by Kate Hewitt
“That must have been very painful,” Eleni said quietly. “But perhaps he was not comfortable telling you how he felt. Men are like that.”
“I know, and I know Simon, and he’s never been emotional, but I needed more from him than he was willing to give. I wanted to talk about it, but he just shut down when I tried. Then he seemed impatient, as if he expected I should be over it all just weeks afterwards and was annoyed that I wasn’t. That hurt as much as anything else. I just got more and more depressed, and he got more and more angry. It was a terrible cycle, and the only way I knew of breaking it was to leave.” Ava swallowed down the sobs, forced herself to continue. “My whole life started falling apart. I couldn’t keep up with work—I was an art teacher, but with the proposed budget cuts my job was scrapped anyway. When I learned about this place, I thought it seemed like the best solution. Time apart to really think about what we wanted out of life.”
“And do you think time apart will draw you close together again?”
“Not any more.” Ava gave a twisted smile. “Even though that’s what I still want. I think.” She thought of that painful conversation when she’d asked Simon for a separation. I think it’s best… for a little while… we don’t seem to be getting on, do we?
Simon had stared at her for a long silent moment before he’d given an indifferent little shrug. “If that’s what you want,” he’d said, and Ava had wanted to scream that of course it wasn’t, but she was running out of options. Out of hope.
Eleni patted Ava’s hand. “Why don’t you ask him to visit you here?”
“I think he’s moved on, Eleni.”
“You don’t know that.”
“He went on a date with my best friend.” Yet even as she snapped out the words, she questioned them. Simon hadn’t actually said it was a date, and Julie might not have told her simply because she didn’t want to make her upset, as she had been before. And she had, more or less, gone on a date with Andreas…
As if she could sense the nature of Ava’s thoughts, Eleni spoke again, patting her hand. “Ask him, Ava,” Eleni advised. “Ask him to visit. Don’t throw it all away simply because of disappointment. Everyone will disappoint you at some time or another. It is not the same as betrayal.”
Even, Ava thought sadly, if it felt the same.
19
October 1942
The soldiers trudged silently through the woods as day broke all around them with a chorus of birdsong and pale shafts of sunlight filtering through the trees. Dimitrios and the one Greek SOE agent, whose name Sophia knew now was Marinos, walked ahead, sometimes slowing to confer quietly between themselves. Numb with fatigue, Sophia could barely manage to put one foot in front of another. She was even too tired to feel the fear that lurked in the corners of her heart and the fringes of her mind, knowing they were walking right into a nest of communist agitators, including the volatile Velouchiotis himself.
After half an hour of walking, the soldier called Alex fell into step beside her. Sophia snuck a sideways glance at him, noticing again his friendly eyes and ruddy complexion. He seemed so… ordinary, and yet so foreign at the same time. She felt very conscious of his close presence, and her heart raced. She looked away again.
“What brought you into all this?” he asked in slow, hesitant Greek. She was startled by it, and he gave her a cheeky grin. “I do know a little of your language.”
His pronunciation, she thought, was awful. Still Sophia smiled and nodded her thanks.
“So? How did you come to be here?”
She shrugged. She could hardly explain that she’d had no choice. “We must do what we can,” she finally said, and Alex nodded.
“My thoughts exactly.”
She gazed at him, and saw that he was smiling, whistling tunelessly under his breath. Anyone would have thought he was going for a stroll around the village square rather than tramping through enemy-occupied forest, on his way to a mission that could mean the end of his life. “Are you scared?” she whispered in Greek, and Alex turned to smile at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Yes, very much so.” He switched to English then, speaking slowly in the hopes that she would understand. “But I’m used to it. I’m an explosives engineer.”
Sophia shook her head, the words meaningless.
Alex grinned again. “I make the bombs.”
“Bombs?”
His eyes twinkling, he leaned closer and whispered so his breath tickled her ear, “Boom!”
Sophia clapped a hand to her mouth as she gazed back at him. She understood that. If she took Alex’s meaning, not only was he at risk of being found and killed by the Nazis, but his very profession could end his life most horribly. Another thought slid into her mind.
Boom.
They were going to blow something up. That was why the men were here, that was why they had come. What could it be? What was their target?
She glanced back at Alex; he was still smiling, still whistling under his breath. He saw her looking at him and winked, making Sophia blush and quickly look away. No man had ever been so forward with her. In her village, she would have been insulted and shamed, yet here she felt an unfamiliar and wary thrill, a surprising frisson of pleasure.
“Don’t worry,” he said in a low, laughing voice, switching back to Greek again. “I haven’t blown anyone up yet.”
Sophia glanced back, smiling shyly, his cheer and humor impossible to ignore. She felt her own spirits lift. Some would think him a fool for not being more cautious, more afraid.
And yet wasn’t this a kind of courage? It was so far from what Sophia felt she was capable of herself but realizing that Alex must know what he was facing and yet he still chose to smile and joke made her heart swell with a surprised admiration.
The man was no fool.
