Chapter 15
Three Months Ago
That first night after taking the pregnancy test, Wren was so jittery that she couldn’t sit in her hotel room for long.
Donning a long white dress, a vacation dress that made her feel like every other tourist, she left her room and walked the streets, eyeing the laughing and eating and wine-drinking tourists with an air of secrecy about her.
She was pregnant, and she was the only person in the world who knew it.
She wondered what it would be like to share the news with a stranger, then decided their simple congratulations wouldn’t cut it.
They wouldn’t really feel what they were saying. It wouldn’t mean a thing.
Eventually, she sat down, ordered herself a glass of water and a large salad with fish and olives, then picked through it delicately, telling herself to focus on the present rather than everything she couldn’t change in the future.
In a little journal she’d brought with her, she wrote in pen: These are the facts: I am healthy. I am still a photographer with some money in the bank. I know how to get a new job. I know how to start again.
She reminded herself that Angelos was a very good guy, a brilliant and family-driven guy.
Probably, when he’d reached Santorini, his parents had put him through the wringer, demanding to know why he’d been so secretive, running away from them like that.
Probably they weren’t pleased about “that American girl,” about Wren taking Angelos away from his duties.
Still, it had been several days at this point, and Angelos hadn’t texted or called.
After dinner, Wren walked down the harbor and entered a little bar.
The bartender was playing a song by The Doors and bouncing around behind the bar.
Wren sat at the counter and ordered a nonalcoholic cocktail, which he stirred up for her with a happy and charming grin.
He watched her taste it, and she gushed with thanks. “It’s delicious,” she said.
He beamed. “You’re traveling through Greece on your own?” He was a native English speaker, probably from London, if she had correctly identified his accent.
“I am,” she said. “I was here for work, and now I can’t find a way to leave.”
“I could never get myself to leave either,” the bartender said.
“I came here on vacation about five years ago. I came with my girlfriend, if you can believe that. We got into some kind of argument here in Crete, and I told her I didn’t want to go back to Manchester with her.
She thought I was joking. But the following morning, after she packed for the airport, I went for a jog and didn’t even say goodbye.
” He told the story as though he were very proud of himself.
“Wow,” Wren whispered. “Was she heartbroken?”
“I’m pretty sure she was cheating on me with my best mate from back home,” the bartender said, a glint of sorrow in his eyes.
“Oh. Oh, that’s hard.” Wren had never been cheated on before. That she knew of.
“It’s not really. It’s just my origin story.” The bartender put his elbow on the counter. Wren had the sense that he’d flirted with about a thousand girls at this very bar, just as he flirted with her. But she didn’t mind, not now. It took her out of her changing body.
“And what’s your origin story?” he asked her.
Wren laughed and sipped her nonalcoholic cocktail. “I just lost my long-running gig,” she confessed. “I’m a photographer. A travel photographer. I think my boss had some kind of crush on me, and when I didn’t reciprocate…” She slashed under her chin.
The bartender winced. “You’re kidding me.”
She shrugged. “Happens all the time, I guess.”
The bartender raised his beer, his eyes to the pink sunset just beyond. “To better feminism,” he said. “We have a long way to go.”
Wren clinked her glass to his.
“Do you have a boyfriend waiting for you at home?” the bartender asked.
Wren lent a crooked grin. “I have someone, I think. Well, I don’t know. But he’s here in Greece.”
“You don’t know?” The bartender clapped the bar. “He isn’t Greek, is he?”
“He is.”
“Oh, dear.” The bartender sucked his teeth. “Greek men, they aren’t always the most trustworthy, are they?”
This was the first Wren had heard of it. “What do you mean?”
The bartender turned away slightly, his face shadowed, as though he regretted mentioning it.
“It’s just the way they’re wired. Tourists come in from all over, have little flings, and send them on their way.
The Greeks, they know how to enjoy life.
They don’t take everything as seriously as we do, maybe.
But it means I’ve seen plenty of women brokenhearted. ”
Wren wanted to roll her eyes, although a kernel of fear hardened in her stomach. “Don’t tell me you don’t do the same to tourist women,” she said.
The bartender laughed. “All right. I’ll admit, I’ve had my share of flings. But I’m lonely here on this island by myself. The price of having the life of your dreams is that you might lose people. But I guess you know that. You’re traveling on your own, with only your camera and a dream.”
And a baby, Wren did not add.
A tourist couple came into the bar and drew the bartender’s attention, so Wren paid up and went on her way. Anxiety flooded her veins. She hated that what the bartender had said aligned with her initial fears that Angelos was ghosting her. She hated how true it felt.
But things were different now. Even if Angelos had another family, even if it had all been pretend between them, he still deserved to know about his baby. She had his phone number. She couldn’t be too afraid to use it.
