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‘Where are we going?’
‘First we are going to Monastiraki, which has a flea market perfect for our purposes of simply enjoying the morning. Then we have lunch.’
Loukis had decided not to tell Célia about the lunch meeting he had arranged for her. He’d not missed the way that, if given too much time to think, Célia would over prepare, over question and over doubt. When she met the first prospective client he had arranged, as agreed upon as part of the fake fiancée deal, Loukis wanted her to be as natural as possible.
She dragged her heels for a while, but soon relaxed, guided by his arm around her shoulder, Loukis telling himself the touch was necessary for them both. Aversion therapy, he had said the night before. The problem was that Loukis was not in the least averse to touching her.
The smell of strong coffee and sweet treats filled the air, his mouth watering at expectation of the honey and pistachio of a baklava. As if Célia was having the same thoughts, her footsteps slowed, and he smiled.
‘Coffee? Baklava?’
She nodded, smiling, and they took a seat at one of the free tables out in the street. Dappled light picked out shadows on the white tablecloth as it filtered through the leaves above. The warmth of early summer comforting. He loved Athens at this time of year. A little too early for the massive influx of tourists that would usually drive him and Annabelle from their estate out to the island. It had been the first property he’d ever bought. Somewhere that his mother hadn’t tainted, his father’s devastation hadn’t touched, and where he initially and then, later, Annabelle had both found a peace...no. More than that. They had—for a while—found happiness. Suddenly, without warning, the looming custody battle set his heartbeat racing as he vainly tried to struggle with the fear, shocking and terrible, that he might lose Annabelle.
The waiter came with menus, but Loukis waved them away, simply ordering baklava, an espresso for himself andfrappe metriofor Célia. He thought she would like the sweet iced coffee. As the waiter disappeared back into the restaurant, his attention was drawn by a father and son on the nearby table. The son was angrily wiping at his eye with one hand, as if trying to disguise his tears, and holding what looked like a small black electronic plane in the other.
He heard the father’s reassurances, and almost felt the man’s helpless anger as he tried to explain to the boy that there must be something wrong with it. That they just had to wait until they could go back to the shop. Though judging from the look on the father’s face, he either didn’t hold out much hope for a solution or feared the money it would cost. Loukis empathised with the man, clearly struggling with his child’s hurt and pain. Since Annabelle had come into his life, he’d felt that constantly.
Célia turned to look behind her, her gaze seeming to snag on the same tableaux as his had done.
‘What’s wrong?’
Loukis shook his head, shrugging. ‘Something wrong with the machine apparently.’
He watched as she cocked her head to one side as if trying to get a closer look at the machine, rather than the boy and his father, which struck him as a little odd. She shifted her chair a little, so she could better see, which drew the attention of the upset little boy and his father.
‘Can you ask him what’s wrong with it?’ she said to Loukis.
Frowning, he relayed the question and the father’s answer, all three of them looking rather bemused by Célia’s interest.
She nodded, and held her hand out for the toy.
The boy looked to his father for permission and, once granted, passed the machine over to Célia.
It felt strange having a drone in her hands again. Strange, exciting, sad...a heady combination as she placed the lightweight black body on her lap and scrolled through the controller to switch the language from Greek to French. She was familiar with the cheap mass-produced brand—a family favourite that entertained children and adults alike. Checking that the drone was powered up, she scrolled to the status bar to find the compass setting. She had already checked the aircraft battery was above eighty per cent, so she was pretty sure that recalibrating the compass should be all that was needed. Looking for the solid clear light at the back of the drone, she put the controller aside, and picked up the body of the machine, turning it in her hands three hundred and sixty degrees until the light ran green. Pointing the nose downwards, she turned the machine again until the green light started flashing. Which was just as it should be.
She looked up at the boy, smiling, and passed him back the drone and controller after switching the language back to Greek.
The boy took it from her gingerly, placed it on the ground and experimentally started the drone up. It jerked upwards, startling some passers-by, and the boy let out a cry of joy, before guiding it up and into the air, running a short way after it.
For a moment, she indulged. Indulged in her own childhood memories. The hours she had spent playing with similar toys, and then later, the years she had spent studying, working towards more and more complex designs, GPS systems, loving the way that binary numbers combined with computer chips and the smell of a soldering iron. As her interest in the mechanical had turned into the way that signals could be sent and received to identify locations, the possibilities that could be achieved with such information had set her brain alight with wonder and excitement. The thrill of having an idea and of making it—
‘What was wrong with it?’
Loukis’s question cut through her thoughts, drawing her attention back to the present, back to him.
‘The father wants to know, in case it happens again.’
‘The compass needed to be recalibrated. It’s a fairly common problem for that particular brand. He can look it upeasily enough.’
It was only when she looked up at Loukis that she realised her mistake. Because how on earth would she explain how she had known that? His eyes didn’t leave hers as he translated what she had said to the father. They didn’t leave hers as the father proclaimed effusive thanks, tried to pay for their coffees—an offer that was dismissed by Loukis with a wave of his hand—and ran off after his happy son. No, it was Célia that broke the connection, unable to bear the scrutiny.
Over the past five years, only Ella had known about her drastic career change. She had been the only person to stick with her after her life had changed. Faces and so-called friends ran through her mind from that time ‘before’. Hopes and dreams of trying to be seen by her father, be considered valuable, or even worthy in his eyes. But then he had taken her plans for agricultural drone technology for use in drought-affected areas of Africa and warped it, changed her good intentions in the most horrible way. Took them from her and used them for his true love: his own company.
She had spent the summer interning and impressing the research and development department in Paquet Industries as a way to try to be closer to her father. To impress him somehow. She’d inherited her father’s genius, they’d all said. At the time she’d been pleased, so, so pleased. Only Ella had grumbled about being a genius in her own right. But Célia hadn’t cared. Finally pleasing her father had been her only focus. Until someone had seen the technical specs she’d been working on as part of her degree over lunch one day. Closer and closer they had looked and once they’d realised what she’d done, they’d whisked her up to see her father. Her drawings, her ideas, had been pored over and over. At first by the manager, then by her father, then by other advisers and ultimately by lawyers.
God, she’d been so naïve. At first she’d been thrilled, excited, hopeful even. But then suddenly everything went quiet. People stopped talking about the project, behaving as if it had never happened. Her father became too busy to see her, to answer her calls even.
She’d wondered if perhaps they’d found something wrong with her designs and that had scoured her insides, devastating her in what she’d hoped to be ‘the final’ way, the ‘only’ way her father might find use or value, or even love. Three weeks after the internship had finished and she had returned to university, returned to Ella, who had comforted Célia in her bewilderment, she discovered what had happened. In the newspaper. The article had revealed a major deal between her father’s company, Paquet Industries, and one of France’s leading firearms manufacturers, proclaiming the revolutionising of drone technology as its key motivation.
