Milly opens her mouth, then closes it and drops back onto the futon, red-faced. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her look chastened, and I have to admit—I’m glad she does. Normally I like her hard-charging style, but seeing Uncle Archer like this makes my chest hurt. Milly said on the way over that we should’ve realized who he was earlier, but I don’t see how we could have. My last memory of Uncle Archer is of him handsome and laughing, crouching on the floor with me to build a Lego town when I was a little kid. There’s nothing familiar about this version unless you know to look for it.
“I’m sorry,” Milly says quietly.
“It’s okay,” Uncle Archer says, blinking through still-wet eyes. “I deserved that. And hey, what do you know? It might’ve done the trick.” He laughs shakily and swipes the last of the water droplets from his beard. “I owe you an apology, too. All of you. You asked me, in Dunes, if I brought you here. Truth is, I did.”
And there it is: the answer to a two-week mystery. But it only raises more questions, and for once, Milly seems reluctant to ask them. Jonah’s basically useless, since he’s too worried about saying the wrong thing, so I guess it’s up to me. “Why? And how?”
Uncle Archer looks longingly at Milly’s discarded glass, like he wishes it were still full and holding something stronger than water. “It started with Edward—you remember Edward Franklin?” He looks at us questioningly, and we all nod. Milly recovers enough to elbow me in the side with a self-satisfied smirk, since she’s been trying to follow the Edward Franklin thread all week. “Well, Edward and I were introduced by a mutual friend in Boston last winter, and we hit it off. When I found out where he worked, it seemed like fate. I’d been thinking a lot about family, and home, and I just—I wanted to come back. But I knew I couldn’t waltz in here as Archer Story. I asked Edward to set me up with a bartending job at the resort, and Rob if I could pose as a friend from out of town while I got my bearings.”
“Bearings?” I echo, and Archer sends me a wry smile.
“I had this silly fantasy at first that I’d run into Mother at some point, and all the anger she’s been holding on to would melt away. That she’d realize she wants to be reunited just as much as I do. But that didn’t happen. I haven’t even caught a glimpse of her the entire time I’ve been here. She keeps herself very isolated. Even when she comes to the resort for business reasons, she only sees a handful of people.”
I inch a little closer to the edge of my seat. “Uncle Archer, do you know what the letter meant?” He furrows his brow, and I clarify. “The you know what you did letter that Donald Camden sent. Do you, um…know what you did?”
“I have no idea.” He spreads his hands in a helpless gesture. “I’ve never been able to understand what she meant. I’d give anything if I could.”
It’s the same answer Dad has always given, and that I’ve always accepted without question. But now that I know how duplicitous my father can be, I’ve been considering his response through a different lens—his eyes would shift just a little, his jaw tighten, and his nostrils flare. Small tics that make me wonder what he might have been hiding. When I search Uncle Archer’s face, I don’t see any of that, though. All I see is sadness, and confusion.
“Did you ever think about trying to see Gran?” I ask.
“Constantly,” he says. “But the longer I was here, the more I realized I’d been kidding myself to imagine that I could become part of her life again. Me, Adam, Anders, Allison—none of us can. Whatever happened to change Mother’s feelings hasn’t faded in more than twenty years. Our chapter of the Story legacy ended a long time ago. And then I saw an article about you, Aubrey.”
I tilt my head, confused. “Me?”
“Yeah. Your swim team was in that national meet that USA Today covered. I read the article, and it hit me all over again how fractured our family is. It felt like such a waste, to know so little about you that I hadn’t even realized you’d become an elite swimmer.”