Finikia, Santorini, Greece
August 2023
IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY, you can see it. A scar, on the underside of a milky throat, just beneath the thin stretch of skin. It started as a pink gash but is now silvery white, a gathered burst that resembles a stretch mark. Someone would really have to know where to look, and nobody ever did. It’s a nice fiction, that we know the person we marry better than anyone, but the truth is that we know the person they want us to know.
I stare down the hillside into the rolling blue of the Aegean, pulling my pashmina tightly around my shoulders. It gets cool here at night. Never cold, but cool enough to need an extra layer. My skin has adapted to the climate, browning a bit in color, like a toasted marshmallow that has bubbled in the heat. The air is salty, and I can smell the cherry tomatoes I’ve been growing, thick-skinned and sun-warmed. Tomorrow, we’ll pick them for a salad.
My phone vibrates in my hand. I smile at the photos that come through. They’re from Camille, screenshots from June’s Instagram account. Thought you might want to see these, she writes. I scroll through the images. June and Kyle in a Brooklyn park, his hands cradling the dome of her stomach, her eyes closed, but her smile relaxed and genuine. A close-up of their entwined fingers forming a heart over the baby bump. June by herself, tossing her head back in a laugh. June with her head bent, like she’s communing with her unborn child; Kyle in the background, grinning wildly.
They look happy. More than that—June looks absolutely joyful. Even though part of me is sad she didn’t get to have this same future with Josh—married life, babies—I’m still happy for her. Josh treated her well in their short time together. Maybe David and Camille were right, and he was never the problem at all.
My wife sweeps down beside me, her long tunic wrapping itself dramatically around her legs. She places two small glasses of honeyed vinsanto wine on the table, one in front of me and one in front of herself. Our only ritual, the only shred of routine, is that we have none. Our days are spontaneous and unplanned. Sometimes we take a sailboat out, and others, we walk through the terraced vineyards near our home, down steep alleys and stairs that hurt our aging knees, and we bike the countryside, baskets filled with tomatoes and green cucumbers that will later turn yellow. We make love, and we grow wine grapes, both of our hands now stained. I’ve taken up sketching and painting; a few pieces of my art are on display in the local galleries we frequent, a small connection I share with my late mother. I drink the natural wine Emilia has taught me to love. When she told me my life, our life, could be better than I even let myself imagine, she wasn’t lying.
We had traveled the world together, but it was Santorini—with its whitewashed Cycladic architecture and volcanic beaches, the sapphire basin of the caldera—that gave me a shivery sensation, a full-bodied knowledge that this was where I belonged.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Emilia says when I pass her the phone. Her hand rests on my shoulder. “She looks radiant.”
“She really does.”
“Kieran went down to that bar in Oia again,” Emilia says. “There’s a girl he likes. Maybe he’s in love. Anyway, don’t expect him home tonight.”
I shake my head and give a soft laugh. “I never do.” I worry about my baby, but not the same way I had worried about Josh and Andrew. He isn’t a baby anymore: he’s a grown man, one who was raised lovingly and well. He has been to visit me several times when he’s been on summer break from college, and he’s here for another two weeks.
I enjoy his company immensely: sitting with him on the terrace, having genuine conversations, hearing about his life and telling him about mine, watching his easy smile and round blue eyes. He’s still finding himself, but he’s happy and free-spirited and, above all, loved.
Emilia sips her wine as her hand migrates to my face and slips under my jawline. She knows about the scar, the one from a bike riding accident when I was a kid: Camille plowing into the back of my new princess bike with hers, sending me flying over the handlebars and onto the asphalt. The shock had knocked the wind out of me, leaving me gasping for air. I’d landed on a rock, which had managed to scrape my throat like a fingernail.
I remembered David once, in our early days, navigating the terrain of my throat with his fingertips, a path they’d take hundreds of times. He must have noticed the scar, but never asked for the story. That was David: always keeping things light, never wanting the gore.
When my first ultrasound showed two babies, identical twins sharing the same placenta, David had to sit down. Twins. I wasn’t expecting that, he said as we both processed the shock. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Camille and I had grown up in matching outfits, getting mixed up even by people who knew us and constantly being stopped in the street by total strangers. You should get them into movies, one woman had said, handing my mom her card and introducing herself as a casting agent.
My mom never called her. We weren’t interested in performing anyway. Not yet. Our performance of a lifetime was still decades away.
David didn’t understand, and even I didn’t at the time. I didn’t realize that twins do run in families, but on the mother’s side.
