Chapter Fifty-Five
Fifty-five
The mood on the hillside was one of giddy frivolity.
Skye accepted a rare beer from Joy, laughing as her friend clambered up onto a patio chair.
“Careful!” she cried as it wobbled precariously.
“Time?” Joy asked, looking around at her assembled guests.
They were all there—Theo and George, Adam and Victoria, Dusty, Louisa, Mia—and Cassandra.
The sun blazed in a sky scrubbed free of clouds.
Smoke curled from the grill, tugged along by a teasing breeze that carried the scent of charred meat and roasting pepper through the garden.
“Two minutes to five,” Dusty replied, her phone in her hand.
“Let us know when it’s thirty seconds,” Joy told her. “I want us all to join in on a countdown.”
Skye frowned for a moment, then she realized: The ferry would leave at 5:00 p.m., taking Martyn with it. She smiled, waited, raised her beer, chanted along to the chorus of “ten…nine…eight…” Joy gave a great whoop as the hour passed and held her bottle aloft.
“To freedom!” she said.
“And victory,” Adam put in.
They all looked expectantly at Skye. She hesitated, then took a slow, deliberate sip.
“To justice,” she said.
“Do you think we should’ve gone down to the port, made sure he really did leave?
” Mia asked. She had arrived with Bruno in her arms, Louisa following with a large, rather tattered dog bed.
When Skye had brought them and Dusty up to speed on the day’s events, their three mouths had fallen open in unison.
“Shame I don’t have that saber anymore,” Dusty brooded now. “I could’ve brandished it at him.”
Louisa caught Skye’s eye.
“I’m not sure that would have been a good idea,” she said mildly.
“You gave it to the police, then?” Theo asked, coming toward them with one of Joy’s hastily constructed haloumi kebabs.
“Yeah,” Dusty said rather forlornly. “They said I can have it back once it’s been tested. I might mount it on the wall, you know, like a Samurai sword.”
Mia scrunched up her features.
“What are you now, Mr. Miyagi?”
“He was into karate.”
“Potato, potahto.”
Theo laughed, then turned to Skye.
“Did you read the letters yet?”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t had a moment. But I want to. I will. Soon.”
“Andreas should be here,” Joy said, swiping Cassandra’s wide-brimmed hat and plunking it on George. “I’m going to call him.”
She raised a theatrical hand for silence, selecting speakerphone so they could all listen in. Andreas, when he eventually answered, did so with a dour-sounding “Nai.”
“What are you doing?” Joy said. “Nah, scratch that. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Your plans are canceled. You’re coming here to my house for a barbie.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“Andreas? You there?”
“You are having a party?” he asked, though it was delivered more as a statement of fact. Skye felt a twinge of unease, her whole body tingling unpleasantly.
“Not a party exactly,” Joy said. “More a gathering of friends. We’re celebrating, you see, and—”
“I am not in the right mood to celebrate,” Andreas said. “Goodbye.”
The dial tone sounded. Joy grimaced.
“Ah well,” she said, reaching for her beer. “His loss, I reckon. Shall we put some music on?”
Nobody mentioned Andreas again, but he remained in Skye’s subconscious as the evening wore on, his mood a dark slash through an otherwise colorful tapestry.
When her mum stood up at nine thirty, yawning widely and brushing off Joy’s cry of “Stay, stay,” Skye was only too glad to accompany her back to the house.
She still had her tote bag, the bundle of letters pressed enticingly against her side.
“Hot drink?” she offered.
Cassandra smiled through a shake of the head.
“No, thank you. I might just go on up if that’s OK with you?”
Not once, at any time that Skye could recall, had her mother asked permission before doing anything. The thought brought a smile to her own lips.
“Of course, Mum,” she said. “And thank you again for today. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Cassandra paused, a foot on the bottom stair.
“I wouldn’t have wanted you to,” she said.
In the kitchen, Skye boiled the kettle, adding a handful of fresh mint and a slice of lemon to her chipped “I don’t need therapy, I just need a trip to Folegandros” mug.
She’d picked up a foldable canvas deck chair from the mini-market and set it up now just beyond the back door, angled toward the view.
The air held the last warmth of the day, soft against her skin.
Insects hovered low but made no sound, as if the hush of approaching night had silenced them.
The sun hadn’t quite set, and the sky behind the mountains was tinged in gold. A fading spill of light slipping away.
