The Hotel Nantucket (83)

“I’m not a thief, Long Shot,” Bibi says. “I have a daughter. I need to set an example.”

“I thought maybe you did it because you needed the money.”

“I do need the money,” Bibi says. She narrows her eyes at him. “If it was a scam, then where did the belt that Ms. English found in the laundry come from?”

Chad is tempted to say, Must have belonged to someone else, but instead, he blurts out the truth. “That belt was my mom’s. I took it from her and planted it in the laundry because I didn’t want you to get in trouble.”

Chad isn’t sure what kind of response he’s expecting—maybe a thank-you, maybe “Aren’t you sweet”—but Bibi just barks out a hard, one-syllable laugh. “Who’s the thief now?” she says.





20. Here Comes Trouble




Edie sends out ten résumés to other hotels, including the Little Nell in Aspen (Edie’s mother, Love, worked there in the nineties) and the Breakers in Palm Beach. Edie has decided to work somewhere else only for the winter season because she wants to come back to the Hotel Nantucket next summer. Lizbet has told her they’re already full for certain weeks in June and July. Zeke said he’s coming back next year as well—he’s going to spend the winter surfing in Costa Rica—and Adam and Raoul are returning.

The only person who hasn’t committed to coming back is Alessandra. Maybe she’ll turn tail and run back to Italy, Edie thinks—although she has to admit, Alessandra has mellowed a bit recently. Adam told Zeke that Alessandra has been staying in every night, eating dinner in her room with the door closed.

“Something happened with her, I think,” Adam said. “But she won’t tell us what.”

Edie is on the desk one gloriously hot and sunny afternoon by herself. Alessandra is at lunch and everyone else is at the beach or the pool or biking to Sconset for ice cream or hiding from the sun at the Whaling Museum. Edie has a moment to check her phone just to see if all ten of her cover letters and résumés went through on her e-mail—and that’s when she sees the Venmo request from Graydon for a thousand dollars.

Edie huffs out a short, indignant laugh. The nerve of him. No, really, the nerve! Edie isn’t sure why—maybe because she now has a plan for her future, maybe because working the desk has made her more confident, maybe because she has Lizbet as a role model—but she decides in that moment that she has had it. She will be bullied no longer! She deletes the Venmo request and sends Graydon a text: We’re finished. Leave me alone.

Three dots surface on the text stream immediately and Edie gets a hot, prickly feeling as she imagines Graydon typing.

His response: Pay me or I’ll send the videos to all of your prospective employers.

Edie gasps softly and looks around the lobby. It’s cool and serene; Jack Johnson is singing about turning the whole thing upside down. Edie hears splashing from the family pool and a moped going by out on Easton Street. She starts to shake. How does Graydon know about her résumés going out?

Well, he must have access to her e-mails and maybe her texts as well, maybe her entire cloud. Did she ever give him the password? No, but it wouldn’t be difficult to guess: Nantucketgirl127 (her birthday).

She’s tempted to call him but that will end one of two ways: with her screaming or with her crying and begging. He knows she has student-loan payments. He knows Edie and Love’s financial future is uncertain. Love actually asked Lizbet if she could use one more person on the desk (Love did it under the pretense of “offering help,” but she needs the money), and Lizbet snapped her up, so now Edie’s mother is going to be working one night shift a week to give Richie a break. Graydon also knows that Edie’s shame about what she did, what she agreed to, is deep and painful and that she’ll do anything to conceal it.

Through the blur of tears, Edie takes inventory of the lobby. No one needs her; the phones are quiet. Zeke is stationed by the door in case of emergency.

Edie runs to the break room, and as soon as the door closes behind her, tears fall.

“Edie?” a voice says. “Are you okay?”

Alessandra is sitting at the counter with…some kind of craft project in front of her. Both this and the unexpected concern in Alessandra’s voice stop Edie from going into a full-blown meltdown.

“Fine,” Edie says, wiping quick fingertips under her eyes. She approaches Alessandra as she would a venomous snake and peers at the project before her. It’s an eighteen-inch frame, the inside of which is spread with some kind of adhesive. Alessandra is pressing in broken pieces of pottery and colored glass. She has only half the square completed, but from where Edie is standing, it looks kind of like…

Alessandra says, “I’m making a mosaic.”

“I didn’t know you were crafty,” Edie says, and this makes Alessandra laugh.

“I’m not, particularly,” Alessandra says. “I just wanted to try my hand at this. It’s harder than it looks. You have to lay down the pieces and hope that when you step back, it makes the whole you’re looking for.”

“It’s a woman’s face,” Edie says. “It looks like you. Is it you?”

Alessandra shrugs. “I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.”