They walked for most of the day, through rugged hills and dense pines, deeper into the mountains where Velouchiotis made his camp. Still aching with fatigue and numb with cold, Sophia could not keep the fear that had been crouching in the corners of her heart from threatening to overwhelm her completely as they drew closer to their destination. She had no idea what lay ahead; she knew only that Perseus had not warned her about this. She wondered if he’d even known about it.
It happened suddenly. One minute they were walking slowly, steadily forward, the next they were surrounded. The men melted from the trees, emerging from the shadows, rifles held in their hands. Rifles, Sophia saw, that were pointed at the SOE agents. At her.
Everyone stopped, and when one of the guerrillas barked for them to put their hands in the air, no one hesitated, not even Dimitrios. Sophia’s heart started to thud with hard, heavy beats.
“We come in peace,” Dimitrios said. He sounded both irritated and afraid, and Sophia silently prayed that he would show more sense than swagger for once. “Velouchiotis is expecting us.”
“Major Velouchiotis to you, boy,” one of the guerrillas sneered, and Sophia closed her eyes. God help them all if they had to entrust their lives to Dimitrios Atrikes.
“Major Velouchiotis,” Dimitrios said, a bit sulkily. “He is expecting us. He knows of these men. They come to help.”
“We’ll see what he knows,” the leader of the group said, and with a brusque nod at his men, they started forward. Sophia felt the cold, hard butt of a gun in the small of her back, and she stumbled forward, stifling a cry, her whole body numb with terror.
The guerrillas surrounded them, rifles still aimed, as they herded them towards Velouchiotis’s camp. Sophia glanced at Alex; he wasn’t smiling now. Yet he saw her glance and quietly, stealthily, he reached out his hand and touched her fingers with his own, squeezing briefly, imparting strength.
Tears stung Sophia’s eyes and she nodded once, accepting his encouragement even as her body and mind roiled with fear. Was this going to be the end of them all?
They walked for half an hour with guns at their backs; it was the longest thirty minutes of her life. When they finally came to Vel
ouchiotis’s camp, nothing more than a few tents pitched around an old, half-abandoned dwelling in a clearing on the mountainside, she nearly fell to her knees. Surely her legs could not hold her up much longer. They both ached and trembled.
With the men surrounding them and the guns still trained on their backs, no one dared move or speak. Then a man strode into the clearing. He had a bushy black beard and surprisingly sad, thoughtful eyes; he wore a leather coat over a wool blazer, and a rifle across his shoulder. He glanced at the sorry little group, his eyes narrowing.
“Who is this?” he demanded, and the head of the guerrillas answered.
“We found them in the woods. British men—they say they come to help us.”
“Help us?” Velouchiotis sneered. “What British men help us? They bow the knee to the king-in-exile. I have no need or want of them.” He spat on the ground, and then moved his gaze over each one of them; as he did so, his eyes no longer looked sad. They glittered coldly, like the eyes of a snake. “How do I know they’re not spies?”
Sophia glanced at Dimitrios and saw that his face had turned a terrible chalky white. She realized yet again how young and foolish he really was; he’d probably never even met Velouchiotis before. He’d acted with his usual reckless bravado, and now she and these Englezoi would pay the price. She wondered hollowly just how high that price would be.
Velouchiotis turned back to his man, nodding once. “No need or want,” he repeated, spitting the words out with a kind of vicious satisfaction. “Execute them.”
20
Now
Ava opened the front door of her house and kicked off her shoes with a grateful sigh of relief. She’d been out at the school teaching again, and the hike back home made her feet ache.
She sank onto her sofa with another sigh and reached for her phone. She was checking for messages far too often these days, and she couldn’t pretend it was for any other reason than Simon. She wondered how she could expect or even hope he would call after their last conversation. She didn’t even know what she would say if he did call, or if she’d be able to speak past the lump of anger and pain that always rose up in her throat when she thought of him.
The phone, pressed against her chest, emitted a buzz that vibrated all the way through her. Her heart seeming to leap right into her throat, she checked the screen. It was her mother.
“Hi, Mum.”
“Ava!” Her mother’s warm, cheerful voice flooded through her, and strangely made that lump intensify. She closed her eyes, tried to swallow and speak. “Sorry I haven’t called—”
“I’ve been worried about you.” Her mother spoke with concern rather than reproach. “Wondering how you’re getting on. And of course I want to hear all about the house and the village—your grandmother would never even say where she was from, you know. She wouldn’t speak of Greece at all.”
“I can believe it. No one here seems to want to talk about the war.”
“No one? You’ve met people, then?”
“Yes, quite a few people. Everyone’s very friendly…” She stopped suddenly, because the lump in her throat had grown again, and she couldn’t speak at all. Tears stung her eyes and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.
“Ava? You’re all right, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” She managed to squeeze the words out, and thankfully her voice sounded normal. Almost.
Her mother let out a sorrowful little sigh. “Is it very difficult, being on your own?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Sweetheart…” Her mother’s sympathetic murmur made Ava straighten, take a clogged breath.
“I’m OK. Just a bit emotional.”
“That’s understandable.”
Is it? Ava wondered. A year later maybe she did need to move on. Maybe she needed to let go, as terrifying as that prospect seemed. “Actually,” she said, almost brisk now, “I’ve found out quite a bit about your mother. Well, that’s somewhat of an exaggeration. But a schoolteacher here is putting an oral history together, and she’s talked to some people who remember Granny.”