Emilia’s hand rests lazily on mine as we both stare into the distance, at the sun, a bright ball in a reddening sky. She stretches out her legs and tips her face back.
I need to find a way to make this work, I had said to Camille all those years ago, and I hadn’t, but she had figured out a way to change everything. Most people don’t get a do-over. I had been on a different path before Emilia came back into my life.
The idea had been Camille’s. I never would have thought of it, but she was the mastermind of the two of us. She always had a plan for herself. She was ready to have a family. To settle down, to raise children.
“Hear me out,” Emilia whispered to me the day she showed up at my rented bungalow, the two of us huddled at the kitchen table. “What if you came with me, and Camille—what if she stayed, as you? Just for a few weeks, maybe a month.”
I laughed. “That’s crazy. And I’d never ask Camille to do that.”
Emilia paused. “What if it was her idea?”
It made sense, in a way, after I got over the initial shock of it. Camille loved my boys like they were her own, with a fierce devotion and natural maternal instinct. Her adoration for Kieran was unparalleled. When I approached her about what she and Emilia had talked about, a tiny smile played on her lips.
“Being with the boys—getting to help you raise Kieran—that’s all I want. To be someone’s mother.”
“You can still meet someone and have a baby,” I said.
“It’s too late for that. Even if I met someone now… it’s not going to happen.” She didn’t look sad, just matter-of-fact.
“Well, you can adopt,” I said. “You could have your own family.”
“But I already do,” she said. “Your boys—they’re my family too. My blood. This is for both of us. I’d put everything into raising Kieran. I’d make him my whole life. And you know how much I love Josh and Andrew—I’d be there for them too. Forever.”
“You’re always traveling,” I said. “I didn’t think you even wanted to stay in one place.”
“I can still travel,” she said. “We can have the best of both worlds.”
We were both quiet. She put her hand on mine.
“I’ve figured out a way for you to be in two places at once. Take the chance.”
I spent the next week in a fitful sleep, trying to figure out if I could actually do it, if I could really leave everything behind and let my sister step in to help raise my son. It’s irresponsible, I thought at first. It’s selfish. It felt impossible to leave him for a month, but more impossible to stay.
“Everyone will know,” I said, but Camille didn’t think so, and she proved it to me. One day, when it was just her and me and Kieran at the bungalow, she dressed in my clothes, air-dried her hair like I did, put on the Burt’s Bees lip balm I always wore. She opened her arms for Kieran, and he toddled into them.
“Mama,” he said in his tiny little voice, and those two syllables broke my heart open.
The rest of the logistics were almost too easy. David and I barely had any contact anymore. My life was in Mill Valley, not Napa; I didn’t see any of the same people. After Michelle’s death, I had no friends. Our fellow vintners we had spent years growing close to wanted nothing to do with us. And Camille was a wanderer: she had random jobs, never a long-term career, and with her apartment sold, nothing tethered her to one place. When I was with Emilia, she would be here in Mill Valley, and when I was with Kieran, she could travel on her own.
What really made up my mind was the panic I felt about seeing Josh and Andrew again, when they’d be home for the holidays. I loved them so much, but that love was no longer enough. They deserved somebody who believed in them the way Camille did. It was as simple as it was complicated: I doubted my sons too much to properly protect them. Camille only ever thought the best of them. She was the right person to keep them safe—and more than that, she wanted to.
It wasn’t that my boys didn’t bring out the best in me, because, in many ways, they did. They had made me a more sensitive person, softer and more patient and empathetic. It was that I didn’t bring out the best in them. I would never stop picking at the scabs of the past, never be able to let us move on. Michelle would never not be on my mind. Whether she was upset that night because of my sons, or because of David and her mother. Whether her drunken state was what led her to the pond, or if it was something—someone—else.
The arrangement worked well for the first few years. We switched off every couple of months, but the more time I spent with Emilia in Croatia, the more devastated I was to leave her. I started staying for longer stretches; a couple of times, Camille brought Kieran to visit us, and we kept up the ruse that Camille was his mother, I, his aunt.
Camille and I both knew a clock was ticking. Kieran was almost five, and we would no longer be able to get away with switching. He would know the difference, or one of us would inevitably slip up—he had school, friends, activities, a routine. It was becoming too much to handle. Josh and Andrew were adults now: they had graduated college, with jobs and lives of their own, and we saw them less and less. But Kieran was the one who intensely deserved not just a mother to raise him, but one who would give him everything.