When Wren returned to her hotel room, she braced herself and dialed.
But almost immediately, the phone went to voicemail.
Shock reverberated through her. She tried again and got the same thing.
What could this mean? Of course, his phone might have been off or dead.
But it was also possible—and more than likely—that he’d blocked her number.
Her stomach sloshed, and she went to the bathroom and threw up her nonalcoholic cocktail, then went to bed with tears draining out of her eyes.
But over the next few days, as Wren traveled through Crete, taking photographs, eating, and chatting to strangers, Wren’s loneliness began to edge toward anger.
She was a strong and confident and capable individual.
There was no reason in the world why she shouldn’t storm into Angelos’s family hotel and tell anyone standing there the truth about her pregnancy.
They could handle it however they wanted to.
On the southernmost coast of Crete, Wren allowed herself a few days of daydreaming, thinking about what would happen if she told Angelos about the baby and they decided to build a life together.
She imagined them living on Santorini at first, so that Angelos could help out at the inn and his parents could help out with the baby.
Maybe they’d tell one another they’d move on soon, that they’d leave for another island or another country or another continent, but maybe they’d get stuck there, hypnotized by the turquoise waters and the sunsets until they were old and gray.
Would they have more children? Wren felt sure of it.
She didn’t want to force her baby to be an only child.
Only children were lonely, she felt. And she knew all about loneliness. She was living it.
When June began, Wren decided she’d had enough of daydreaming and getting sick alone in hotel bathrooms. She needed to go back to Santorini and learn how to tell the truth.
The ferry left from Heraklion Port at eleven thirty in the morning, and she boarded it, grabbing a seat with an enormous window directly beside it so that she could watch Crete fade into the distance.
She would always remember that massive and individual and terribly lonely island.
She would always remember it as the place where she learned she would be a mother.
When Crete disappeared, she closed her eyes and fixated on what would happen next. She whispered, “Angelos, I’m pregnant. You’re going to be a father. Listen to me. It’s going to be all right. We can handle it. Maybe we really were in love before. Perhaps we can be in love again.”
A few seats away on the ferry, a teenage couple would not stop making out. It was distracting, and the sound was worse. Wren put on noise-canceling headphones and closed her eyes. Soon, she would be in Angelos’s embrace.
When the ferry reached Santorini, Wren was euphoric.
She grabbed her bag and hurried to the ramp.
She nearly cried when her foot touched Santorini soil for the first time.
Up the donkeys went, carrying enormous bags and also people, but after a brief bout of morning sickness earlier, Wren felt stronger than ever and traipsed past them.
She knew the route to Angelos’s parents’ inn like the back of her hand, and she decided to go directly there.
It was the high season, and even more tourists were on the island than before, which felt insane.
But maybe Angelos’s parents would make an exception and find her a room somewhere.
She was carrying their grandchild, after all.
When Wren turned the corner onto the street that led to the inn, her heart skipped and skipped.
All around her were memories of those first nights with Angelos.
Looking back now, it felt impossible that he’d had a wife and kids at home somewhere.
He’d been entirely free, save for his responsibilities at the inn.
She couldn’t believe she’d let herself worry about that.
But then, she saw it. Just three houses away, the inn was boarded up, with a sign out front that read: CLOSED. DO NOT ENTER. Wren’s heart stopped. She hurried to the entrance and stared up at the inn, searching for clues as to why it had closed.
On her fingers, she counted how many days it had been since she and Angelos had said goodbye. At that time, Angelos had told her the inn was fully operational and needed him. Had there been an accident here at the inn? Maybe a kitchen fire?
Or maybe it was much worse. Wren took a delicate step back and asked herself if she’d imagined all of it.
What if her “memories” of Angelos were not memories at all but fantasies?
She touched her still-flat stomach and wondered if she was going insane.
Was she really pregnant? At that thought, nausea rolled through her, and she knew she needed to get to a bathroom immediately.
She needed to check into a hotel. She felt like Mother Mary.
But finding a hotel in Santorini on a random day in June was not so easy.
Wren searched her phone for answers and found only a crummy room in a low-rated hotel a twenty-minute walk away.
Begrudgingly, she hauled herself out there, searching the streets for signs of Angelos.
Twice more, she called him, but his phone went straight to voicemail.
She even called the phone number listed on his parents’ inn’s website, but that had been disconnected.
What on earth was she going to do?
In the hotel room, she sat in the drooping center of the bed and then fell back, splaying her arms above her head.
She knew she needed to go back out there and start asking the locals in Santorini about Angelos and his parents.
She knew that someone, somewhere, would know what happened to them.
But fear bit at the back of her consciousness.
What if she didn’t want to know the truth?