Chapter 10
Eloisa
“Deep down in our anger lies the source of grief.”
—Eloisa Hobby
“I hope you know what you’re doing.” Eloisa fixed her gaze on Demetra’s portrait that rested on an easel directly beneath the bell tower.
After everyone had left the visitation, Eloisa returned to tidy up. The sweet, cloying scent of funeral flowers hung heavy in the air, a reminder of endings and beginnings intertwined.
This picture was Eloisa’s favorite photograph of her friend.
Taken five years ago, when Demetra was still vibrant in her early fifties, her smile pouring out pure joy.
Unsettling, really, how happy she looked when she’d seen so much darkness, so much heartache.
Though slow and painstaking, her miraculous healing helped Demetra to heal others.
The only thing that hadn’t healed was the forever hole in her heart from losing her children. In quieter moments, Demetra would trace their names in the sand at low tide, letting the waves wash them away as tears tracked down her cheeks.
So the sacred task of reuniting Demetra’s daughters fell to Eloisa. The weight of this responsibility pressed down on her shoulders like the thick summer air of Hobby Island.
“They’ll get furious at me, but I will bear their anger gratefully for you, my friend, because of all you did for me.” Eloisa let out a soft sigh. “I just pray this turns out the way you hoped.”
Light from the setting sun filtered through the stained glass windows, casting rainbow shadows across Demetra’s face, making her appear almost ethereal.
The creak of the chapel door broke the stillness. Eloisa turned to see Calista framed in the doorway, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders, looking so much like Demetra’s that it took Eloisa’s breath away.
The resemblance went beyond mere features—it was in the way she held herself, the subtle lift of her chin, the careful way she surveyed a room before entering. Overwhelmed, Eloisa hiccuped and pressed two fingers—which smelled of the Stargazer lilies she’d arranged—to her mouth.
“I left my cane in here somewhere.” Calista’s voice echoed in the empty chapel, bouncing off the wooden beams above. “Have you seen it?”
Eloisa tacked on a bright smile, though her heart ached at the wariness in Calista’s eyes. “Let’s look for it together, shall we?”
Calista moved with a lithe grace that belied her injury. She had a dancer’s build, willowy and lean but muscular, just like Demetra. Even her movements echoed her mother’s—deliberate yet fluid—as if she were moving through water rather than air.
“There.” Eloisa pointed. “I see Germaine’s head poking out.”
“Huh? Germaine?”
“That’s what we call your cane. Germaine the Giraffe.” Eloisa let out a giggle, her natural effervescence bubbling through the sadness. “We are a tad whimsical on Hobby Island.”
“I’ve noticed,” Calista said with a dryness that indicated maybe she did not bend toward whimsy.
Eloisa didn’t judge. She could appreciate that not everyone enjoyed flights of fancy.
Calista leaned down to retrieve Germaine the Giraffe from beneath the pew and let out a little gasp. “Oh!”
“Is it your ankle?” Eloisa rushed closer, joining Calista in the pew. The wood creaked beneath them.
“No, the cane is stuck on something.”
Eloisa reached down to help, her hand brushing Calista’s as they both grasped the cane and tugged it free—together. For a moment, neither let go of the cane, and Eloisa felt Demetra stretch between them like an invisible thread of yearning.
Calista met Eloisa’s gaze, her eyes filled with unanswered questions, each one a weight she’d carried for two decades. “I miss her.”
“I miss her too.” Eloisa released her grip on the cane.
“At least you got to know her a lot longer. I only had her for nine years.” Calista set down the cane and leaned against it.
“I’m sorry about that.” The words felt hollow, insufficient against the vastness of lost time.
“Me too.”
In unison, they turned in the pew to stare at the portrait of Demetra. The silence between them grew thick with unspoken words and buried memories.
Eloisa knew the entire story, and eventually, she would dole it out to the girls just as her dear friend planned, but she understood how badly Calista and Athena were hurting. The pain radiated from Calista like heat from summer pavement.
Unfortunately, feeling the pain was part of the healing process. The young women were in the thick of sorrow, and there was no rushing grief. It had its own timeline, as unpredictable as island weather.
“You know,” Eloisa said, “your mother planted a fig tree next to the cottage where she once lived. It’s the same cottage where Reid Thornton is bunking.”
“I see.” Calista’s expression was neutral, revealing nothing.
“The fig was a spindly little thing.” Eloisa forged on with the story, praying Calista would pick up on the underlying message. “Little more than a twig, really. Our soil here isn’t ideal for figs, you see. Too sandy and too close to the sea.”
Calista’s fingers tightened on her cane, and she canted her head, listening. A muscle worked in her jaw, betraying the emotion she tried to hide.
Grief.
“For years, that tree just stood there, no fruit, just a few leaves. Dormant. Not dead, but not fully alive, either. My groundskeeper, Paul Chance, wanted to dig it up and transport the tree to his in-laws’ house in Everly and give it a fighting chance, but Demetra wouldn’t hear of it.”
“The patron saint of lost causes, huh?” Calista asked, bitterness edging her words.
“I think that’s Saint Jude, but I see your point.
Your mother spent hours nurturing that tree, talking to it, singing to it.
She got compost from Paul and mixed it into the soil.
I’d find her out there, checking the leaves for signs of growth.
Sometimes in the rain, sometimes under the scorching sun. ”
Calista’s breathing slowed, and her eyes fixed on some distant point as if she were struggling not to tear up. The late-afternoon light caught the moisture in her eyes, turning them into melted chocolate.
