Kosta’s voice came out gently. ‘I know what it’s like to live without the person you love. I lost my son.’ His voice was just a hoarse whisper now, almost indiscernible above the distant rumbling of thunder and the crashing of the waves. ‘I lost my wife. Neither of these things I had a choice in, but you do. Alice is out there, and she loves you, and you love her. All you have to do is reach out and grab her with both hands, and you’re too damned afraid.’
Thanos stopped fighting the truth. He stopped fighting. He turned to face Kosta, his skin pale beneath his caramel tan. ‘And what happens when she decides she doesn’t love me after all?’
‘And what happens if she doesn’t?’ Kosta threw back. ‘What happens if you are a man like me in fifty years’ time, staring out at the ocean and looking back on a lifetime of happiness and memories that you wouldn’t trade an entire fortune for?’
Thanos listened to these words, his heart in his throat, Alice in his mind, and suddenly he felt it imperative to sign the papers and leave Kalatheros that had nothing to do with P & A and everything to do with somewhere else he desperately needed to be.
* * *
Running helped.
Alice had never been much of an athlete.
But after the grief and the depression and the desire to wallow had come a strange restlessness she hadn’t been able to burn off. It made her legs twitch at night, while lying in bed, and her brain run like a freight train at all hours, so she would wake up in the middle of the night and be wide awake with no hope of sleep or rest.
She had a restlessness with nowhere to put her energy and so she’d taken up running. And not just running a little bit, either. She tried to do five miles morning and night.
It helped.
She didn’t sleep better but her body was weary, so that she could lie on the sofa with mind-numbing television on in the background and try not to think about what her life would be like if she hadn’t told Thanos how she felt.
Would they still be married? Sleeping together every night, her body wrapped around his, the sound of the waves that surrounded Statherá Prásino whispering in her ear, filling her soul with the beats of happiness?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Maybe he would have sealed the deal with Kosta and put an end to things, finishing it because their marriage served no practical purpose.
Her chest felt heavy and strange at the very idea of that, and she knew she’d done the right thing. It was so much better to have left rather than to have been asked to leave.
She ran, one foot in front of the other, through Central Park then onto the busy streets surrounding it, weaving through people and bikes and cars and horse-drawn carriages stuffed with loud tourists; she ran with her head bent and her hair pulled into a plait, her earphones blocking out all the noise of the city she didn’t care to hear.
And when she reached the foyer to the apartment he’d bought for her, which she’d eventually stopped fighting and accepted as a part of her life, she stopped running and pressed her hands to her knees, letting herself catch her breath for a few moments before she had to dredge up a smile and offer it to the doorman.
After just a moment she straightened and nodded in his direction as he held the glass doors open for her. The foyer was a testament to white marble and glass. Even in her rubber-soled sport shoes, she couldn’t cross the space silently.
She pulled her earphones out as she approached the lift, jabbing the button with more anger than it deserved. Her breathing was still rushed. The doors opened and she stepped inside. The doors slid shut, except right as they were almost closed, just an inch or so from meeting in the middle, a hand slid between them, to hold them open. Alice fumbled, reaching behind her for the panel, looking for the ‘door open’ button.
It wasn’t necessary. The hand succeeded. The doors opened and seconds later, as if her dreams and mind and hopes and heart had conjured him, Thanos swept into the lift.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHE COULDN’T SPEAK.
There were a thousand words rushing through her, begging to be spoken, but she couldn’t fumble her brain towards a single one of them in that second. She stared at him hungrily, her eyes refusing to obey and look away, her brain forgetting that he’d broken her heart and ceased to exist in her life, her heart chugging like a bouncing ball in her torso.
And he stared right back, his expression, his beautiful eyes moving with urgency over her face, as though he could somehow catalogue everything she’d done and said and felt in the three and a half months since she’d left the island.
She was in a state of shock, which was the only explanation for why it occurred to her to mind that she was wearing running gear, no make-up, and was covered in a sheen of perspiration from her exercise.
The lift began to cruise upwards and it was just the jolt Alice needed.
‘Why are you here?’
His eyes glittered with determination. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
Alice shook her head. ‘Not to me.’