“I can stay,” Tessa said. “You can go back to Jersey if you need to.”
“It’s almost the weekend,” she said. “I’ll see how my meeting in the morning goes.”
Tessa just nodded, though her sister wasn’t looking at her. Her phone rang, and it took her mind several seconds to catch up to the sound of it. Janey said, “That’s you, Tess,” and she still didn’t get the device out in time.
The call went to voicemail, but another one came in right after it. She had the phone in her hand now, and the billowy clouds and crystal blue sky didn’t feel so lazy anymore.
“It’s Esme,” she said, sitting straight up.
“Answer it.”
Tessa swiped on the call. “Esme,” she said. “What’s going—?”
“There was a man here,” the older woman said. “I called the police, and they came quickly, by a miracle of miracles.” She was panting as she spoke, and Tessa quickly put the call on speaker so Janey could hear.
“A man?” Tessa asked.
“An older man,” Esme said. “I’ve never seen him before, but he tried to break into the house. He broke a window in the back, and I just happened to be in my jacuzzi and heard the glass shattering. I called nine-one-one, and he ran off when he heard the sirens.”
“Did they find him?” Tessa asked, wondering if she’d need to go back to Long Island.
“No,” Esme said. “But I got a picture of him. They’ll find him, and he’ll be brought to justice.”
Tessa met Janey’s eyes, and she had to work hard to suppress her giggle. “Can you send me the picture?” she asked, looking away from her sister so she wouldn’t laugh.
“It’s on its way.”
“Thank you, Esme,” Tessa said sincerely. “You’re so kind to keep an eye on the house for me.”
“The last thing I need is hooligans in this neighborhood,” she said, and Tessa nearly laughed again.
She thanked Esme one more time and got off the call.
“Hooligans?” Janey repeated, giggling. “Be brought to justice?”
“She’s a little eccentric,” Tessa admitted. Her phone chimed, and all traces of laughter and smiling vanished when she opened the picture Esme had sent.
In fact, tears came to her eyes, and she emitted a high-pitched whine.
“What?” Janey asked. “Who is it?”
Tessa just handed her phone to her sister, her vision blurring and her heartbeat rippling through her whole body.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Who is Riggs Friedman?” Janey asked again. She paced from the far windows to the new dining room table, where Tessa and Sean Masterson sat. Dinner had been delivered an hour ago, but Tessa had mostly picked through her chicken Caesar salad.
Her appetite had fled earlier that day when the picture from Esme had come in.
She looked at it again. It was clearly Riggs Friedman, from the oversized nose to the wrinkled forehead to the wispy, thin hair.
“Why did he go to Long Island?” Sean asked, looking between the two sisters.
“To our house?” Tessa asked.
They’d been through this routine before, all the same questions being posed.
How would he even know about it? Had he been following Tessa? Was the cottage here bugged? Janey had been asking questions for an hour, ever since Sean had showed up with dinner and a kit containing several security cameras.
They now had one on the front door, the back door, and the garage, and he’d shown Tessa and Janey how to access the feeds on their phones.
“Maybe you two just go next door and ask him.” Sean closed his Styrofoam container and pushed it away, though he hadn’t eaten anything out of it in a while.
Janey glared at Sean as if he’d suggested she give up diet cola for a year. She folded her arms and cocked her hip. “Come on. What if he’s dangerous?”
“The guy carries around a fishing pole and a fake box of tackle,” Sean said, giving Janey’s attitude right back to her.
“How do you know it’s a fake box of tackle?” Tessa asked.
“I’m assuming,” he said. “You two just see him walking to and from the ocean with the pole and box. You don’t actually ever see him fishing.”
“Or ever catching any fish.” Janey sighed and sat down. “Okay, look, I have something to show you.” She cut her eyes in Tessa’s direction without truly looking at her.
Tessa’s stomach tightened and tried to flip, but it didn’t get anywhere. She wasn’t sure if she felt good or not, but she said, “Okay,” slowly. In the past, before Mom had died, Tessa would’ve quipped about it being a picture of Janey with her lady motorcycle club, all nine of them decked out from head to toe in black leather. If not that, then a screenshot of how much weight Janey had just done a dead lift with.
Tessa could barely get herself off the couch most of the time.
“I’ll be right back.” Janey got back up and went down the hall.
Tessa watched her go and then watched Sean. “You know what it is, don’t you?”
“I think so,” he said.
Tessa barely knew Sean, and she wished he wasn’t here for all of this. Janey had obviously been leaning on him, though, and Tessa should be glad about that. Her boyfriend was out of the country, and Tessa had been absent the past several days.
She needed to get outside of her head. Her phone rang, and she quickly swiped on the call from Marcus Hall, her mother’s lawyer. “Marcus,” she said, surprised. “It’s quite late, isn’t it?”
“This can’t wait,” he said. “I was just working on your mother’s will to move it out of probate and get it settled, and I can’t. It’s still locked.”
“Okay.” Tessa got up from the table and walked toward the front door. She didn’t dare go outside, though, because Riggs could be there.
“Janey didn’t sign it,” Marcus said.
“I thought—yes, she did.”
