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Thanasi crossed his arms over his chest, his features showing skepticism. For a moment, Anastasios was struck—by how shitty it felt to be speaking the truth and be disbelieved. A powerful sense of guilt almost felled him.
“Listen, Thanasi, we need to speak. There’s something going on that you should know about.” He heard the words and realized where he was going, and felt a strange bubble of apprehension. But he couldn’t keep these secrets forever. He needed to share the load. Telling Cora had helped, but she was a cousin. No matter how close they were, she had her own parents and siblings; it wasn’t the same. Thanasi understood more closely what this would mean to Maggie.
Anastasios poured two generous measures of scotch then carried them across the room. Before Thanasi had begun to drink, Anastasios began the story. Of Annie, of Ophelia and finally, of Phoebe. He discovered that talking about her felt good. That in the absence of being with her, and being able to touch her, simply saying her name and describing her to his brother sent his insides into a tailspin.
Thanasi’s glass was empty when Anastasios reached the end, and the brothers stared at one another.
“That’s a lot to take in.”
“Yes.” Anastasios winced. “So you see, I might have been absent, but my mind has been engaged in how to handle this, how to protect our mother from the media speculation. It couldn’t come at a worse time.”
“And what have you decided?”
Anastasios looked away. The truth was, since Phoebe had left the yacht, his mind had been running at about an eighth of its usual speed.
“Annie Westbourne is on hold, for now. I’m in negotiations, via Georgios. I can string those out a while. So long as there’s the question of her inheritance, she seems willing to stay quiet.”
“And the younger mistress?”
“I was wrong about her,” Anastasios admitted, frowning. “Tommy told me the source of the story had retracted their report. It was a cash grab, nothing more.” His stomach sank to the ground. All of the ways in which he’d let her down came back to him. All of the things he’d said. The way he’d treated her. He saw it as if from a different perspective and he wanted to shake himself, to reach back through time and somehow alter what he’d done, how he’d acted.
“So there’s no possible harm from her?”
“No.” The word was a guttural admission, heavy with emotions.
Thanasi watched his brother with care. Anastasios was, of all of them, the most like Konstantinos, in many ways. He was famously in charge of his emotions, steady and level-headed, focused on business to the exclusion of all else.
But what if something had changed for him? What if the woman he’d sought to silence had changed something fundamental within Tasso?
“Tell me what happened,” Thanasi said, gently. He saw now what he’d missed at first. His brother was broken, altered. Beyond the grief they all felt, the wheels had come off for Anastasios, and Thanasi knew that the woman on the yacht must be at the heart of that. “Tell me about this girl.”
Anastasios fought temptation for a moment, finishing his scotch then holding the glass in the palm of one hand. He was tempted to excuse himself, to disappear to his room, but something inside of him snapped, and it was then that Anastasios understood: he’d come here because he needed to talk to someone. To have someone help make sense of what had happened. He just hoped Thanasi wouldn’t stand in judgement of Anastasios for too long. Though God knew he deserved it…
Chapter 12
ALMOST AS SOON AS Phoebe and Konstantinos had met, they’d bonded over their grief. Neither was used to sharing, but they each found something in the other that called to them, at just the right moment, and against all odds, they opened up to one another. In a way that defied explanation, they’d been kindred spirits.
Phoebe spoke about Dale, and the loss of his life, but more achingly, the loss of his hope, how her father had beaten it out of him, and Konstantinos spoke of Valentina, the daughter he’d lost when she was only five years old. Without her, their family had never been complete again. He blamed himself, and whenever he saw the pain in his wife’s eyes, he felt rage, because he wasn’t able to make it better. He never could. They had Leonidas, Valentina’s twin, and instead of being able to know gratitude for him, Konstantinos had struggled with feelings of rejection. Why had one twin lived when the other died? How could they keep going, with a Valentina hole in their lives?
Phoebe had thought that coming to England would help her to escape her grief, to outrun it, but it hadn’t. Konstantinos had helped her understand that grief never left you. Eventually, you learned to live alongside it, but never easily, never without pain.
He was right.
And she felt it even more now.
Every morning she woke as though she were drowning, sitting upright, struggling to breathe, her mind casting around for why there was such darkness on the periphery or her vision, and then she remembered, like a cement truck crashing down on her.
She’d fallen in love with a man who’d seen the worst in her, who’d refused to love her back. She’d slept with him, and she’d done the only thing she could—left him—but that didn’t mean she’d stopped loving him.
Life became like a strange two-dimensional image. She stepped through her days as if in grayscale, going from home, to work, and back. She avoided Mrs Langham, didn’t go to the galleries, didn’t speak to anyone.
She was weary. Wearied by life, by loss and love, and by grief.
For weeks, she existed as a shadow person, half hoping she could fade away completely, when all her light had finally dimmed.
“Tasso?”
His mother, wearing a loose, black dress, seemed to float towards him, an anxious smile on her face. He braced, as he had every time they’d been near one another. He hated that Konstantinos had cheated on her, he hated that he knew, and his mother didn’t. And that he couldn’t tell her. At least, not yet. Not when she looked so weak and desperate.