She needed to message Sal. Tell her what had happened. But that could wait.
Skye opened the bag, took the first translated letter from the pile, and began to read.
It did not take long. Within moments, her dusky garden faded and the past rose up around her, Katerina’s words unspooling like the notes of a song inside her head.
Theo had been right; the letters read more like diary entries.
Only not the kind you write to yourself.
These had been meant for someone else. For “S.”
Stefanos.
Skye caught her breath at the sight of his full name. She whispered it into the quiet, as if the sound might summon him, draw him home, coax his secrets into the present.
Katerina had written:
Stefanos, my love, I am alive. I begin with those words because they are how I begin each day. It is always a surprise to open my eyes and discover that I am still here, that the night, cloaked by darkness, did not take me to whatever it is that awaits us in the life after this one.
Skye squinted down at the words, dark and deliberate, the paper tinged yellow by the light spilling out through the open back door.
She read on, tears stinging as she learned of a woman collapsing on the road, a boy taking her purse, her shoes, a brooch she wore in honor of her lost child.
She read about famine. How the wife of a German officer lurked like a ghost around the school Katerina’s sister, Leni, had opened.
The outbuilding mentioned could only have been the one still standing in Victoria and Adam’s garden—the very same space Skye herself had imagined as a classroom.
Goose bumps dappled her arms.
The water in her cup had gone cold, yet Skye barely noticed. She was enthralled. Horrified yet tantalized. Katerina’s accounts were like a horror film from which she could not tear her eyes.
There was a time when I believed that death marked the beginning of a journey, one that would carry the soul from this world to another. Today, I fear that I was wrong. How can death lead to beauty when it is this brutal? How is pain considered a pathway to any form of salvation?
And on it went. Reams of fear and yearning and anger—much of the latter reserved for the occupying invaders, though Katerina seemed to be angry at the entire world.
She was plain in her account of having lost faith in God, foolhardy in the derisory way she disregarded the curfew, risking her life to ensure that her friends, the two brothers, did not starve.
There was a lot to take in, so much devastation.
An elderly man walking into the sea, livestock taken and slaughtered, bags of grain traded for precious gems. Skye brought the pages closer, reading and rereading until the images were burned into her mind.
More than once, tears blurred the words.
As night settled thick and still around her, a quiet melancholy took hold.
She had read many accounts of war over the years, though none so raw, so unashamed in their fury and indignation. Katerina was undoubtedly brave, though as her letters continued, it was clear to Skye that her edges had begun to fray.
I try to work, try to eat, try to hope. Leni gives everything away—her food, her time, her affection to the orphans whose parents have been killed or starved to death. She says that they are her purpose, the innocent souls that spur her on. It matters not what we do, she tells me, but why we do it.
When Skye turned over a page and found a short passage, not more than three sentences in length, her hands began to shake.
Katerina had been beaten. Leni had been raped. The same man had committed both crimes. An Italian soldier. In the letters, he was referred to as either “him” or “the pig.”
Could his name have been Giulio Muti? Was it his body buried in the garden of the abandoned house?
Had something happened so that Katerina had ended up with his dog tags?
The temptation to read ahead nagged at Skye, but she forced herself to continue chronologically, a smile finding its way onto her face as she read the words of love that Katerina had scribbled to her and Stefanos’s unborn child.
After our baby comes, I will begin spying for the brothers again. He or she will be the perfect decoy. It is an amusing thought, a child of yours being a soldier before they can even think for themselves. I can picture your smile, my love. Hear your laughter in the dark.
Skye stretched, checked the time. It was three a.m. She was wide awake, perhaps more so than she had ever been. Had freedom done this to her, or was it discovery?
Only three more letters remained.
She sat for a moment, head tipped back, gazing at the stars.
The last time she’d done so, Andreas had been beside her.
Later that same night, he’d read the first letter aloud.
It was in those moments that something had taken root between them, a bond shaped not just by feeling but by story.
Their story, folded into that of two others long since gone.
Whatever had become of Katerina and Stefanos, she and Andreas belonged to it now—they all did, every one of them on the hillside—theirs a new chapter in a tale buried for decades, hidden inside a house that had saved Skye in more ways than one.
The same instinct that had led her to Folegandros stirred again.
It urged her to keep reading. To go deeper. To reach the end.
But as Skye was about to learn, Katerina’s final letters weren’t the end at all.
They were only the beginning.