There was light—light everywhere. Lightness and brightness and the radiance of the sun pouring into her after long, bleak darkness.
How can this be? she thought, amazed and dazed and dazzled and delirious. How can this be?
How could it be that Nikos was kissing her, embracing her, holding her so tenderly, so lovingly? It couldn’t be true—surely it couldn’t be true? Yet it was! It was true—it was real and true and not a dream—not a yearning—but real, real, real…
The tears were pouring down her face and he was kissing them away, kissing her and murmuring to her, with a wealth of tenderness, and then cradling her, soothing her, as she wept against him, wept away the long, bitter years that had divided them.
‘Oh, Nikos—my own, own Nikos!’ She pressed her face against his chest, weeping for all that she had lost and all that had been given to her again. Radiance filled her.
He swept her up, swept her away, carrying her as if she were no more than a feather, thistledown. He laid her down on the satin-covered bed and lay down beside her, cradling her all the time. Soothing her and hushing her, gentling her and quieting her.
And then softly, sweetly, tenderly and gently, passionately and lovingly, he made love to her—the woman he loved, the girl he had always loved, his own, sweet Sophie, always his.
As he was hers. Now and for all the years to come.
EPILOGUE
THE music room at Belledon was hushed. At the piano Sophie sat, fingers poised over the keyboard, gathering her focus. Then, with a ripple of notes, she began to play. Chopin, lyrical and poignant, poured forth.
Sitting beside Edward Granton, freed now of his imprisoning wheelchair, Nikos watched the woman he loved play the music she loved. At his side he heard Sophie’s father give a sigh of contentment.
‘So like her mother,’ he murmured, with a world of love in his low voice.
Nikos smiled. But his eyes remained on Sophie. Always on Sophie, his beloved wife. How blessed he was, he knew full well. To have lost her through his own lack of faith, and yet to have found her again. He would stand by her side for eternity now! Love her for all eternity.
As his gaze rested on her, Sophie caught his eyes, and her own filled with warmth and tenderness. Nikos—her own Nikos! Love swept through her, borne aloft by the swelling of the music at her fingertips. How much she loved him!
Happiness filled her—a happiness that was almost more than she could believe! Yet believe it she must—it was in every moment of the day. Every moment of the night. And it filled this house, too—Belledon, which Nikos had indeed restored, but for themselves to live in, just as in that fleeting longing for it to be their home which had fired within her as she’d wandered its desolate, abandoned rooms. They were desolate and abandoned no more. Restored, as their love had been restored, they now gloried in their beauty. Gracious and welcoming, lapped by breathtaking gardens, Belledon was a home once more.
And not just to them. For not only did Sophie’s father live there now, with his health immeasurably improved in the three years since his daughter had won Nikos’s love again, but Belledon was a home to many others who, like him, had suffered the grim debilitation of stroke. One whole wing had been transformed to become patient accommodation, and the extensive outhouses had been converted to treatment rooms and housing for medical staff—the whole enterprise funded by Kazandros Corp, for patients who could not otherwise have afforded the rehabilitation therapies on offer.
And one of them was music. Sophie had set up a series of weekly recitals, here in the beauty of the music room, played sometimes by herself, when she and Nikos were in residence, and sometimes by the orchestras and music students of the local secondary schools, for the benefit of patients and staff alike. Tonight, on this mild spring evening, it was her turn to give the performance, and as Chopin’s preludes, etudes and nocturnes flowed through the candlelit dimness, she knew she had found her heart’s content.
How much I have! My adored Nikos, my dear, dear father, and…Her eyes softened with infinite maternal love as she played. And my precious, precious son…
Taddeus Nikolai Stephanos Kazandros—known universally as Teddy—was now a lively eighteen-month-old toddler, and the apple of
all eyes. Sophie’s father vied with Nikos’s parents as to who could spoil him the most, and even to Sophie and Nikos’s more discerning eyes their firstborn was without fault or flaw. Her expression softened even more. Soon they would all have another baby to adore, and already she was sure that she could sense the first flutterings of new life within her.
Across the room, her eyes sought Nikos’s again, meeting his in love and joy and mutual cherishing. And between them flowed a message as old as time itself. The eternal message of love fulfilled, that no power could defeat.