Chapter Eleven
It wasn’t until she heard the front door of the flat shut that Saskia finally accepted the fact that he was gone. He was really gone when she’d kept thinking he’d turn back. She’d kept thinking he’d reconsider.
She stayed where she was, kneeling on that bed and feeling winded.
And she stayed there a long, long while.
Thanasis didn’t come back that evening. He didn’t come back for days.
She started to wonder if he planned to come back at all.
One night, Saskia sat in her study with the fire blazing, wrapped up in a sweatshirt she knew was his.
She would have known it was his even if she hadn’t found it in his part of the closet.
She was sure she could smell that hint of vetiver in the fabric, that ghost of him that haunted her everywhere she turned in this flat.
Though there were worse ghosts. She stared around at the pictures of the two of them on every surface, laughing, smiling, gazing at each other. She remembered each and every one of the moments captured. It was like, having deserted her for so long, her memories were working overtime now.
That or her heart was in charge, making sure she knew exactly how broken she could feel.
Eventually, as the days passed her by with no sign of Thanasis, Saskia realized that she had never really considered the possibility that he might leave her .
Even that fateful night when she’d stormed out of the flat in high dudgeon but with no preparation, she’d expected him to be there when she got back.
She had tucked a fistful of twenty-pound notes into her pocket and had taken off into the night.
She’d bought her train ticket with cash just like she’d bought herself snacks off the trolley, too.
She’d sat there on the train as it left Paddington Station, telling herself bold stories about how she was going to break free of that man and start a whole new… something.
All the while secure in the knowledge that she would do nothing of the sort.
If she hadn’t thumped her head and wandered off from that train, she likely would have found her way back to him much sooner. The actual details of the derailment were blurry to her even now, but she rather thought that she’d ended up on that roadside because she’d been trying to walk her way home.
Because Thanasis hadn’t simply been her lover.
She hadn’t simply been his mistress. Maybe, she’d thought then, it was a special sort of foolishness to imagine that there had ever been anything simple about those descriptions—or those relationships—at any point in history.
Because it was all people, wasn’t it. And if those people were anything like her, they’d been doomed from the start.
Because that was the thing that there was no getting past, then or now.
Saskia had not only been in love with Thanasis since the moment she’d laid eyes on him in the Tate Modern, she had been equally in love with him—if significantly more horrified by it—from the moment she’d clapped eyes on him in his father’s villa.
She’d wanted desperately to pretend otherwise, and she’d tried.
She truly had. But she had been more engaged with Thanasis as Selwen—even while telling him all the terrible things she’d imagined he might’ve done to a version of her she couldn’t remember—than she’d ever been about anything else in those five years.
She had kissed him on that beach. He had brought her alive, and she’d hated it. She’d pretended it wasn’t happening, because she’d wanted to stay locked up inside herself. That was what she’d understood. That was who she was .
Or rather, that was who she’d become. That was why Ffion had given her that list, and some money, and had ordered Selwen to do what she’d asked. She might not have known who Selwen really was, but she’d understood the important bit.
That Selwen was hiding, whether she knew it or not.
She might have forgotten all the details, so little did the men she’d met impress her, but Selwen had danced her way across Greece.
Just as Ffion had asked. She’d hit one island after the next, had flitted from one taverna to another, and the only man she’d looked twice at was the one who resembled Thanasis.
The one who sometimes looked a little bit like him around the eyes. And the mouth.
If she’d never run into a Zacharias, Selwen would likely still be dancing now, a mystery to herself and shut off from everyone else.
Instead, she’d come alive. She’d come home.
And now she sat about in this flat that she could remember decorating all too well, because each item that had come into it meant something . She had considered it nesting, and she knew he had, too.
This had been their home, a safe place for both of them.
It had been that for a long time.
Until, that was, she had decided that he must think less of her. Because if he didn’t, why would he keep hiding her away?
