EPILOGUE
THERE’SAGREEKISLAND, only a short hop from the Liassidis family’s island, that’s a mecca for travellers of all varieties. A long stretch of its golden beach is entirely private but at its border with the public beach sits a wooden shack with an open front and outside tables.
Tourists and locals alike have learned that the best months to visit Kate’s Cocktail Bar are May and June, when its gregarious owner can be found behind the bar welcoming familiar faces and strangers as old friends. His wife, the eponymous Kate, is a regular presence in those months too, although she leaves the cocktail-making to her husband. Come the end of June, the couple fly out to Borneo, where they spend six months living in a bespoke treetop house in the sprawling grounds that constitutes the orangutan orphanage his non-cocktail-making wife works at. Every year, a week before Christmas, they fly back to Europe to visit their respective families, often bringing them all together in their magnificent Greek villa, before they move on to California, where the husband enjoys weeks of surfing and his wife pretends her heart isn’t in her throat every time he carries his board to the beach. February, March and April are spent wherever they fancy it.
It’s a semi-nomadic life Kate absolutely adores but one that must soon come to an end, and with excitement and a tiny bit of nerves sloshing in her stomach, she wanders out of the villa in search of her husband. It’s a short search.
He’s sitting on a wooden stool at the bar of Kate’s Cocktail Bar scribbling on a napkin. Music’s already playing. It’s still a little early for even the hardened drinkers, and his concentration is such that at first he doesn’t hear her approach. When he does, the wide, beaming smile that’s entirely for her lights his face.
He pulls her between his legs, squeezes her bottom and kisses her as if they were still newlyweds. She has no doubt they will always kiss like newlyweds. And then he must see something on her face for his eyebrows draw together in question.
She grins.
A moment later he understands what the grin means and an almost dazed smile comes close to splitting his face.
The front of the shack’s shutters are closed so they can celebrate the life they’ve created together in private.
Their lives will have to change again.
Neither of them has any doubt that they will make it work.
They always make it work.