Chapter 17 Naomi
NAOMI
The call vibrates in my pocket as I’m drying my hands on a linen towel in the bathroom.
Unknown number.
I stare at the screen like it’s going to leap up and bite me.
And I know before I swipe. Some things you just know.
“Congratulations, Princess,” he says, the endearment curled in contempt. “Or should I say Mrs. Temporary?”
The towel slips off the rail and falls to the floor, unheeded.
“Harrison.”
“There was a time when you called me Dad.”
Before you proved you weren’t worthy of the title.
“Where…how are you?”
“Bored. And waiting for you to thank me for the congrats.”
“Thank you,” I respond, loathing the coldness seeping into my bones. The lack of affection that makes me wonder if I’m flawed. “But how did you know…you saw the photos,” I say, and it isn’t a question. “So you must be out of rehab?”
“Oh, I saw.” His voice is ice against my ear and he doesn’t answer my question. “Our Naomi, marrying the housekeeper’s son. How… American. And how very treacherous, considering which island he stole from us.”
My fingers tightened on the phone. “It was barely ours and he didn’t steal it,” I say calmly, the only calm left available.
“A name is a crown,” he says and I hear the slur in his voice. Another stint that didn’t take then. “Did you enjoy watching him rename my island while you smiled like a paid porcelain doll?”
The insult slides off carefully constructed armor. “You lost the right to claim it as yours a long time ago, Harrison.”
“Ah,” he murmurs. “You’ve learned to say my name like a stranger. How modern of you. Tell me, do you say his like a prayer? Or the password to his bank account?”
“Why are you calling?”
“To congratulate you on the stunt.”
“What do you mean stunt?”
“Come on, girl. People talk, especially the help. And hallways have ears.”
“What does that even mean?” I whisper, urgently glancing over to the open doorway to the terrace where Vasso and his mother are waiting for me to join them.
“All it took was a few calls to get the picture of the man strutting into your grandfather’s place a few weeks ago is suddenly your husband. All very shotgun hasty? You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No!”
My denial is too hasty, too visceral, born entirely of the image suddenly shoved into my brain. An image that triggers a very secret, very sacred yearning. “Look, I don’t know what you heard but this is all new and—.
“And all fake? I know. Which is why, since you didn’t bother to invite your dear old dad to your wedding, I’m calling to request a wedding gift.” The tone lightens—chilling. My throat closes before I can point out that that’s not how it works.
Then I decide to save my breath. “You’re not rushing to deny it? Good. That diamond necklace plastered all over the papers. It’s lovely, if provincial. How about you lose it so I can find it?”
My hand goes to my bare throat, horror dredging through me at the thought. “No.” My mouth is desert dry.
“You will.” The temperature drops ten degrees. “Or my old friend at the trust will hear that your ‘marriage’ is a marketing strategy with a shelf life. Would be a shame if the lighthouse fund suddenly stalled, hmm?”
My fingers go numb. He can’t prove— He can guess. He can seed. He can poison wells like a pastime. And it will achieve the same horrible result for Vasso. For Vecchio.
The project will hit the skids before it’s even taken off.
I grip the sink until my knuckles threaten to pop.
“You can’t prove it isn’t… permanent,” I say, before I can stop myself, the truth slithering out like a snake I thought I’d bagged.
He pounces, pleased. “You just did that for me, sweetheart. But there’s no reason why we can’t both enjoy your unexpectedly bumper year, Princess.
Not when your husband can more than afford it.
Send the necklace to the address I’ll text.
If you don’t, I’ll chat to a journalist about staged mergers and vendettas in linen suits. ”
“Is this what you’re reduced to, blackmailing your own daughter?”
“What daughter?” he sneers back.
I hang up because I have to, because if I keep listening I will throw the phone at the wall and he will still be on the other end. My reflection in the bathroom mirror looks like a pretty liar. I press both hands to my face until the heat in my cheeks cools enough to pass inspection.
When I step back into the kitchen, Vasso’s mother glances up from a pan of lemon chicken. Her eyes flick to my mouth, then my hands, then the place where my pulse lives in my throat. She says nothing as she sets a sprig of rosemary on the cutting board in front of me.
Dinner is simple and perfect. Potatoes and chicken and good wine.
Vasso sits, glass in one hand, the other resting at the top of my chair, trailing his fingers through my hair.
Eleni, graciously mellow, asks me about the lighthouse vows idea and I find myself talking about how the island could invite people to write their own vows to themselves and lock them into a barrel that opens in five years, how commitment can be civic as well as romantic.
She makes a small approving sound without letting it become a smile.
