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‘Anonymous conversation helps sometimes, I believe...’ he said.
‘You’re not anonymous, Galen.’
‘Sort of...’ he said.
‘No, thank you,’ Roula said, and then rather tartly added, ‘To both offers.’
Galen knew exactly to what she was referring—for, yes, there had been two offers made tonight.
Roula pushed out her best guest services manager smile. ‘I hope the remainder of your stay is a pleasant one.’
‘Roula...?’
‘Goodnight, Galen.’
Roula slipped away into the dark of the night. She could hear the roar of the sea and feel the whip of wind on her cheeks, and she was hurting and confused and so cross, so furious, that she felt like screaming.
Instead she walked faster, almost at a run.
Mia had upset her, Roula told herself as she marched along dark familiar streets. And Mia was wrong. They had grown apart long before Dimitrios’s death.
She had tried to broach her issues once, at a girls’ lunch. Ella, his sister, had been pregnant with the twins, and had told them that Stephanos wanted to get the snip, so they could ‘do it’ worry-free.
They had all laughed.
Her face burning, Roula had broached the subject, desperate for some advice. ‘Dimitrios wants it all the time...’
‘Newlyweds!’ Ella had smiled. ‘We never came up for air. But wait till you have kids...’
‘Young love...’ Mia had sighed. ‘I’m jealous—the only thing keeping me up at night is meal prep!’
Roula had come away even more confused, and had never so much as hinted at her private hell again.
Never.
Even when it had got worse.
The lunches with friends had stopped. The sex and violence had not. There had been no babies, and that was all her fault, and each month his rage had increased.
Her retreat had started.
‘I might apply for work as a chambermaid,’ she had said one day as she’d put down his dinner, nervous to admit to him that she had already put in her application.
‘Why would you work for Costa Leventis?’ Dimitrios had stood up from the table. ‘You wish you’d married him, don’t you?’
‘Of course not. Dimitrios, please...’
‘Why would you want to work for him when I’m working night after night to provide for you?’
To say they’d ‘made love’ would not be the term she would have used even in her most naïve times.
To say they’d ‘had sex’ did not suffice either...
Roula was crying as she let herself into her little fisherman’s cottage, the flashes of memory too much. All she had held in during this long, dreadful day burst like a dam as she went through the door—only to be greeted by her wedding photo.
‘Damn you!’ she said, and took off her wedding ring and placed it on the mantelpiece, then turned down the photo as she always did when she was home alone.
Roula headed into the bedroom to retrieve her bed linen from the wardrobe. Usually she did not so much as glance at the marital bed as she passed it, but tonight—or rather early this morning—she glared at it.
