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1
Melina Lakkas was having the mack daddy of bad days. She’d quit her job after getting yet another pay cut, her car was in the shop needing major repairs, and her sister had left an ominously cryptic voice mail for her. She was almost afraid to call her back. The way this day was going it couldn’t possibly be good news.
Once she got home, she sank onto the couch and pulled out her phone. It was probably better to get this over with.
“I’m getting a divorce,” her sister Sophia said in greeting.
“You’re what?” Lena froze, her heart sinking.
“Everyone has been thinking I should do it for years and now it’s time.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s nothing to say, but I wanted to let you know.”
“Are you moving in here?” Lena lived with their parents and paternal grandmother. They had a guest room, but that meant Sophia and her three-year-old son would have to share it.
“Short-term, I don’t have a choice,” Sophia said quietly. “Giorgios doesn’t have any money and although I’ve gotten a job, I can’t afford to rent an apartment on my own without digging into our dividends from the company.”
“What kind of job did you get?”
“At a café,” she responded. “Just on the weekends. I can make a hundred Euros in a weekend, maybe 400 a month, enough to pay for my phone and contribute a little to the household. The payouts we get from Lakkas will keep me going and until the economy turns around, and anyway, what choice do I have?” Lakkas, International was their family shipping company and both she and Lena got quarterly payouts.
Lena swallowed hard, a million things running through her mind as she tried to process what her sister’s divorce might mean. “Will Giorgios keep his mouth shut?”
Sophia sighed. “I don’t know. He hasn’t said anything yet, but you know it’s going to get nasty once I contact a lawyer.”
Lena started to pace, the phone at her ear. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t work it out?” Lena hated how pathetic she sounded.
“You know I love you, but I can’t be married to him anymore. He’s always been a little bit of an asshole, but his outbursts used to be rare. Now it’s almost all the time and…” She hesitated, taking a breath. “He hit me.”
Lena gasped. “He hit you? Oh my God.”
“That’s what pushed me over the edge. I heard the usual nonsense about how it won’t happen again, but I know it will, and I won’t live that way.”
“No, of course not.” Lena paused. “Did you tell Apollo?”
Sophia snorted. “No. Why would I? So he can go to jail? And you’d better not either—that won’t help any of us. Apollo runs the company and is probably going to wind up supporting us, so keep what I told you to yourself.”
“I’m so sorry, Sophia. You never would have married him if…”
“I would have married him,” Sophia said impatiently. “We were together for years and it was comfortable. I was never brave enough to truly take a chance on someone else, no matter how much I wanted to.”
“This means we’re going to have to tell the truth,” Lena groaned.
Both women were quiet for a few minutes, ruminating the different possibilities. Before they could say anything, however, the front door opened and their brother Apollo was calling out to Lena.
“Lena? Are you home?”
“In here!” Lena called back. “I’ll call you back,” she told her sister, disconnecting.
“Kalispera!” Good afternoon. Apollo’s wife, Paige, had only been living in Greece a few weeks but was taking the task of learning the language seriously.
“Kalispera!” Lena smiled at her, glad to see her brother and his pretty wife so happy.
