CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I woke up the next morning to a soft light flooding the room and a very vague recollection of Dimitri carrying me to the bedroom at some point. But the bed next to me was empty and for a moment I wondered if last night had been real. Had Dimitri and I really made love and confessed love to each other? I saw a distinctly blondish brown hair on the pillow next to me and smiled. It had been real. I glanced around the room for him, but he wasn’t there.

I got up, totally naked, wrapped the sheet around me, and strolled out to the veranda. The sun was barely out. The light was soft and hazy, and in the distance the sea looked quiet with the slightest bit of mist hanging over it. And there he was, sitting on the wall looking at the sea. He looked unreal.

“Dimitri?” I called out. He turned around and smiled at me and my heart swelled. He walked over and kissed me on the forehead.

“Ready for your last stop on this adventure?” he asked with a small smile. It seemed slightly sad, and I wondered if he was also wondering about what was going to happen to us when this adventure came to an end.

We were speeding across the sea again. It looked even more spectacular than it had yesterday. Although I was mainly staring at Dimitri, not the view. It wasn’t long before we came to a small dock on yet another beautiful-looking island. Its only occupants were a few old-looking fishing boats tied to the pier. But before docking, Dimitri slowed the boat and came and sat next to me. He didn’t look at me for the longest time, and a feeling rose in my stomach. This time it wasn’t giddy butterflies, but a sense of dread and foreboding.

He turned slowly, and when I saw the look emblazoned across his face, I froze. The light in his eyes looked like it had been switched off and a cloud of something serious and dark hung over him. It made me shiver. Overwhelming nerves chewed and gnawed at me. This could only mean one thing.

“Just say it.” My voice quivered. In my heart, I knew exactly what he was going to say.

Dimitri continued to look at me. He seemed dumbstruck.

“I’ll say it then.” I took a big breath and steadied myself. “The private investigator phoned and he says there’s no way of getting hold of my father? That’s what you were trying to warn me about last night.” I felt the sting of salty tears forming in my eyes. “I’ll never meet him.”

A cold, scratchy feeling clawed its way through my body. I knew I had said that it didn’t really matter—that I’d gotten to know him already. But meeting him would have been the cherry on top to this trip. It was, after all, the reason I was here.

“Dimitri?” I asked again. He wasn’t speaking, and the silence and absence of words was making the whole thing even worse. “Talk to me,” I begged with a slight hysteria in my voice.

“Jane…” I’d never heard him say my name with such sadness. I didn’t like it. “There was no investigator.”

“What do you mean?”

“No one was looking for your father.”

“What?” I shrieked as my skin prickled. “But he’s been messaging you, you spoke to him…”

He shook his head. “No. I never spoke to one.”

“But you did. You were on the phone the other morning and you were talking to him. I heard you.”

“I lied. I’m sorry, it wasn’t him.”

My mind was swimming and spinning and the thoughts were all so messy that I didn’t understand what he was saying. “I don’t get this, at all. At the airport, you said you spoke to an investigator, you told him everything, and he said he could find my father and that’s why I stayed. He was going to look for him while I was here… I don’t understand.”

He paused for the longest time. It felt like the pause went on forever and that there was never going to be an end to this torturous moment. It felt like every last bit of breath was being sucked out of my body, and my legs began to feel weak underneath me. Luckily I was sitting.

Dimitri pulled something out of his pocket and handed it over. It was a few of those old photos that had been hanging on his wall. “Turn one over,” he said.

I turned one over and looked. Some Greek had been scribbled on the back. A name maybe? “I can’t read this. What is this?” I demanded. My voice was shrill and high and bordering on a yell. I looked at the back of the other ones.

“Xexos Dimitri Constantinides.” He paused. “This is the Dimitri you came looking for.”

“What?” I turned the picture back around and gazed at it. The photo was of the pool in the rocks that we had just been in yesterday. “I don’t… this makes no sense… I…?” I looked at the next photo: the sunset over Oia. The next was of the open blue seas and the shipwreck we had visited. I kept flipping and more and more familiar images come into focus: winery, ruins, small streets covered in bougainvillea… I had been to all these places. “What is going on?” I was almost in tears now.

“Your father brought us together.”

I shook my head. “Stop speaking in Greek fucking philosophical crap. Tell me what is going on. Facts. Explanations. What?”

“The old woman in our village, the woman that used to tell me all the amazing stories that made me want to travel? She is your grandmother. The stories she told me were about your father.”

