Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
September 2024
F orty-somethings Stella and James sat side by side on the sofa at The Lucerne Hotel. It was more than twenty years since James had left Stella on Crete. And Stella still didn’t know the reason.
James had both of his hands around his glass of wine. He looked at Stella with open, honest eyes. It reminded Stella of how little he’d been able to look at her that last night in Greece. Now, it was like he didn’t want to hide anymore.
“It’s a good wine,” he said, maybe because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I took a few sommelier courses,” Stella said.
“Me too,” James said. “I’m always trying to teach my daughter to appreciate good wine. But she’s still young. Still into really loud rock music. Doesn’t care if she drinks light beer or vodka.”
“Aren’t you still into really loud rock music?” Stella asked with a smile. She’d read a few of his album reviews and interviews and been impressed with his writing.
“I’ll always be into that,” James admitted. “But I have a thing for classical and jazz these days, too. Maybe it means I’m old.”
“Maybe it means you appreciate all the finer things in life,” Stella said. “But you always did.”
James blushed and looked into his glass.
Stella thought, I wonder if we’ll talk about wine all night, and then he’ll just go home.
“I can’t believe you wrote a book about it,” James said with a wry smile.
Stella’s heart pumped. “It started out as an experiment. I wanted to see how much I remembered.”
“You remember all of it,” James said. “I cried when I read it.”
Stella took a sharp breath.
“I couldn’t believe how devastating the ending was,” James said. “It’s hard to believe that guy abandoned you in that hotel in Crete. No explanation! What kind of monster would do that?” James’s eyes filled with tears. “I can’t believe that was me.”
Stella gazed at him. This was James’s aging face. Those were James’s big eyes.
“You broke my heart,” Stella said with a soft laugh. It was years ago, but it suddenly felt new again.
“I broke my own heart, too,” James stated.
“Tell me what happened. Tell me why you left,” Stella urged.
James nodded. He knew he owed her that.
“I remember we hadn’t bothered with phone calls for a while. It was like we were the only two people to exist. But you called your mother, and it got me thinking about my younger brother. We’d both been pretty banged up about the death of our mother. And then I’d left him alone.
“So I went to that payphone and rang him up. His girlfriend answered. Molly. She was totally enraged. Told me exactly what she thought of me and my abandoning the family. I tried to laugh it off. I told her to give the phone to my brother. But she wouldn’t let up. And that’s when she told me my ex-girlfriend Nancy was pregnant,” James said.
Stella’s jaw dropped.
“Molly ripped into me. She told me Nancy didn’t have anything. Her visa was running out, and she was going to have to go back to America and face her family. I knew how cruel Nancy’s family was. I started imagining her life in the States, raising our child with her abusive father nearby. It shook me up.
“Nancy and I hadn’t been together very long. We dated maybe three or four months that spring before we parted ways. Mum died in June—a car accident—and after that, I took off and never thought about Nancy or anyone, not really, not when we were sailing around Greece and falling in love with each other.”
Stella’s head throbbed. Falling in love. Was it a fantasy?
“But after that phone call, I went walking through the rain. I thought about my own mother and father. I thought about how much I’d loved my mother and how much I’d hated my father for making my mother miserable. I thought about what kind of father I wanted to be. An absent one? It seemed too cruel.
“That’s when I found you at that taverna, got out of my mind drunk, and chatted with that older gentleman.”
“Angelos,” Stella reminded him.
“Angelos. That’s right. We must have talked for an hour about my mother and about Nancy and about my unborn child,” James said. “I knew what I had to do, but I also knew I was in love with you.” He wet his lips. “I could have wandered through Greece with you forever. But real life was waiting for me in London. And I went back.”
Stella’s heart was in a million pieces. The enormity of James’s story hung in the air between them.
Pregnant. His ex was pregnant.
“And that’s your daughter,” Stella said in a small voice.
“Taylor,” James said. “Yes.”
Stella remembered the TikTok video she’d watched of a beautiful young woman named Taylor Atkinson. The young woman who’d “destroyed” her life by taking James away.
But was it destroyed?
“I wish you would have told me,” Stella said.
“I was too confused. Too weak,” James said. “And I didn’t want you to hate me more than you already did.” He sighed. “But I owed you an explanation.”
“I never hated you,” Stella said. “I never could have hated you. I loved you too much.”
