Chapter 26 ISABELLA
Chapter twenty-six
ISABELLA
Two Weeks Since Leaving Greece.
Ican't stop finding her.
In the garden, I catch myself arranging flowers the way she taught me—before I understood what our family really was.
Roses and jasmine, stems trimmed at an angle, leaves stripped below the waterline.
My hands know the motions without thinking.
Muscle memory from a childhood that ended with an empty grave.
"You have your mother's hands," the housekeeper used to say. I'd forgotten that until now.
In the music room, Chopin echoes off the walls and I hear her voice layered underneath: Dancing is in your blood, kardia mou.
It's the only thing your father couldn't touch.
She was wrong about that. He touched everything.
But she was right that dancing saved me—gave me something that belonged only to me, even when nothing else did.
Elena finds me there, standing in front of the piano, not playing. Just... standing.
"Bella-ballina?" Her small hand slips into mine. "Why are you sad?"
I crouch down to her level. Her dark eyes—Antonio's eyes—search my face with that unsettling perceptiveness children have. She knows something is wrong. She just doesn't have the words for it yet.
"I'm thinking about my mama," I tell her.
"Where is your mama now?" Elena tilts her head. "Is she with the stars?"
The question hits me somewhere soft. I think about my mother's body, still and cooling in that ruined ceremony room. I think about the empty grave I talked to for thirteen years. I think about Elena, who lost her own mother and found a way to keep loving anyway.
"Yes," I say, because it's easier than explaining. "She's with the stars."
"That's good." Elena nods solemnly. "The stars are very pretty. She can watch you dance from there."
My throat closes. I pull her into a hug so she won't see my face.
"Yeah, baby. She can watch me dance."
Antonio finds me at 3 AM.
I'm standing on the balcony, watching the Mediterranean do its ancient thing—waves rolling in, pulling back, indifferent to human grief. The moon is nearly full, painting silver across the water. Somewhere below, the gardens sleep. The whole fortress sleeps.
Everyone except us.
"You're not sleeping," he says from the doorway.
"Neither are you."
He moves to stand beside me. Close enough to touch, but not touching. Giving me space while making sure I know he's there. It's such an Antonio thing to do—this man who spent years not knowing how to be gentle, learning it one choice at a time.
"I keep thinking about what I should have said," I admit. The words come easier in the dark. "All those conversations I imagined having with her grave. All the things I rehearsed. And when I finally had the chance..."
"Did you tell her any of them?"
"Some." I wrap my arms around myself. The night air is cool, carrying salt and something blooming in the garden below. "Not enough. There's never enough time, is there? You think you'll have more, and then suddenly—"
I can't finish.
Antonio waits. Patient. Present.
"She asked me to forgive her," I finally say. "Right at the end. And I couldn't. I wanted to. I tried to find the words. But they wouldn't come."
"What did you say?"
"That I loved her anyway." I turn to look at him—scars silver in the moonlight. The Beast and the man, always both at once. "I told her I couldn't understand what she did. That I would never leave Elena the way she left me. But that I loved her anyway."
"That's the truth."
"Is it enough?" My voice cracks on the question. "She died not knowing if I forgave her. She died knowing I couldn't understand her. What if that's the last thing she—"
"Bella." He turns to face me fully. "You told a dying woman you loved her.
You held her hand. You came across an ocean and walked into danger because you couldn't abandon her, even after everything.
" His voice is rough, scraped raw. "That's not nothing.
That's not failure. That's more than most people ever get. "
"But I didn't forgive her."
"Maybe you will. Later. When you've had time to carry it." His hands find my shoulders, warm and steady. "Forgiveness doesn't have to happen in the moment. It can come after. It can come in pieces. And if it never comes at all—" He pauses. "You still loved her. That matters."
I search his face. "Is that what you tell yourself? About your mother?"
Something flickers in his eyes. Pain, old and deep.
"My mother died thinking I failed her," he says quietly. "She died believing I chose the family over her safety. I've spent years hating myself for that. Hating you, too—for being the reason I wasn't there."
"And now?"
"Now I know the truth. The manipulation. The way we were all played against each other." He exhales slowly. "The truth doesn't fix anything. Doesn't bring her back. Doesn't undo what I believed for years. But it helps you stop fighting ghosts. Helps you put them to rest."