My mouth fell open. I turned one of the pictures over in my hands again and ran my fingertips over his name; it had been written so long ago. “Are you sure? I mean, how can you know. He might not be… it’s too much of a coincidence, it’s—”

“Fate. Not a coincidence. Fate.” He tried to reach out and touch me but I pulled away. “That day when you were at my house and you told me you were looking for your father, that he was sailing the seas and you told me your mother’s name, I… I wasn’t certain at first. I remember the old woman telling me he had these different-colored eyes. I was young, I thought that he was a pirate, maybe he wore an eye patch, I didn’t really understand properly. And then I went to the photos and turned them over and saw his middle name. And then I saw this…”

He handed me another photo, and my heart crashed against my chest. Adrenaline surged in my veins, making me feel drunk. A bright-red boat was docked in the water, and my mother’s name was written across it. PHOEBE. The dock looked strangely like this one. I looked up. Our boat had floated closer now and I could make out more details. And then I saw it.

And when I did, an electric charge shot through my body. For a moment it buzzed and screamed in my ears and burned my skin and evaporated all the moisture in my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. I gasped a few times, trying to get air into my lungs. Through the loud internal buzz I vaguely heard Dimitri say, “Wait. I have to tell you something.” But I didn’t wait. I just flung myself off the boat without even thinking about it.

“Jane, wait. I need to tell you…” His voice faded out completely as I swam as fast as I could for the shore and the boat. Eventually the water got shallower and I half ran, half swam there. The force of the water felt like nothing and I moved through it as if I was running in a vacuum. I climbed onto the pier and ran for the boat, and when I go to it, I came to a complete halt and stared.

PHOEBE.

There it was in orange cursive on the side of the red boat. I felt slightly woozy from the frenzied swim, but I had no control over myself anymore. I was acting on complete instinct again and my mind was simply floating along, observing everything that was happening.

“Whose boat is this?” I heard myself scream at the top of my lungs. “Whose boat is this?” The scream grew louder and more hysterical until someone rushed up to me. An old fisherman appeared out of nowhere. He brought his face close to mine and as he looked at me, he gasped as if he had seen a ghost. Without saying a word he grabbed me by the arm and started dragging me across the pier.

“Wait! Jane!” Dimitri yelled and I heard a splash, as he must have dived into the water, too.

I wasn’t going to wait. I couldn’t. Instead I went with this man who was now dragging me up some stairs. They wound their way up and onto the small paved streets of a village. He pulled me down a small street of tightly packed houses and finally came to stop at a small blue door.

He knocked frantically and called out in Greek. The door finally swung open and I looked straight into a mirror. A young girl stared right back at me with eyes identical to my own. There was a small moment, a pause when the two of us just looked at each other, and then without warning she threw her arms around me and pulled me into a hug.

She held on to me tightly, and it was only after a few seconds that I realized she was crying. Her body was heaving and shaking in my arms and the strangest feeling came over me. I rubbed her back in a comforting manner and she held on to me even tighter. I knew this girl. Somewhere inside I knew her. Her smell and touch and the sound of her cries were all so familiar to me and I felt an instant connection to her. A deep one that swelled up inside me and made me hug her even tighter. She finally pulled away and looked right at me.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry… I’m so, so sorry…” She continued to repeat the words as if she were a record, stuck in a perpetual loop.

She called out in Greek and suddenly another, older woman was at the door. Her mother, I presumed. She looked at me and the color drained from her face. She held my gaze and then the tears started streaming down her face, too. This wasn’t exactly the welcome I had expected; I had expected it to be emotional, but this seemed over the top. I turned and looked at the fisherman who’d brought me here; the look on his face was also one of devastation. He looked up at me and shook his head, something flashing in his eyes that I did not recognize.

My eyes drifted back to the two women in the doorway. They had been joined by more people now. Each of them looked consumed by sadness.

“Come in,” the older woman finally said in a thick accent. This whole moment was so surreal. As I stepped inside the house I heard Dimitri’s voice and looked back at him. He looked up at me and mouthed something; it looked like “sorry” but I couldn’t be sure. I turned back around and disappeared into the house.

The older woman guided me toward the couch. Everyone else had left the room, as if they had been told to. The woman lowered herself on the couch next to me, and I could see that her hands were shaking.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Jane,” I whispered. Our words tumbled out into the eerie silence that was now filling the room.

“I have imagined this moment so many times before,” she said softly. “He has been waiting for you to return for so many years now. He always knew that you would find him one day.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Dimitri?”

The woman nodded slowly and looked me straight in my eyes. “You have his eyes.” She smiled up at me. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen, and I wondered what was behind it.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

As I said those words, her eyes began to tear up and…

I just knew. I knew.

It was written in the solemn tearstained lines of her face. I could feel it in the heaviness that had descended on the room and the pain that was searing my chest.

“He’s dead?” I asked.

“I’m so sorry.”