don’t know if he can fix everything this time.”
Jack’s gut stirred with fear. “Let’s go inside,” he said, turning and beckoning for his father to follow him.
Benjamin did, his boots stomping against the concrete walkway. When they reached the shaded interior, Jack clamped the door shut and crossed his arms. His heart pounded so much that he imagined his father could hear.
Benjamin offered him a soft smile. “She’s wonderful.”
“How did you find me?” Jack spat.
Benjamin laughed. “I found you because I was chasing your Tio Angelo. He led me here.”
Jack felt as though he’d been smacked. “That’s impossible.”
Benjamin looked every bit as old as he was. He slumped into Jack’s office chair and spread his hands out on the desk. “I’m sorry to say it isn’t. When it comes to your uncle, nothing’s impossible. He’s always been a few steps ahead of me.”
Jack needed a drink of water badly. He searched the counters for his bottle but found only an abandoned coffee cup from either yesterday or the day before. “What do you mean he led you here?” he demanded.
“For the past few years, I was living all over the place,” Benjamin said. “I thought for sure that Angelo had moved on, or died, or decided that the past didn’t matter any longer. I lived with Chloe for a little while—Nina’s mom, you know—but that didn’t work out, not long-term. It occurred to me that I would never get over your mother, not really. So I was preparing for the next phase of my life, of living alone, maybe on a mountain somewhere. I didn’t want to think about the past any longer. I was lying to myself when I thought I was over it.
“And then one afternoon, out of the blue, I came back to my hotel and found Angelo waiting for me on the balcony. He was drinking a scotch and smiling in that awful way of his. It made me think he’d gone insane from all these years of being in hiding, of doing whatever he was doing to make money. I tried to remainvery calm. I told him that I wanted nothing to do with him, that the past was over. But Angelo soon revealed how paranoid he was. He told me that the cops were sniffing around him again and wanted me to come clean about my involvement in all the drug dealing and everything that happened back in the late nineties in Nantucket. I told him that was out of the question. He threatened to go to the police and tell the cops he witnessed me killing you, killing my son. I didn’t know what to do. I was stunned into silence. He told me I had a week to do it.
“After that, he left the hotel. I nearly lost my head. But I kept it enough to grab my things and follow him. He entered a bar not far from the hotel, which I staked out until I realized I would never be able to get close enough to learn his next steps. I needed someone to talk to him, someone with no obvious connection to me. So I went back to the hotel and asked the woman at the front desk if she wanted to make some extra money. It was a relatively dead night, and she had a coworker who could cover for her, so she agreed and came down with me to the bar. I told her to sit beside Angelo and strike up a conversation. You know how Angelo was about women. He could never resist them. He was and ever is Italian.
“I waited for ages, watching them. Angelo went to the hotel clerk immediately. He was exuberant, talking to her about the grand adventures he had planned. When she managed to slip out—just barely—he’d just ordered them another round of Negronis and had invited her to go to Hawaii with him. This very island. He was shameless. When she asked what he planned to do there, he said he had an important meeting with his nephew Seth Green.”