We stand in silence, carrying our respective dead.
The sky is lightening at the edges. Dawn coming, whether we're ready for it or not.
I think about my mother's last words—I love you, kardia mou—and the way her hand went slack in mine.
I think about all the years I grieved someone who wasn't dead.
All the years I'm going to spend grieving her now that she is.
"I'm going to be okay," I say finally. Testing the words. Seeing if they're true. "Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But eventually."
"I know." His arm comes around my shoulders, pulling me against his side. Solid. Warm. Real. "You survive things. It's what you do."
"We survive things." I lean into him, let his heartbeat steady mine. "Together."
"Together," he agrees.
The sun breaks over the water—pink and gold spilling across the waves, turning the Mediterranean into something molten and alive. A new day beginning whether I'm ready for it or not.
I'm not done grieving. Won't be for a long time.
But I'm not alone.
And right now, that's enough.
We scatter her ashes in pieces. In different places. The way she lived—fragmented, hidden, never fully in one place at once.
The first handful goes in Chicago, in the garden behind the dance studio where she used to teach. The building's been sold twice since then, but the new owners let us in when I explained. They didn't ask questions. Maybe they saw something in my face that made questions feel cruel.
I kneel in the dirt where she once knelt, planting bulbs that would bloom after she was "dead." Tulips, I think. Yellow ones. Her favorite.
"For the dancing," I whisper, letting the ashes sift through my fingers. "For teaching me that my body could be an instrument and a weapon and a prayer all at once."
Antonio stands back, giving me space. Elena's with Martha today—too young for this, we decided. Too young to watch someone she never met become dust on the wind.
The second handful goes in Greece, on the island where she hid for thirteen years. Franco comes with us for that one, still healing, still stubborn, refusing to let me do this without him.
We find a cliff overlooking the compound—the compound that's empty now, Dr. Theos and his believers scattered, the Gabris brothers rebuilding, facing their past. The buildings look smaller from up here. Less threatening. Just white walls and terra cotta roofs, baking in the Mediterranean sun.
"For the years you survived here," I tell her. "For staying alive when it would have been easier to give up. For finding a way, even when the way was twisted and wrong and cost us both so much."
The wind takes her. Carries her out over the sea, toward the horizon she watched for so many years.
I wonder if she ever stood on this cliff. If she ever looked toward Italy and thought of me.
I'll never know. I'm learning to live with that.
The last of her, we save for the fortress.
It feels right, because once upon a time, before my father, before the lies, before everything went wrong—she loved the water. She said Italy was beautiful. That she felt at ease in this country once before.
I remember that now. Fragments surfacing like debris after a shipwreck.
The way she'd take me to the lake in Chicago, how she'd wade in up to her knees and just stand there, face turned toward the horizon.
The stories she told about swimming in the Aegean as a girl, before her family fell apart, before she learned that love could be a trap.
The water doesn't judge, she told me once. It just holds you. Carries you. Lets you be weightless for a while.
She hadn't been weightless in years. Decades, maybe. Carrying secrets and fears and the crushing weight of choices she could never take back.
Maybe now she can float.
We take the boat out at sunset—Antonio, Elena, Franco, me. The sea is calm, the sky streaked with orange and pink, the kind of evening that makes you believe in something bigger than yourself.
Elena doesn't fully understand what we're doing, but she insisted on coming. I want to say goodbye to Bella-ballina's mama, she'd said, and how do you argue with that?
She's quiet on the boat, pressed against my side, watching the water with unusual solemnity. In her lap, she's holding a drawing she made this morning—the one she said was "for after."
When we reach the spot—far enough from shore that the fortress is just a smudge on the horizon—Antonio cuts the engine. The boat rocks gently. The only sound is water lapping against the hull and gulls crying overhead.
I hold the urn in my hands. It's lighter than I expected. A whole life reduced to ash and calcium and fragments of bone. This is what we become. This is what's left.
"I don't know how to do this," I admit.
Antonio's hand settles on my back. Warm. Steady. "You don't have to know. You just have to do it."
He's right. There's no script for this. No right words, no correct way to let go of someone who was already gone for thirteen years.
I open the urn.