“Really? What do they say?”
“Well…” Ava paused, wondering if she should tell her mother about Angelika. The truth could hurt, and if her mother had never even known she had an aunt…
“Ava?”
“Did you know she had a sister? Angelika?”
“A sister?” Her mother sounded shocked. “No, she never said—she never said anything except that her mother had died young and there was no one left in Greece.”
“Maybe Angelika had died then too. I don’t know what happened to her. Only that someone said she was like a butterfly.”
“A butterfly,” Susan repeated, her voice sounding distant in a way that had nothing to do with the kilometers separating them. “How strange.”
“I know.”
“And what is the house like?”
“A bit—rustic. But livable.”
They chatted for a few more minutes, with Ava telling her a bit about Iousidous. She left out any mention of Andreas, and neither of them spoke of Simon.
“Ava,” her mother said as they were finishing the call. “Be careful.”
“Careful? I’m not in any danger, Mum—”
“I know that, but digging into the past can be… painful. And you’ve had enough pain, haven’t you? There’s a reason why my mother never spoke of Greece. Discovering it might not be the cozy little mystery it seems.”
“I know that.” She thought of Parthenope’s tears, her agitation since Ava had arrived. “I know that,” she repeated quietly. “But sometimes you need to talk about what happened, whatever it was, to move on.”
“But your grandmother’s dead—”
“There are other people who remember her, Mum. Other people who might need to move on.”
Including her.
Yet how did she begin, Ava wondered after she’d finished the call. She sat for a moment, her chin resting on her drawn-up knees, the house silent all around her. Then, faintly, she heard a scratching sound from the kitchen. She went to look and found the rail-thin cat with the yellow eyes mewling by the back door.
“Have I actually tamed you?” Ava asked as she opened the door and the cat came in, swishing its tail as it wound through her legs. She emptied some of last night’s chicken into a bowl and put it on the floor. The cat fell upon it greedily, eating every morsel and cleaning its whiskers afterwards as Ava crouched on the floor next to the bowl.
Then suddenly it jumped up on her bent knees, rubbed its bony head against her shoulder and purred. Tears stung her eyes and she stroked its head, scratched behind its ears. A moment later the cat jumped off her lap and slipped through the open door, disappearing into the tall grass with a last swish of its tail.
Ava sat there for a moment, still smiling, wondering if she needed to worry about fleas, when she heard her phone ring from the sitting room.
Simon…
She hurried to answer, felt a flicker of disappointment when she saw it was Andreas.
“Ava? Have you seen Kalista?”
“Kalista? No, why?”
Andreas’s voice was gruff with worry, his accent more pronounced than usual.
“She’s missing,” he said. “She didn’t return from school, and when I called her teacher, she said she has been absent all day.” His voice rose in a father’s anguished cry. “I have no idea where she could be.”
Kalista… gone? Could she have bunked off for the day in Lamia? When Ava suggested as much to Andreas, he rejected the idea.
“That’s not like her. None of this is like her. I’m worried…” He stopped, but Ava thought she knew what he’d been going to say. He was worried she’d run away, perhaps all the way to Athens. She forced herself to think logically. Reasonably. As Simon would.
“Does she have a phone?”
“No, she doesn’t. I didn’t want her calling her friends at all hours…” He sounded both defensive and apologet
ic, and Ava wondered if he was realizing just how controlling he’d been. She’d known Andreas was strict, but a mobile phone for a fifteen-year-old made sense right about now, when he so desperately needed to contact her.
“How did she get to school?”
“She didn’t go to school today—”
“I know,” Ava said, her calm somewhat restored, “but you thought she went to school, so how does she get to school usually?”
He let out a ragged sigh. “I drove her, right to the school gates, as I always do. She got out and waved and I drove away before she even went in.” He let out another sigh, this one an angry huff. “She didn’t go in, I see that now.”
“And how does she get home, usually?”
“The bus. It lets her off on the main road, about half a kilometer from home. She walks the rest of the way.”
Ava was silent, wanting to comfort Andreas in his worry and fear, yet not knowing what he wanted or needed to hear. She knew all about the fear of losing someone precious: the hollow feeling in your stomach, the disbelief that this could actually be happening to you. That bad things, the worst thing, were possible.
Yet Kalista was fifteen, not a baby, and she was only missing. She might already be on her way home, happy to have played truant for the day.
“Where do you think she would go if—”
“If she ran away?” Andreas filled in bitterly, his accent so pronounced in his distress that Ava could barely make out his words. “I don’t know. She has a few friends in Lamia. I don’t know their names or addresses. I don’t know anything.”
Ava heard the recrimination in Andreas’s voice. She knew all about that too. Blaming yourself could feel productive; sometimes it felt like the only thing you could do.
“She might have just wanted some time by herself—”
“She’s fifteen—”
“Which is old enough to get around by herself,” Ava pointed out, trying to stay practical. Someone needed to be. Funny it was her; that was usually Simon’s role. She was the one having fits. “Have you rung the police?’