“Harrison. Your father cost us years,” she says later, as she pours me the last of the wine I should refuse but don’t. It’s the first time she’s said his name to me. It lands like a pebble in a pond, its rings widening the horror the call earlier started. “Bitter, difficult years.”
Vasso’s fingers press gently into my nape. Support or something else?
I choose support. “I can’t give those years back,” I say, setting the glass down because my hand shakes once and shows me; I set it down again, steadier. “I can stand where I should have, now.”
She studies me for an age. Then she inclines her head.
And the world shifts a hair toward peace.
After dinner, we walk along the harbor with the soft hiss of little waves licking stone.
Teenagers dangle their legs from the jetty and flirt in a language older than Greek.
Vasso buys me lemon sorbet; I share it with him mostly because I want to watch his mouth. He watches me watching and presses the empty cup to my palm with a look that says he’s aware of every secret in my face.
“You’re quiet,” he says when we’re done eating the sweet. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”
“I’m just tired.” The lie is clean and wrong. I swallow the rest. I’ll fix it. I will.
Back in the room, he climbs behind me into the small bed and tucks himself around me as if my body were a harbor and not a coastline dotted with wrecks.
I lie awake listening to the pulse of the sea through the shutters and draft a courier pickup in my head—no, on my phone, thumb hovering, then moving, then hovering again.
When the screen lights my face, he stirs, murmurs something low and Greek that sounds like sleep has relaxed the little boy inside the man, and I put the phone face-down and close my eyes and choose nothing, not yet.
Morning brings coffee on the balcony.
Eleni sets two cups down and says, “Drink, Naomi,” as if testing the fit. It fits. We drink quietly and let the day peel open. My phone buzzes as I reach for the honey and dread the text that pings into the calm.
Address to send the necklace. Tick-tock. —H
All the good sky in the world can’t make a message like that look like anything but a storm. I slide the phone under my thigh and pick up my cup.
Vasso turns with a slice of watermelon for me, sees something flicker across my face, files it behind his eyes where he keeps ledgers and knives.
He doesn’t ask. Not yet.
We spend the morning doing almost nothing.
He helps his mother fix a loose shutter; I sew a loose button onto a shirt, purely to be useful.
After lunch, while they read the paper and argue about football, I step into the bedroom, open the wardrobe, and take the velvet box from where I placed it under my folded shawl.
It is breathtaking, the line of diamonds he clasped at my throat; the one that made me feel, stupidly, like I was both beloved and bought.
I hold it in my palm until my fingers ache.
We’re leaving today, next stop is Athens before we head for the Amalfi Coast.
I locate the courier and make arrangements with a voice that never once trembles because I’m saving something worthy.
Something…someone I lo...
I clamp my eyes shut and stifle a moan as a truth I’m not wiling to face, or rediscover, whistles like a steam engine through me.
Temporary. Temporary. Temporary.
Remember that.
A year from now, you’ll be back living with Grandpa and Vasso Dillinger having run you off his driveway the way you did to him ten years ago.
When I return to the balcony, his mother glances up once, then back down at her crossword. She says, without looking at me, “The sea returns what does not belong to it.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“Do you?” she asks, still writing, and the kindness in it is a small, lethal thing.
That evening the island turns its lamps on one by one, gold coins falling into the dark. The courier message pings—collected. I feel the click in my bones, as if a safe has been shut on a secret that will either save us or blow our house apart.
We eat octopus and drink ouzo in the loud and rowdy little restaurant by the harbor.
We are laughing when my phone buzzes again and the sound feels like a gun cocking at the back of my neck.
Tick Tock, Princess.
I smile like nothing in the world has teeth and say, mildly, “Another talking dog video from TikTok,” because lying is a thing my father taught me and I am, apparently, a very good student when I have to be.
Later, in the dark, I listen to my husband’s breathing change as sleep takes him. I lie with my eyes open and the sea inside my ears and count backwards from a hundred, then a thousand, then the number of days left on a contract I signed with my own hand.
Eleven months and change. The inner voice smooths its nails over my heart. Tick-tock, Princess. How much can you fix before time is up?
Down the hill, a boat engine coughs, catches, putters into the dark. Somewhere a dog barks once and gives up. I turn onto my side and face the man who once kissed me under glass and promised me a world he didn’t have the funds to buy.
“Together,” I whisper at his sleeping mouth, and my throat burns at the truth in it. I want together. I want to stop building clever cages and calling them protection. I want to hand him the truth and let him be angry and trust that he won’t put that anger down as punishment on my body.
In the morning, there will be consequences.
Today, I keep my secrets. Tonight, I keep my place in his arms.
For now, the sea keeps our house afloat.