Chapter 42
42
THE BAROS’S APARTMENT, KASSIOPI
Molly’s hands were shaking as she held the notepaper between her fingers. It didn’t seem real. None of it seemed real. Not the look on Magdalena’s face the moment they walked through the apartment door, not the way she had placed a stack of envelopes into her hands, nor the way Christos had shepherded her gently out here onto the patio, pulling out a chair, sitting her down, turning on the light as darkness fell, offering her tsipouro . But from the second she had seen her Aunt Maud’s handwriting on the letters, something inside her had connected all the dots.
‘Is she OK? Do you think?’ Magdalena asked in a whisper of large decibels.
‘What do you think?’ Christos replied. ‘Would you be OK?’
‘I… can hear you, you know,’ Molly said, her voice wavering with emotion. They were standing on the threshold between the balcony and the living area inside, where they had been since she started going through the letters. There had been so many, going back years, cataloguing her life like a Wikipedia page…
‘Would you like us to leave you alone?’ Christos asked.
‘No,’ Molly said. ‘I can’t read everything now. I just need to… process what I have read and try to take it in, you know.’
She didn’t know. Not really. It wasn’t news that could be so easily absorbed. You had the bare factual knowledge of something, yet there were so many other elements that made up the final picture. All the years and years of deceit that she now knew her Aunt Maud was also involved in. And, as for her mum… She had outright lied to her so many times, even that very day on the beach. It hurt. The only people she had as family, the people she thought she was close to, were hiding so much from her when they knew how desperately she wanted answers.
Magdalena got to her first, putting her arms around Molly’s shoulders and hugging her close. ‘This is a good thing, Molly! Right?’
‘How many of the letters did you read?’ Molly asked, sniffing away unshed tears.
‘Only one,’ Magdalena said. ‘The first one. All of them in perfect order stuck in the very back of that photo album I only found because I went into my brother’s room to destroy something expensive.’ She took a breath. ‘I cannot believe Vaggelis kept them so all together. It is like nothing else he had.’
Molly forced out a laugh as Christos came out onto the balcony.
‘But it is a good thing, because now we know why you are here with us and… we are family!’
Family. The other people in her life she had always dreamed about. Vaggelis was her father, it was here in black and white. The reason she had been gifted his estate was exactly what she had already thought from the beginning. And Magdalena and Christos were two people who had spent their entire lives growing up alongside her dad, someone she had never got the chance to know.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Molly said, getting up from the chair and making Magdalena recoil.
‘Hey, no,’ Christos said, stopping her, guiding her over to the railing and plucking something from one of the terracotta pots. ‘Take a deep breath. Long and slow. And put this in your mouth.’ He didn’t wait for her to take the leaf he was holding out, he put it between her lips for her.
It was peppermint. Fresh, strong, immediately somehow eliminating the nausea. She wrapped her fingers around the balcony rail and held on.
‘Better?’ Christos asked as Magdalena beat a retreat inside.
She shook her head as she looked over the rooftops to the lights of the harbour below. ‘No. How can I be?’
He leaned back against the rail. ‘I know. It is a lot. And I cannot believe that if Vaggelis knew this, that you have not already been part of our lives.’
‘My mum said that Vaggelis loved her. She told me he wanted them to be together.’ She tried to remember exactly what Janette had said to her earlier that day. ‘But maybe that wasn’t even true! Maybe she’s lied about everything my whole life! I mean I’m looking at scores of letters from my great-great-aunt talking about my achievements at school and sending Vaggelis photos of me. Why was Maud doing that? Why wasn’t my mother doing that?’ She took a breath. ‘There’s only one answer. Because my mother had to have been the one to keep Vaggelis from me!’
‘There could be other answers,’ Christos said. ‘Because Janette found it too hard? Because she felt she should stay in England and not be in Greece? Because she, rightly or wrongly, thought she was doing what was best for you at the time?’
‘What was best,’ Molly said, fingers holding on to the balcony rail.
‘One thing I do know is, it would not be in Vaggelis’s Greek nature to give up on the woman he loved or the child he had.’
‘He didn’t,’ Molly whispered. ‘He wrote letters too because my aunt thanked him for them. He was there even though I never knew it. And now, with a share in his things.’
‘So, like my sister says, it is a good thing, no?’
She looked at him then. His handsome face and those beautiful penetrating eyes. But now was not the time for getting caught up with whatever they had been starting together. This news, her mother’s betrayal, was hurting her like nothing else and she needed to deal with it. ‘I need to go,’ she said, voice shaking a little. ‘I need to take these letters and I need to speak to my mum and I need to find out why.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
She shook her head, tears rolling from her eyes again. ‘No.’
‘Molly, do not isolate, remember?’
His hands were on her shoulders now and it would be so easy to fall against him, let him hold her up, comfort her, soften things. But, right now, she didn’t want things softened. She needed to be her strongest self, to confront the woman who had allegedly spent her life protecting her but had done that by hiding the truth Molly had always been desperately seeking.
‘I really have to go,’ she said, turning away from his touch and scooping the letters up from the table.
‘Molly, let me walk you.’
‘No, please, don’t.’ She took a breath, held the letters to her chest. ‘Goodnight, Christos.’
And, with that said, she made her way to the door.