“My system is telling me she didn’t. So I need her to get on and do that before we can get this sewn up.”
“Okay,” Tessa said with a big sigh. “I’ll talk to her.”
“The link I sent her the first time should still work.”
“Thanks, Marcus. I’ll let her know.”
“I don’t want to put too much pressure on you, but we only have until the end of the month. July twenty-ninth, in fact.”
“Yes.” Tessa turned back to the kitchen when she heard footsteps. “I’ll make sure it gets done.” She ended the call and went back to the table. Janey sat across from Sean now, and she had a couple of pieces of paper in front of her.
“What’s this?” Tessa asked.
“I got a letter from Mom.”
Tessa blinked, absorbing the words. Janey didn’t look at her, and everything felt so black and white in that moment.
Her vs. Janey.
Just when she’d started to think they’d work everything out and everything would be okay.
Then she’d learned that Janey hadn’t signed the documents to settle the will, and she’d been hiding a letter.
“When did you get this?”
“It was in the safety deposit box in New York City.”
“Really?” Janey had gone to the bank in the city over two weeks ago.
Janey nodded, smoothed her hands down the front page, and lifted them up to Tessa.
Tessa’s eyes could not move fast enough, and she forced herself to slow down so she could read and understand.
My dearest Janey,
I’m sure you are confused, scared, and angry. You have every right to be, and I hope you’ll allow yourself to run through all of the emotions you need to feel.
I want to say that I will miss you terribly once I am gone. That must sound strange to have someone who has died say they will miss the one left behind, but it’s true. I have been worried about how you will handle my death the very most, and I hope it will be a comfort to you to know that I will miss you.
You have been the very best daughte
r a mother could ever want. I hope you will not judge me too harshly once you learn everything.
You will get to decide what you’d like to tell Tessa. I don’t know what she’s told you and not told you. My guess is she’ll share everything with you, simply because I know Tessa as if she were myself, and she loves you dearly and wants you to be happy.
But don’t tell her anything just because she told you. There is no money involved with this, so you’ll not be cheating her of anything. Just so you know. Make your own decisions, Janey, based on what you feel is right.
I apologize for putting these new assets in her name only, but there is a very good reason. It’s simply to protect them from Dennis’s children. He has three of them, and they were all estranged from him for the past decade. Not one of them came to the funeral.
If you haven’t looked at the packet from The Hotel Benjamin yet, all of the details and evidence you’ll potentially need in a court case will be there. I won’t go into them here.
Suffice it to say, his children did not care for him in life, and he did not want them to profit after his death. He left everything to me, and I’ve been managing it since his death two years ago.
I have left it solely to Tessa, purely because it will be easier for her to win should Dennis’s children challenge my will to her. And they will, Janey. They have been contesting his will to me for the past two years, and I don’t believe for a moment that they’ll stop just because I am gone.
I apologize for not telling you and Tessa everything. It is the one major regret of my life, though I have had many, most of them surrounding you.
The first thing you need to know is that Dennis and I were married. That’s why I got everything upon his death, and I’ve been able to keep his assets out of the hands of his children.
Please forgive me. I love you, and I have learned so much from being your mother. I am proud of the woman you are and the woman you will become after you discover all of my indiscretions. You are a strong person, Janey, though I know you feel weak. Don’t listen to those negative messages in your head.
* * *
Love, Mom
* * *
Tessa read the letter again, trying to decide what she was supposed to get from it. “You told me all of this,” she finally said, handing the pages back to Janey. She did like seeing her mother’s handwriting, as it made her feel closer to her mom.
“There’s a few things in there that point to something,” Janey said. She picked up the pages. “I apologize for not telling you and Tessa everything. It is the one major regret of my life, though I have had many, most of them surrounding you.”
She looked up. “Surrounding me? Why would she say that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Maybe that’s why she left all of the items in the addendum will to Tessa,” Sean said. “There’s something going on with Janey she still doesn’t know about.”
“She said it was to make it easier to keep everything away from Dennis’s children.”
“And then there’s this,” Janey said. “I am proud of the woman you are and the woman you will become after you discover all of my indiscretions.”
“Yeah, that she was married to Dennis and had all of these extra houses and a whole hotel in the city.”
“A marriage she didn’t tell us about isn’t an indiscretion,” Janey said. She refolded the letter and tucked it into an envelope. She looked across the table at Sean and inhaled deeply. “I’ve been over everything in the binder, and I think we’ve been behaving exactly how Mom predicted we would.”
She reached over and touched Tessa’s hand. “You told me everything. I went to the city to the bank and the hotel, but you went to the house in the Hamptons.”
Tessa thought of Esme, and the question she’d asked that had been plaguing Tessa all week. Who’s Janey?
“She was married to Dennis and didn’t tell us. She had all of these properties and didn’t tell us.” Janey got up and retrieved a new can of diet cola from the fridge. “She leaves us all these old pictures. For what? Then we find out Riggs is up on Long Island. There’s so much going on here that we don’t know yet.”
“Do you think Mom had an affair with Riggs?”
“I don’t know.”
Tessa put her face in her hands and tried to think. “Remember how Bobbie said Mom met Dennis here? On Nantucket? On one of those cruises?”
