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‘It’s from your grandmother.’
‘Yiayia Helena?’ A tide of sorrow momentarily washed over me, my heart still missing the grandmother I’d lost a year ago.
My mother nodded. ‘She said I’d know when you needed it. And even if I’m wrong...’
She paused, a faraway look in her eyes hinting that she was indulging in all those might-have-beens that sparked my own desperate imagination. When she refocused, her gaze moved dully over my wedding dress.
‘Even if this...alliance turns out to be tolerable, it’ll help to know you were loved by your grandmother. That should you need her she’ll be there for you the way I wasn’t.’
I held on tighter to her hand. ‘I know you love me, Mama.’
She shook her head, tears brimming her eyes. ‘Not the way a mother should love her child, without selfish intentions that end up harming her. I took the wrong turn with you. I left you alone with your father when I should have taken you with me. Maybe if I had—’ She stopped, took a deep breath and dabbed at her tears before braving my worried stare again. ‘All I ask is that you find a way to forgive me one day.’
‘Mama—’ I stopped when she gave a wrenching sob.
Her gaze dropped to the envelope in my hand. ‘Hang on to that, Callie. And don’t hesitate to use it when you need it. Promise me,’ she insisted fervently.’
‘I... I promise.’
She sniffed, nodded, then abruptly turned the wheelchair and manoeuvred herself out of my bedroom.
Before I could process our conversation I was again surrounded by mindless chatter, unable to breathe or think. The only solid thing in my world became the envelope I clutched tightly in my hand. And when I found that within the endless folds of tulle the designer had fashioned a pocket, I nearly cried with relief as I slipped the envelope into it.
Even without knowing its contents, just knowing it came from my grandmother—the woman who’d helped me stand up to my father’s wrath more times than I could count, who’d loved and reassured me on a daily basis during my mother’s year-long absence when I was fifteen years old—kept me from crumbling as my father arrived and with a brisk nod offered his stiff arm, ordered me to straighten my spine...and escorted me to my fate.
The chapel was filled to the brim, according to the excited chatter of the household staff, and as my father led me out to a flower-bedecked horse-drawn carriage I got the first indication of what was to come.
Over the last three weeks I’d watched with a sense of surrealism as construction crews and landscapers descended on our little corner of the world to transform the church and surrounding area from a place of rundown dilapidation into its former whitewashed charming glory.
The usually quiet streets of Nicrete, a sleepy village in the south of the island of Skyros, the place generations of the Petras family had called home, buzzed with fashionably dressed strangers—all guests of Axios Xenakis. With the main means of getting on and off the island being by boat, the harbour had become a place of interest in the last few days.
Every hotel and guest house on the island was booked solid. Expensive speedboats and a handful of super-yachts had appeared on the horizon overnight, and now bobbed in the Aegean beneath resplendent sunshine.
Of course the man I was to marry chose to do things differently.
My carriage was halfway between home and the church when the loud, mechanical whine of powerful rotors churned the air. Children shouted in excitement and raced towards the hilltop as three sleek-looking helicopters flew overhead to settle on the newly manicured lawns of the park usually used as recreational grounds for families. Today the whole park had been cordoned off—evidently to receive these helicopters.
Beneath the veil I allowed myself a distasteful moue. But the barrier wasn’t enough to hide my father’s smug smile as he watched the helicopters. Or his nod of satisfaction as several distinguished-looking men and designer-clad women alighted from the craft.
I averted my face, hoping the ache in my heart and the pain in my belly wouldn’t manifest itself in the hysteria I’d been trying to suppress for what seemed like for ever. But I couldn’t prevent the words from tumbling from my lips.
‘It’s not too late, Papa. Whatever this is... Perhaps if you told me why, we can find a way—’
‘I have already found a way, child.’
‘Don’t call me a child—I’m twenty-four years old!’
That pulse of rebellion, which I’d never quite been able to curb, eagerly fanned by Yiayia when she was alive, slipped its leash. She’d never got on well with my father, and in a way standing up to him now, despite the potential fallout for my mother, felt like honouring her memory.
His eyes narrowed. ‘If you wanted to help then you should’ve taken that business degree at university, instead of the useless arts degree you’re saddled with.’
‘I told you—I’m not interested in a corporate career.’
Nor was I interested in being constantly reminded that I wasn’t the son he’d yearned for. The one he’d hoped would help him save Petras Industries, the family company which now teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.
‘Ne—and just like your mother you let me down. Once again it has fallen to me to find a way. And I have. So now you will smile and do your duty by this family. You will say your vows and marry Xenakis.’
I bit my lip at this reminder of yet another bone of contention between us. I’d fought hard for the right to leave the island to pursue my arts degree, only returning because of my mother. The small art gallery I worked at part-time on Nicrete was a way of keeping my sanity, even as I mourned my wasted degree.
