8. Konstantine
CHAPTER EIGHT
KONSTANTINE
Icome to her room at midnight.
She is awake, in the chair at the small desk by the window, with the lamp low.
I have a folder under my arm, the investigator’s report on the death of my wife. It has lived in the safe in the south office for five years, and I read it once, the week it was delivered. I have not read it again, never needed to.
I cross the room and sit in the chair across from her, and I set the folder on the desk between us, squared to the edge, because my hands want a task.
“This is the file,” I say.
“Tell me what is in it.”
I tell her that my wife Marta and I were married on Kalydon in 2008, in the chapel on the south cliff.
That we had a daughter, Sophia, in 2020, after years in which the doctors had told us to stop hoping, a detail that is not in the file.
That in the summer of 2021 Marta took Sophia to the harbor at Mykonos to meet me for a weekend on the family yacht.
The yacht had been arranged at short notice. The crew were not the regular crew.
“The boat hit a swell at sunset. It capsized. Marta was below decks with Sophia, who was a year old. Marta got Sophia into a life jacket, got her out of the cabin, and got her onto a broken hull. She did not have time to get herself onto a hull. Sophia was found by a fishing boat at one in the morning, alone on the wreck, the life jacket on, asleep on her stomach. Marta was found three days later.”
I stop there. Isadora does not move. Her hands are folded in her lap, her chin level, her eyes on my face, taking it the way she took the courtyard on the first day.
I continue, because the second half is the half that concerns her.
“The regular captain had been called off the run that morning by a false message routed through my cousin Nikos’s office.
The replacement came through an agency we used for casual crew.
That agency had been infiltrated three years earlier by a man named Petros, the same family as Antonios, who answered to your father.
During the crossing, the replacement captain placed a small charge in the bilge.
It was not built to sink the boat outright.
It was built to weaken the hull, so that the sea would do the work and the story would hold.
The boat broke in the swell. The captain died with it.
The investigator confirmed the charge, confirmed the captain’s connection to Petros, confirmed the Petros line ran to the Kallis house. The order originated with your father.”
I do not say I have hated your father every day since. I do not need to.
She closes her eyes and breathes out, slowly, the long controlled exhale of a woman bracing a weight across her own shoulders. Then she opens her eyes, rises, and crosses to the window.
She stands with her back to me for a long time, looking out at the dark of the south wall and the sea below it. I sit in the chair across from her empty chair, and I wait, because everything left in this room is hers to do.
Then she turns and crosses back. She kneels.
She kneels, theé mou, in front of me, on the floor of her own room.
“Konstantine, I did not know. I should have asked. I ask now. I am not him.”
I lift her face with both hands, and I press my mouth to her forehead, and I hold it there for the length of a breath.
“Mikrí mou,” I say, low. “I know.”
She rises and lifts the folder from the desk, carries it to the small bedside table in her room.
“I will read it tomorrow. Will you stay tonight? On the bed, not yet on me.”
“Yes, mikrí mou.”
We lie on her bed in the dark, above the covers. She lies in the crook of my arm with her face pressed to my collar, and she lays her hand flat over my sternum, over the place where my heart is.
She sleeps, but I do not.
I lie awake with the daughter of the man who killed my wife breathing against my throat. I think about Marta. The woman asleep on my chest did not do it. I will not insult either of them by apologizing for what is happening in this room.
I think, instead, the thing I have not let myself think in five years.
Marta. I am going to be alive again.