James showed her his crooked smile. Stella waited for her heart to melt. But it didn’t.
“What happened to you after Crete?” James asked. “The book doesn’t go that far.”
Stella sipped her wine and remembered her mother at the airport, her father’s familiar smell of autumn in Nantucket.
“I came home,” Stella said. “My family was angry with me but so glad to see me. Slowly, I built a life. I had a family.”
James nodded. “A beautiful life.”
“It has been,” Stella agreed. It’s getting more complicated by the day.
“I think my love for you changed me,” James said. “I’ve been thinking that ever since I read the book.”
“My love for you changed me, too,” Stella agreed. “I was a completely different person when I went home.”
James reached out to take Stella’s hand. Stella placed it in his palm and closed her eyes. His skin was warm. She could almost imagine they were in their twenties again, holding hands as they slept late on the sea.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Stella opened her eyes to look at James. “Okay?”
She wondered if he was going to ask, Do you think we could ever try again? Or Are you still in love with me? Or Why did you write this book?
Instead, James asked, “What’s the story with your ex-husband, Matt?”
Stella’s chest felt flush. Immediately, Matt’s face came into her mind’s eye. “He’s my ex-husband. That’s it.” But even as she said it, she felt how untrue it was.
“He came up to me at the book launch,” James said. “I could see in his eyes that he still loves you. A lot.”
“We’re good friends,” Stella said.
James shook his head. “He loves you.”
Stella didn’t know what to say. She continued to hold James’s hand. But she was beginning to question why.
“We got divorced four years ago,” Stella said. “It was during the pandemic, but we hadn’t really been together in a while.”
“Can you say why?”
“Why does anyone get divorced? I think we were exhausted. We spent all our energy raising children and worrying about the house, our careers, and our money. We lost something. We stopped trying to get it back.”
James raised his shoulders. “Maybe that something was just asleep for a while. Maybe you can still get it back.” He laughed. “Love is all we have, you know? And I know for a fact that you really know how to love. I’ve felt it myself.”
Stella couldn’t believe this. Here she was in Manhattan, on her book tour, talking to her first true love about her ex-husband.
“I messed up big with my ex,” James said.
“Nancy?”
“Kinsey,” he said. “Nancy and I got divorced many years ago. She’s married now.” He swallowed. “But Kinsey was one of the best people I’d ever been with. We worked. We really did. But I couldn’t fully show her how I felt. It was like I was underwater. After we broke up, she read your book and said she couldn’t believe I was capable of so much love.”
Stella squeezed his hand. “It doesn’t feel like you’re underwater anymore. Maybe there’s still time to show her what kind of man you really are. You’re still the passionate, loving man from the book. It just took you some time to find yourself again.”
James shook his head. “I can’t believe you helped me. Again.”
Stella laughed. “You helped me, too. It’s pretty insane, isn’t it?”
“It’s like we’re soulmates,” James said. “But we’re not meant to be together forever.”
Stella took a breath. She knew he was right.
And she was surprised how little it hurt her to hear it.
Stella and James talked for another two hours that night. They shared memories of their time in Greece; they ordered Greek food up to their room and drank wine. They talked about the joys and mysteries of parenting, their hopes for their children, and their goals for the future.
They talked until the clock hit midnight, and James said it was time to go.
Stella walked him to the hotel door and hugged him with tears in her eyes.
A part of her wanted to say, If it doesn’t work with anyone else, let’s call each other in five years and make a go of it.
But this story wasn’t a romance novel.
It was real.
Then she remembered something.
“I have a question for you,” she said.
James offered a sad smile. “You can ask me anything.”
“Remember that first morning? You rented that sailboat from a man named Kostos. I asked you how he knew you wouldn’t steal the boat, and you said you’d given him something precious.”
James nodded somberly.
“What was it?”
“It was my mother’s locket,” James said. “It had a photograph of my brother and me in it. It wasn’t worth anything save for the memories.” He turned to look at a painting in the hallway. “He could see it in my eyes, I think. How much pain I was in. How much the locket meant to me.”
Stella ached. “I wish I would have seen it.”
James turned to look at her again. “You did see it. I think that’s why you loved me so much. You knew I needed it.”
Stella felt final tears fall down her cheeks. She couldn’t say anything else.
“I love you, Stella,” James said before he left. “I always will.”
Stella blew him a kiss as he walked down the hallway. He caught it in his hand and turned out of sight.