CHAPTER 41
NINA MARCHESI
It could be any ordinary night in the life of some tourist who stumbled upon this place by sheer chance or luck—but it isn’t.
Seated at a café at the highest point in Athens, I look down at the city beneath me without truly seeing anything at all. In my head, all that exists are endless calculations that never yield a result.
I’ve been here for hours, torturing myself with the sight of the Greek sea, which awakens the same feeling it always does: that of drowning in Nero’s eyes.
I twist the ring on my finger in a nervous tic I haven’t been able to stop.
The sensation of its absence against my skin is, at once, welcome and devastating.
My phone—turned off—rests on the small white wooden table in front of me, right beside the largest cup of tea they serve here.
Neither of them is doing its job properly.
The tea has been useless in bringing me any calm, and the phone is off because I no longer knew how to keep rejecting Nero’s calls.
Not seeing the messages come in or hearing the phone ring, however, hasn’t put an end to my torment. Nero called me for the first time early last night, after sending several messages. I didn’t open any of them; I only followed them through the notification bar.
At first, they were just idle chatter. But when the fifth message went unanswered, the tone shifted to concern. The fact that I didn’t answer any of the calls that followed turned the next messages desperate.
It all seemed so real. So genuine, that I almost gave in and answered—almost ran home, straight into his arms, forgetting everything I had heard from the passenger seat of that car.
That was when I decided to turn my phone off.
Because I may not feel certain about many things right now, but there is one thing I know: I need time. Even if time, too, is proving incompetent at doing its job. An entire day has passed since I found myself arriving in Athens, completely lost, and nothing has become more coherent or cohesive.
Nothing makes sense. And Nero’s reaction to my absence has only made everything harder to understand.
The man frantically searching for me is impossible to reconcile with the image his mother’s words painted in my mind—with the image his own voice, in that recorded conversation, burned into my brain.
Those statements continue to haunt me every second I’m awake and every moment I try to sleep. That isn’t the man I know. It isn’t the man who placed this ring on my finger and made me a million promises. That isn’t the man with whom I was certain I wanted to share my life.
There is something different, though. Some of my feelings have grown stronger. Hatred, for instance.
I hate Lysandra Zanthos.
I never thought I would truly say that about someone. As a figure of speech? Always. But for real? Never. Not once. I suppose things change, because amid the chaos of doubt that I am, this is not one of them—I hate that woman.
I hate her deceptive appearance, her cruel smile, the way she positions herself above me. I hate her rotten heart, her sadistic intentions, her venomous words.
I hate that she is my child’s grandmother. I hate that she is Nero’s mother. I hate that she was capable of making me doubt Nero’s feelings and his intentions. I hate her. With every grain of who I am, I hate her.
And that is why I know that, whether I manage to understand myself or not, I will never be able to take her words as absolute truth. At some point, I will have to accept the very real possibility of having my heart destroyed—and confront Nero.
At some point, I will need to hear him, to give him the chance to explain how all the recent events can coexist with the reality in which he is the man in love who promised to make me the happiest woman in the world.
At some point.
Just not today.