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1992
The news had rocked the family. Their father had fallen quiet. Their mother turned to ice. Kate had no idea what her parents’ private conversation consisted of.
All she knew is what happened next, a drawn-out succession of events. The last-minute road trip after a hushed phone call with their family doctor. The summer in Arizona with Aunt Roberta. A girls’ summer, their mom had called it. That much proved true.
And of course, before all of that, the breakup with Matt: a tear-stained conversation where they went back and forth and back and forth, both pleading and pushing and blaming. Teen angst at its finest.
But none of that was the worst thing that happened that summer.
The worst thing was losing their dad. It made for a second secret. They returned home, the new baby having fussed and pooped and spat up the whole, long journey back, and he was gone.
At the time, Kate and her sisters believed their mother. They believed that he just... left, that the events of the summer pushed him over the edge.
But the thing of it was, Kate never read such a response in her father’s reaction. She never saw hate or anger. Fear, maybe. But Nora had herded them so quickly out of there, that Kate had no clue what the poor man thought about it all.
Upon their return, there were meetings—important ones. She remembered that part as well as anything else. Nora had visited the Actons. The Actons had been in touch with authorities. Everyone settled on a loose agreement: that Wendell Acton took off. Nora eventually painted him a deadbeat, but Kate never felt the woman had believed that. It didn’t make sense, for one, that Nora Hannigan would marry a deadbeat, and, for two, that Nora Hannigan believed her husband had, all of a sudden, turned into a deadbeat. Whatever happened to Wendell Acton rested deep in the heart of Birch Harbor lore. And there it would stay.
Kate never did decide if her father’s fate was related to their vacation. She didn’t think her mother capable of—or interested in—anything insidious. But the timing was too odd. Or, too perfect. He wasn’t that mad. Not to Kate or anyone else.
After the whole thing, the Actons dismissed Nora and her daughters entirely. Holing up in their house, the old, antiquated Birch Harbor lighthouse on the lake, like recluses, until their dying days years later. Kate suspected that her grandparents held her mom accountable. Even Kate sort of held her mom accountable. Amelia and Megan cast blame, too.
But, with time, the town forgot about it. Accepting that some men just leave. And, Wendell Acton was one such man.
Yet, there was a hole in the theory, a detail the investigators and the family didn’t piece together then and maybe never would.
It wasn’t just Wendell who went missing, it was some of his belongings, too.
Things the Hannigans wouldn’t know were missing until years later, when Kate was rummaging around in the basement of the house on the harbor, laying claim to the treasures left to her by their late mother’s estate. An estate so finely tuned, that no one had questioned its flaws. Its inaccuracies.
Kate never would find her father’s wristwatch.