Page 22 of The White Oak Lodge

It took a minute or so for Caitlin to duck out of there and speak clearly. Nina pictured her on a curb near a university bar, all six feet of her, towering over the students who’d gone out for the night.

“Hey. I wanted to ask if you’re okay?”

Nina swallowed the lump in her throat. “I’m happy for him. Really.”

Caitlin sighed. “It’s just like all men, right? When they get a little success, they run away with it.”

“He deserves tenure,” Nina assured both Caitlin and herself. “He’s a terrific professor with a brilliant mind. Our marriage comes first.”

Caitlin coughed. “I was wondering about that. Like are you guys open or something?”

Nina felt so dizzy that she had to sit down.Why, why, why?Her head echoed.

“Nina?” Caitlin called.

“We aren’t open,” Nina said in a small voice. “Why do you say that?”

Caitlin groaned and said something Nina didn’t understand.

“Come on, Caitlin. Tell me,” Nina urged.

“I already told you. I saw them together,” Caitlin said. “But they’re not even being discreet about it anymore. I heard Angie say it earlier. They’re going to South America together. They’re going to be together. They’re basically announcing it to the rest of the staff and graduate students tonight. I’m sorry, Nina. But I really did try to warn you. I did.”

Nina hung up the phone and pressed it against her chest. Somehow, she was on her back in the living room, staring up at the ceiling.

It was six weeks later that they left for South America.

It was six weeks later that Nina left for Nantucket.

The whiplash made her body ache.

Chapter Eleven

Amos

June 2025

After the second evening in a row with Nina, Amos returned to his cabin and almost immediately fell asleep in his armchair with his dog in his lap. It was a fitful sleep, one that left him twitching and muttering to himself. It was also one rife with dreams—some of which were memories.

In one of the dreams, it was the summer of 1997, and Amos was sixteen. With his father long dead, he and his mother were strapped for cash, working odd jobs here and there, counting pennies before they went to the grocery store. Oftentimes at night, Amos heard his mother crying in her bedroom, praying for a change in luck he felt sure would never come. Because so many other teens at Nantucket High were wealthy, from families who made their millions via summertime tourism, Amos was perpetually the odd man out, awkward and quiet at beach parties. But because he was often funny, telling jokes to people in the corner, smiling in a way that showed how kind his spiritwas, many people took a shine to him. One of those people was Jack Whitmore.

One afternoon, Jack invited him out sailing with a few other buddies of his from high school. Miraculously, Amos wasn’t scheduled to work that day, and he fought his instinct to ask to work other people’s shifts, deciding it was time to give himself a day off. He didn’t tell his mother because he knew she hated all the wealthy people on the island, and because he knew he was more or less letting her down by not making money every single second. She kissed him goodbye and thanked him for all the work he was doing for them. “We’ll get out of this hole soon,” she said.

But Amos knew there was no way out of the hole. They’d been born into it, and they would die in it, and that was just the way things were.

It was thrilling to be out on the sailboat. Amos knew his way around the vessel and how to tie the ropes and tilt the sails because he’d worked on a few wealthy people’s yachts a few years back, but he didn’t yet know how to sail for pleasure. He watched the others for clues: drinking champagne, discussing where they were applying for college, and talking about the girls they were dating or the girls they wanted to break up with in order to date other girls. When Amos didn’t talk for too long, Jack swooped in to ask him a question about his dating life and jobs, and Amos did his best to answer with good humor. Twice, he made the entire group laugh.

At the end of the day, Jack invited him to the White Oak Lodge that weekend to do some work. “My dad has a few odd jobs to do, and he always wants me to do them in half the time,” Jack explained. “He’ll be happy to pay extra to get them done quicker.”

Amos was pleased. He told Jack he could swing by the lodge after his morning shift on Saturday and thanked him.

“Don’t thank me,” Jack said. “You’re doing me a favor. Not the other way around.”

Amos knew this wasn’t true, but he didn’t say so.

Saturday, feeling skittish, Amos drove out to the White Oak Lodge and parked a few yards away from one of the nicest cars he’d ever seen—a Jaguar from the fifties, which belonged to Benjamin Whitmore. When he stepped out of his truck, he looked toward the lodge to see some of the most beautiful people strewn across the veranda, sunning or hiding from the sun, drinking cocktails, letting the hours drizzle by. One of them was Francesca Whitmore, Jack’s beautiful Italian mother and the daughter of an iconic Italian director who arty people talked about. Francesca put her hand over her eyebrows and peered out at him, as though she was trying to understand why some poor loser had pulled up in a pickup truck.

“Amos!” Jack strolled toward him wearing a pair of overalls and a white T-shirt and smacked him on the back with one hand as he shook his hand with his other. “Glad you could make it, man.”

---