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‘We wanted it to be a surprise,’ Summer replied.
‘Naughty,’ Star teased.
‘You’re the second person who’s said that to me today,’ she said, confused. ‘I don’t think I’m naughty at all.’
Skye made a face and Summer gently nudged her with her shoulder.
Star looked up impatiently. ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’
Summer laughed. ‘You.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. The key.’
‘But that’s for the... Wait. Oh, Summer!’
She smiled as Star produced the key and found the lock on a door that looked like part of the mahogany panelling beside the master bedroom.
The key slipped in as if it had been used only the day before. Which it hadn’t. Summer had a secret entrance from the master bedroom to Catherine’s hidden room, but she’d wanted separate access for her sisters whenever they wanted to use it.
The door opened to a gently lit corridor, grained wooden flooring and smooth plastered walls. The corridor wrapped around the bedroom and all the way to the small room Catherine had hidden the Soames diamonds in. A room which had also undergone a bit of a transformation.
Skye and Star looked around, wide-eyed, at the little room that now contained shelves and three chairs and was cosy and beautiful.
‘This room is now separate from the rest of the secret passageways,’ Summer explained. ‘We thought that the girls might enjoy being able to use the other passageways when we’re ready to show them. The renovations have made them safe and secure and I have promised Theron a thousand times that they won’t get lost in them,’ she assured her sisters. ‘But this room is separate and can only be accessed by us. For the moment.’
Skye and Star nodded. ‘It’s perfect,’ they said together, each taking a seat in one of the chairs.
‘Have you brought them?’ Summer asked.
The girls produced little velvet boxes and placed them on the table in between them. Star had brought the diadem she had worn on her wedding day, Skye the necklace and, with a little bit of a heart-wrench, Summer twisted the beautiful engagement ring from her finger, before replacing her wedding ring.
For the last five years, Summer and her sisters had been talking about the idea of returning the Soames diamonds and Catherine’s journals to the secret room that had kept them safe for so many years. Unaccountably, each of the sisters felt strongly that it was the right thing to do and had decided to leave their own journals and letters for future generations of Soames women.
For a while the sisters talked, caught up, shared the stories of their lives, laughed, cried and loved, until a text from Theron announced their return. The women placed the Soames diamonds in a box on the shelf next to Catherine’s journals, and their own diaries. In the years to come, those shelves would become full with the writings from generations of Soames women, each telling their own story of adversity and triumph, loss, but most of all love.
But, for now, Skye, Star and Summer left the room, locking it behind them and returning to their families, ready and waiting for Mariam and Kyros’s arrival.
Later that night, as Summer got ready for bed, Theron came out of the bathroom, a towel slung low on his hips and drying his hair with another, and she marvelled at just how handsome her husband was. Not once had their attraction dimmed, even through their occasional arguments and their even more occasional hurts, and Summer wanted her husband with the same ferocity as she had on the beach at Piraeus that first time.
Theron’s gaze flickered from her eyes to her ring finger and back again.
‘I’m sorry, I should have said—’
He smiled, knowing and loving, the look in his eyes cutting her off mid-sentence. ‘You didn’t need to,agápi mou,’ he said, kneeling on the bed, tossing the towel back into the bathroom and reaching into the drawer of his bedside table. He produced a small white box she’d not seen before. ‘I know. I see you. And I love you. More than anything in the world, Summer Soames. I am the proudest man alive that you chose me and I will spend every day being worthy of it.’
Love bloomed in Summer’s heart, strong, powerful, fierce and determined. He opened the box to reveal a stunning diamond engagement ring. It was different to the Soames diamond she had worn, but it was just as special to Summer.
Before reaching for it, she placed her hand on her husband’s. ‘Five years ago I went to Greece, looking for a part of me that I knew was missing. A part that had felt missing my entire life. And there, in Athens, I found it. Not Kyros, not my father. But you, Theron Thiakos. You are the other half of me and you will always have me and my heart, in yours.’
That night they made love until the sun crested on the horizon and not one of their family minded that they missed breakfast. Apart from Lykos, who grumbled about it for the rest of the day.