Eloisa pulled a clean monogrammed hankie from her pocket and passed it to Calista, who took it and wadded it in her fist. The delicate embroidery disappeared into her grip.
“One day, your mother came to me, excited about something she’d read about grafting. She found a cutting from a hardier fig tree on the mainland and said she would join it to her fig, make it strong enough to survive on Hobby Island.”
“She was stubborn, huh?” A faint smile played at Calista’s lips, gone as quickly as it appeared.
“I remember thinking she was fighting a losing battle, but she was so determined. It took two more years before the fig bore fruit. Two years of constant care. Of protecting it from storms. Of talking and singing to it. But then, one spring morning, there it was. A single, perfect fig.”
Calista sucked in an audible breath. The sound reverberated sharply in the quiet chapel.
“I’d only seen your mother cry like that one other time and that was the day Benjamin took you girls away, but this time it was tears of joy. She cradled that fig like it was the most precious thing on earth. She said it was proof that with enough love and patience, anything was possible.”
“Wh-when was this?” Calista’s voice wavered, barely above a whisper.
“She first planted that fig the day after she returned from the mental hospital.” Eloisa hesitated, feeling the weight of the next words. “The first time.”
Calista’s lips parted, a storm of emotions in her eyes. “She was in a mental hospital . . . more than once?”
“She was devastated over losing you, Calista. It broke her in ways that never fully healed. And when she got out, she tried to contact you. She called, she wrote, she sent gifts. But Benjamin sent them all back, blocked her on social media and blocked her phone too. That sent her back to the hospital again.”
“Oh, no.” Calista let out a soft cry.
“Because your mother grew up in foster care, she never knew what it was to fully feel safe, to be loved unconditionally. Benjamin knew exactly how to use that against her. He’d grown so skilled at manipulating her fears, her trauma.
” Eloisa clamped down on her tongue to keep from telling Calista the worst of it—that Benjamin had threatened to take it out on the girls if Demetra kept trying to contact them.
Demetra knew what he was capable of—she’d lived with that fear for years.
Her depression was like a thick fog that would roll in and out of her life.
Some days she could barely get out of bed.
She’d sit by that fig tree for hours, lost in her own darkness.
Even after years of therapy, after she’d done so much healing work, that terror of what Benjamin might do to her daughters never fully went away.
Even when they were grown, Demetra was afraid to contact them. Terrified of Benjamin and what her daughters would think of her cowardice. She was so ashamed she wasn’t strong enough to confront him.
Although Demetra had tried once more. Five years ago. At Chevron.
Calista’s eyes misted, and in the softening, Eloisa spied a hint of the little girl who once chased baby turtles across the beach, but the look was gone in an instant, replaced by a guarded wariness that had become her armor.
“Calista, there’s so much you don’t know about your mother.”
“So tell me.” Anger flushed Calista’s face, bringing spots of color to her cheeks. “Make me understand.”
“First, you need to be in the headspace where you can accept what you hear.”
Calista scowled. “What does that even mean?”
“You’re in too much emotional turmoil right now. That’s the point of spending the summer here. It’s what your mother wanted.” Eloisa’s voice took on a pleading note.
“Yeah? Well, I wanted a mother who fought to keep us!” Calista hopped up fast and gave a little yelp as she put too much weight on her ankle.
Despair wrapped around Eloisa’s heart like morning fog on the island. “What if this summer could help you heal? Help you and Athena find your way back to each other?”
“Heal? How does time on an island erase twenty years of silence? Twenty years of wondering why she didn’t love us?” The pain in Calista’s voice was a living thing, raw and intense, echoing off the chapel walls.
“Stop that!” Eloisa said in a harsher tone than she intended. “Demetra loved you with every cell in her body. Her dying thoughts were only of you and Athena.”
“Why didn’t she come to us?”
“She was too sick by then, both in body and spirit.” Eloisa’s voice cracked. “The cancer came on fast, but the depression . . . that had been her constant companion for years. Even when she was doing better, helping others heal, she couldn’t quite heal that part of herself.”
“Not even at the end? Not even when she needed us most?”
“She . . .” Eloisa swallowed hard. “She convinced herself you were better off without her. That she’d only hurt you more by coming back into your lives at this late stage of the game.
I disagreed with her, fought her on it. But the depression twisted everything, made her believe she didn’t deserve your love.
” Eloisa longed to offer more comfort, but she knew some wounds must reopen before they could truly heal.
“But now she’s giving you this chance—an opportunity to understand the whole truth, to forgive—not just her and Athena, but yourself. ”
“Excuse me.” Calista hunched against the giraffe-shaped cane, skirted past Eloisa, and headed for the door. Her footsteps echoed against the wooden floors, each step a reminder of distance yet to be crossed.
The door closed behind her.
Eloisa sat alone in the chapel, the silence pressing in around her like a physical presence.
Dust motes danced in the remaining shafts of sunlight, reminding her of all the particles of truth still suspended, waiting to settle. She glanced back at Demetra’s portrait, seeing both a challenge and a plea in her frozen smile.
The portrait caught the last rays of sunset, giving her friend’s face an almost otherworldly glow, as if she were trying to reach through time itself to heal this breach.
“Well, old friend. I’ve done what I can. The rest is up to them now.” She exhaled through pursed lips, her gaze fixed on Demi’s. “Let’s just pray it’s enough.”