But now that she had nothing but time and space to look back at those days—and how hurt she’d been, and how determined she’d been to hurt him too—Saskia realized that there had been a safety in it.
Because even then, she’d had absolute faith in the fact that she could shout at him, throw things, act up in any way she liked.
That they could roll all over that bed and seemingly never come up for air, and that he would never leave her.
And now he’d left her twice.
Once because she’d made up the very worst version of him and used it against him.
This time because she’d showed him the very worst version of herself.
Having been more versions of herself than she was comfortable with, Saskia couldn’t say she enjoyed just… sitting with all that. But she did.
Because it was the least she could do. It was the bare minimum she owed this great love that had somehow gotten so twisted and torn.
It was what she had to do, she understood, because once she was done looking inward after the tumult of regaining her memory and coming back here and New York, and then finally wrapping herself up in Thanasis again…
Once all the sitting with it was done, she would have to act.
And she needed to decide what that would look like, now that she knew everything.
Including her own failures, this time around. Because the Saskia she was now, the Saskia who had been Selwen, would never dream of wasting that much time with manufactured fights and hurt feelings.
This time—if there was a this time— she didn’t intend to waste a single second.
All told, it was more than a week before she heard his keys in the door one evening. She didn’t believe it at first. Saskia had dreamed this very thing too many times already, rushing out into the lounge to find herself completely alone—
But this time, when she heard the door open and then shut, she raced down the hall from the study the way she always did—
Then skidded to a stop when she saw him.
He looked different tonight. Taller, somehow. And sterner, as if every stray bit of emotion had been flayed from his bones.
She thought, this is it. He’s come to officially break up with me, tell me to get out of his flat, and carry on with my life.
“Saskia,” he began, in a voice that seemed dark and heavy.
And she couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t take it.
“Don’t!” she cried out.
He stopped, looking startled.
Her chest hurt from all the wild breathing and her poor heart besides, but she understood that this was her chance. She had to take it—before he could say the things she didn’t want to hear.
“I’m so sorry I lied to you,” she said, swift and to the point.
“I don’t know why I did it. It was unfair, but then, so were all the things I said to you when I was Selwen.
I didn’t have to remember everything that happened between us to know—at an immediate glance—that you’re not the kind of man who would do those things. ”
“That isn’t—”
Saskia cut him off. “A man as scary as I made you sound doesn’t stand around listening to a character assassination from a woman who claims she doesn’t remember him.
So I can tell you with total confidence that even when I was Selwen, I knew better than to claim you were that kind of man.
” He was scowling at her, so she took a breath and kept going.
“I think, somewhere deep down I couldn’t remember, that my feelings were hurt.
I thought you’d been ashamed of me, back when we lived here together.
Maybe I wanted you to be ashamed of yourself. ”
He stopped scowling. He sighed instead. “I don’t think that this has any—”
“All of this is ridiculous,” she said, cutting him off again, because maybe she was a little bit desperate. Or a lot. “Because the truth of the matter is what I told you before you left this time. You’re the only man I’ve ever wanted. Only you, Thanasis. Only and ever you.”
“Saskia,” he said again, his voice even more intent this time.
She rushed toward him then. And when she got to him, she took his hands in hers and she held him tight, staring up at him as if her intensity alone could change this.
Because it had to. “Don’t you understand?
” she asked him, with all the urgency she felt inside of her.
“I love you, Thanasis. I’ve always loved you.
Even when I was lost to myself, I must have loved you just as fiercely, because I was clearly keeping a vigil all these years. I was mourning you all the while.”
She couldn’t read that look on his face, so she gripped him harder and she kept going.
“And I do remember what happened that night. I’d worked myself up into a state and nothing you said or did could change it, because I wanted to be yours forever and you seemed perfectly happy to stay as we were.
And the reality is, I was always coming back.
I had no intention of really leaving you.
How could I? I could no sooner leave you than I could leave myself.
I had to actually leave myself to stay away from you. ”