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“I know,” she whispered. “Good luck with everything.”
“You too.”
He watched her walk away, and this time when the door shut he felt a sense of relief come over him. Like maybe that door was finally being shut for good. He could stop letting Kosta’s ghost haunt him. He could learn from the old man’s mistakes by trying to repair relationships instead of sitting silent and hanging onto a broken past.
The only way for him to do that would be to change. Right now. The old Nico would need to be buried along with the past.
He picked up the phone on his desk and pressed the intercom button. “Helena? I need you to organize the jet. I’m going to Australia.”
Chapter Eighteen
Marianna looked up at the empty classroom, long after her students had left. They were a small group—four in total. Hesper, who’d recently purchased a small boutique hotel. Lukas, a fishmonger. Nitsa, who was in her late seventies and wanted to speak better English to communicate with her American-born grandchildren. And Stefan, a suave older gentleman who’d moved to Corfu from a more remote part of Greece and wanted to polish his English language skills.
The language centre had been most impressed with her academic transcripts from Australia, as well as her experience volunteering with a refugee-assistance program. One quick call to her references and Marianna had herself a job. Today was the first lesson, and she couldn’t have been happier with how it went. She was putting her passion for language to good use, and the smiling faces of her students had made it all worth it.
Still, beneath the sunshiny feelings around her new job, darkness lurked. It had been a week since she’d left Nico’s house. Since then, three of her brothers and her sister-in-law had flown to Corfu to support her. As had Jules. They were staying in a large Airbnb house while Marianna figured out where she wanted to live. After sitting them all down for an important chat, she’d made it clear she would not be returning to Australia.
There was no way she’d deny her child a relationship with their father, even if she wasn’t able to have one for herself.
“How did it go?” Felicity poked her head into the classroom. A canvas bag of groceries hung on one arm, showing off all kinds of delicious colorful fruits and veggies from the market.
“Have I gone through all the food in the house already?” Marianna asked as she pushed up from her chair. “Yikes. I thought my pants were feeling a bit tight.”
At sixteen weeks, she was showing very obviously now. Even the floaty dresses she’d taken to wearing hadn’t stopped the questions from people she met. And she feared it would only get worse. What would happen once people realized she and Nico were no longer together?
“You’re supposed to be eating well, it’s a good thing,” Felicity said as they walked out of the room, pausing while Marianna locked it with her key. They waved goodbye to the lady who ran the center’s front desk and headed out into the street to walk home together. “Healthy appetite means healthy baby.”
“Apparently she’s the size of an avocado this week.”
Felicity smiled. “She. Well, I guess you’ll find out today whether your instincts are right or not. Have you settled on a name?”
Marianna hadn’t told anyone her thoughts on the baby’s name, because it reminded her too much of that special night with Nico. The way he’d said her mother’s name, his face all soft and full of what she’d assumed were genuine feelings…it made her eyes burn. At least she could blame any tears on her out-of-control pregnancy hormones, but she would rather avoid crying if at all possible.
“Not yet,” she replied. Ugh, she didn’t want to talk about this. “Did you know Ancient Greek was written from right to left? It then went through a period of boustrophedon, which means it was written right-to-left and left-to-right in alternating lines. Now it’s only written from left to right.”
Felicity shot her a look that said she wasn’t buying the sudden change of conversation. “Have you seen him?”
“No.” Her dress swirled around her feet as they walked.
“Have you reached out to him?”
“No. I imagine he’s holed up in his house like some monster, growling at anyone who dares to go near him.”
It was easier to see Nico as a beast than as a live flesh-and-blood man who was probably hurting as bad as she was.
“Are you going to?”
She’d oscillated between dialing his number and vowing never to speak to him again constantly. Which was bad. Anxiety couldn’t be good for the baby. But every time she told herself to move on and forget about her feelings for Nico, the memories assaulted her. Whether she liked it or not—and at the moment she was leaning more towards not—Nico was part of her life. When Katherine came, she would keep him involved. Which meant speaking to him, seeing him. Usually at that point of her thought process, her evil brain asked questions like “what if he ends up with another woman?” or “what if he decides he doesn’t want anything to do with you or the baby?”