“Yes.”
“And she told us she met him at the theater.” Tessa wasn’t sure where she was going with this. She couldn’t find the path she needed to be on. “Maybe…maybe Riggs is related to Dennis too. Maybe he’s trying to figure out what we have or what we know, so he can fight us for it.”
“His last name is Friedman,” Janey said. “Dennis’s was Martin. Wouldn’t they be the same?”
“Not if they’re half-brothers,” Sean said.
“Bobbie said Dennis’s family had a lot of homes here. Remember?” Tessa really needed Janey to fill in the blanks, but her sister only looked confused.
“I remember,” she said. “Do you think he still does? Mom didn’t mention any of those.”
“Maybe they could be the indiscretions.” Tessa would grasp anything at this point.
Sean stood up. “Let me do some digging on this. If Dennis Martin lived here and had a lot of properties, I’ll be able to find them.”
Janey jumped to her feet too. “Bobbie said the Martins were really wealthy and had a lot of property here on the Point.”
“I’ll see what I can find in the records.”
“You’re leaving?” Tessa asked, following Sean and Janey toward the front door.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he promised. He opened the front door and turned back to Janey. “Bye, beautiful.” He gave her a warm smile that said he wanted to be more than friends and actually leaned down and swept his lips along her cheek. Then he was gone.
Janey stepped to the closed door and locked it, leaning into it and holding onto the doorknob for several long moments before turning back to Tessa.
“You said you weren’t seeing him.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Janey admitted. “He’s handsome and sweet and employed.” She shrugged and smiled, and that was the smile that had gotten Janey all the boys in high school, and obviously got her the men in her mid-forties.
“Can you sleep with me?” Tessa asked. “I’m a little afraid.”
“I’m so glad you brought it up first,” Janey said with a nervous laugh. “Are you still a furnace at night? Because the blanket on my bed is suffocating enough as it is.”
“I still run a little hot,” Tessa admitted, and she let Janey tuck her arm against her side and lead her down the hall to the bedrooms.
They changed into their pajamas, and then Tessa rolled toward the wall and started texting Ron. She really needed to unpack everything and have someone look at it objectively, and he was usually really good at that kind of thing.
Tonight, he didn’t even answer, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.
Chapter Thirty
The thunder clapped again, waking Tessa fully this time. The windows held gray light, which meant dawn had arrived and full daylight wasn’t far behind. She sat up at the first sounds of rain overhead, because they hadn’t fixed the roof yet.
“Three days,” she grumbled. Three more days, and the roof would be fixed.
“Janey,” she said, surprised her sister hadn’t been awakened by the thunder. “Get up. It’s raining, and we need to protect the new floor.” Tessa pushed herself to the end of the bed and stood, the floor sending a chill through her bare feet.
She ignored it and hurried into the kitchen to find as many bowls as she could. The buckets sat on the shelves in the garage, and she wished she’d checked the weather or done something to be more prepared for a storm.
“At least we’re here,” she muttered, craning her head back to look up at the roof. Water didn’t immediately start pouring down, and Te
ssa’s adrenaline wore off.
The wind battled the glass in the front windows, and Tessa cinched her arms around herself. The cottage had heat, but they hadn’t turned it on. Tessa didn’t want to now either, because for all she knew, the furnace would blow out a puff of smoke if fired up.
Janey came down the hall in slippers and a bathrobe, her hair wisping in many directions. “Thanks for the six a.m. wake-up call.”
“That was Mother Nature,” Tessa said. “The roof is going to start leaking. You don’t want this floor to get ruined, trust me.” She bit back her irritation at her sister. She could spend far too much on floors in a beach cottage without consulting Tessa, but she’d leave it up to Tessa to protect those floors.
Janey harrumphed, and Tessa actually hoped there would be a lot of leaks. She heard the tell-tale sound of a drip, and she spun around. Vindication streamed through her, and she took a couple of steps toward the far wall, searching for where the water had hit the floor.
It dropped right in front of her, and she set the salad bowl down. “Right here,” she said. “Janey, bring a towel.”
Her sister did, and they spent the next half-hour hunting down the leaks and putting cups and bowls under them. All told, they found eight separate leaks, and exhaustion pulled through Tessa.
“What’s the weather like until Tuesday?” Janey asked with a sigh.
“No idea,” Tessa said. “You have a phone. Look it up.”
Janey glared at her, but Tessa was too tired to apologize for sniping at her. She’d laid awake for a while, waiting for Ron to respond. He never had, and she wondered why. Then Janey had asked if she was still awake, and they’d talked for a couple of hours. Tessa hadn’t contributed much to the conversation, because Janey had been in a railroading mood.
When she got like that, her opinion was right, no matter what anyone else said. Tessa had been dealing with Janey for her whole life, and she just let her talk and talk, because sometimes Janey just needed to be heard.
Tessa knew exactly how that felt, as she felt so removed from everything and everyone she’d once been so close to. She couldn’t pinpoint when she and Ron had started growing apart. When had the texts become so stale? When had they started to go unanswered? When had their weekends together been one day of her working at the library while he did the previous week’s crossword puzzle, and then a lazy Sunday brunch?
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