“What do you want to do?” Camille asked gently, and as much as I loved Kieran—and I did love him, so much that it made me want to burst—I knew the answer. We were both happier being the other. And thus, he would be better off with me as his aunt, still a part of his life, though from a distance, and Camille as his mother, the rock of his day-to-day existence. The decision had been made. Maybe it had been made a long time ago.
It would be plausible that Camille could uproot her life and move away to be with Emilia Rosser. They’d been in Napa at the same time; we could easily spin a story about how they met at the winery and kept in touch, falling in love over time.
We’ve been back to Napa and Mill Valley countless times over the years, Emilia and I: holidays and birthdays and lacrosse tournaments; weeklong summer vacations; Kieran’s grade school and high school graduations; Andrew’s wedding to Sadie; David’s funeral after his sudden heart attack, which came as such a shock. And another funeral, for Josh—my Josh, the boy I should have protected. After his death, I fell into a very dark place. I’d questioned everything. Marrying David. Divorcing him. Giving up my family and the person I’d been as a mother. When Michelle had died, I’d been devastated. When Josh died, I couldn’t ignore the feeling that the two deaths were tied together somehow, a chill I’ve never quite been able to shake.
On one of our phone calls—night my time, afternoon Camille’s—my sister told me what David had said upon finding out Camille had decided to travel the world with another woman.
I’m not surprised, he’d said when she dropped Kieran off for his time with David and told him the news. After Paul left, I wondered. Good for her. Camille laughed when she told me the next part. Emilia Rosser, he’d said, shaking his head, a gesture I could picture so well. It’s a small world. Almost like we set them up.
I smile, the evening breeze caressing my face, bringing with it the smell of bougainvillea. Bordering our traditional cave home are flower boxes, our unconventional garden where we grow sunflowers and geraniums, plants that thrive under the hot torch of the sun.
Good for her. It is good for me, this life, better than I ever could have imagined, even if it took me a long time to get here.
Josh’s death will always haunt me, and so will Michelle’s, because on some level, I feel like I could have prevented both. Between my visits home, Camille kept me apprised of what was happening with my sons. She was able to get Andrew to come home for Christmas, and we were both there when he brought Sadie home for the first time. The boys never reconciled before it was too late, but Camille maintained meaningful relationships with both of them. And I remained in their lives as their aunt.
I had witnessed Abby’s humiliation, and lived the agony of Michelle’s death. I had been consumed by those girls, the ones I thought my sons were responsible for hurting. But the women Josh and Andrew ended up with, Sadie and June, found true happiness with my sons. I’ll never know if it was Camille’s influence on my boys that made them better people. Or if they were already good people, and I was the one whose brain couldn’t accept that accidents happened, that coincidences existed.
“It’s getting chilly,” Emilia says, the freckled skin of her arms turning to goose bumps. “I’m going in. Are you coming?”
“Soon,” I say, kissing her hand.
Not many people would understand what I did, and even fewer would approve of it. Not because I chose to leave my husband, but because I chose to leave my children—because I wasn’t capable of being the person they needed me to be. I went across the world in selfish pursuit of my own happiness, but the most maternal thing I ever did was put my sons’ happiness first and leave them with the mother they deserved. I question my choices every day but always come to the same conclusion. Camille helped to restore Andrew’s confidence, and maybe he wouldn’t have had a family of his own if not for her. Maybe Josh never would have met June and wanted to settle down. Kieran, though—his was the life that bore the least of my fingerprints, only my DNA, and so far, he’s thriving. I love that he visits me so often in Greece, even though he thinks of me as his aunt.
I can look at myself in the mirror now, at my sun-beaten cheeks and forehead thatched with wavy creases, my gray hair, my well-earned laugh lines, the brackets around my mouth, the way my lips have thinned and feathered. I can look at myself and see the road map of my past. And more importantly, I can see my future, can see the future for all of us, one where we’re exactly where we are supposed to be. I can define what I want, and what I don’t.
I’ve learned that secrets might be inevitable. In the past, I’ve kept them, believing it was in everyone else’s best interests to stay silent. The secret I’m keeping now—the one I’ll keep for the rest of my life—is for the people closest to me, but it’s also for myself. The truth would destroy us all.
As the reddening orb of the sun drops into the caldera, dragging the night down behind it like a shade, I can’t help but smile. It was painful to say goodbye to a vision of the future I had thought I wanted; in a way, it was like a death, but a necessary one. The past is always with me. But the present is where I live now, in the beautiful mess of it.
David was the love of my old life, and Emilia is the love of my new one. Here I am, proof that second chances exist. Proof that love can appear after loss, after tragedy. The view from here might not be perfect, but I never needed it to be.