“No, of course not. Just throw your bags in the back and sit between Christos and me.” Eirini sighed and stood with the door open.
Anna smiled feebly and nodded, placing her duffel and her roller bag as carefully as possible in the back, but a tool fell loose anyway and clattered about a bit. Anna looked up at Eirini, who was rolling her eyes at Christos.
Eirini then ushered Anna into the cab of the truck, squeezing in next to her, pushing her further and further across the bench until she was pressed up against Christos, who just smiled at her with both his hands on the steering wheel.
As they pulled away from the resort, Anna saw the view out over the island for the first time. She could now see clearly the roads of Kamari that had walled her in before, all of them pointing toward the azure sea. It wasn’t the Santorini she had pictured, with winding paths that cut between white stone houses with domed blue roofs that blended in with the sky. But as they wound through farmland and vineyards, she thought it was beautiful nonetheless. She wondered what the view would be like from the summer house. And as they started up a hill and the airport came into view in the distance, Anna remembered how she had ended up in Santorini to begin with.
Four days earlier, Manhattan
Until that moment, the worst moment of Anna’s life had been the night just after New Year’s when she’d found out her father had died. Her mother had mentioned it in passing, right in between a summary of the previous weekend’s yoga retreat and an interrogation of Anna’s dating life. The news that her father, the man who had given her life, had dropped dead of a heart attack was apparently on the same level as how well the other middle-aged faux yogis could hold a downward dog.
Not that they had been close, of course, Anna and her father. At least not recently. He had left when Anna was six, riding away in a taxi as Anna’s mother had screamed down the street after him, yelling all sorts of names and insults, the white of her satin robe fluttering in the darkness as the wind caught it and tore it open. Anna’s big sister, Lizzy, eight at the time, held Anna close as she watched from the window and called down to her mama. Lizzy thought Anna was screaming because she was sad and scared but, really, she just wanted to tell her mother that her robe was open, and neighbors were starting to peek through their windows at the commotion. She had wondered for twenty years how someone could be so angry and embarrassed and in pain that they stood in the street with a boob out without realizing it.
But now, as Anna stood on Fifth Avenue, looking up at the third-story window of the man who was both her boss and her lover and saw another woman pressed against it, him behind her, both of them naked, faces twisted up in passion and agony and pleasure, Anna understood. She could be in a bathrobe, flapping open in the breeze, the whole of Manhattan staring at her, and she wouldn’t be able to think anything but, “You fool. You fool, you fool, you ABSOLUTE FOOL.” Like a mantra of disbelief, it kept coming.
She was devastated, but not for the reason she should have been. Marcus, the man she had been seeing for over a year, was fucking another woman right in front of her. Unknowingly, of course, but that didn’t make it any less jarring. But staring up at their bodies squished against the window, leaving sweat marks on the glass, she felt defeated. She felt worthless. She didn’t mean anything to him. She had had no delusions of romance, but it wasn’t until that moment that she understood exactly what she was to him: convenient.
When Anna had been five years old, she’d been chosen as the “Model Student” of her kindergarten class for the month of May. This meant that she was kind to her classmates, did well on assignments, and was the first to volunteer for things. To be honest, she wasn’t actually that social; she was quite shy, even as a child. A new Model Student was chosen every month, and there were only twelve children in her class. Eliminate the ones who got in trouble a lot, and Anna was pretty much guaranteed the title at some point in the year, regardless of how bold or social she actually was.
But that didn’t matter to five-year-old Anna. She brought her shiny yellow ribbon home that day and presented it proudly to her parents as she walked through the front door after school. Her father, Giorgos – the girls called him Baba, but their mother always introduced him as George – scooped her into a hug and tossed her in the air, spinning her around and cheering. Grace, Anna’s mother, simply said “well done” and poured herself another glass of wine.
Anna asked if she could hang the ribbon on the refrigerator, but her mother said that that space was only for important things to remember. Giorgos had looked coolly at his wife, but then nuzzled Anna’s hair and smiled. “What your mother means, my darling, is that the refrigerator is for boring things, and your award is anything but boring. Why don’t we go hang it somewhere in your room?”
The next morning, Anna’s mother had left for work without saying a word to any of them. Giorgos had piled Anna, Lizzy, and their school things into his painter’s van like always to take them to school. But when they got there, he’d told Anna to stay put; that he wanted to talk to her.
“Baba, what’s wrong? Am I in trouble?” Anna asked, watching her sister walk into the building.
But as soon as Lizzy was inside, Giorgos took Anna to the local breakfast chain for as many chocolate chip pancakes as she could handle. “Model Students get celebratory breakfasts,” he said, taking a bite of his short stack and putting his arm around Anna, who was sat on the stool next to him, still barely able to reach the counter. As he chewed, a bit of syrup dripped out of his mouth and down his face. Anna pointed and laughed. Her father pretended to be confused before leaning in and planting a big kiss on Anna’s cheek, rubbing the syrup in and tickling her with his beard.
After they ate, Giorgos drove Anna back to school and dropped her off at the front door with a note saying she had been at a dentist appointment. Anna was about to ask why they were lying if Model Students were allowed celebratory breakfasts, but when she looked up at her Baba, he looked so sad, so she just gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek and went inside.
A couple of weeks later, just after Anna’s sixth birthday, Giorgos was kicked out of the house, and Lizzy held Anna back as they watched from the window. Their mother would cite this incident of skipping school, alongside temperamental outbursts and a string of affairs she had discovered, in the ensuing divorce and custody battle that would result in Giorgos being sent back to Greece. Grace had never taken the last name Xenakis, and as soon as the divorce was finalized, she changed her daughters’ names to Linton to match her own. Anna and Lizzy would never see their father again.
Anna had a difficult time coming to terms with her father’s infidelity. It didn’t make sense to her. “Baba loves us,” she told her mother. “He would never do anything like that. He would never hurt us.”
“You’re a child,” Grace had said. “One day, you’ll understand just what a man will do, and then they’ll never be able to surprise you with how terrible they can be. But until then, you’ll just have to trust me.”
Standing on the sidewalk outside Marcus’s apartment, her mantra repeating in her mind, Anna finally understood what her mother meant. She did not love this man. She did not have a family with him. But as she watched him through the window, as she felt her world crumbling around her, she began to feel, for the first time, as her mother must have felt: discarded.
Half an hour later, Anna slammed her bedroom door shut and slumped against it, the tears finally coming. She had probably woken her roommate, but she didn’t care. She had been fighting back the tears the entire subway ride home, and she was at her breaking point. She tried and failed to push out of her mind the image of what she had seen, but it stayed front and center as she wept.
It wasn’t even the fact that Marcus was sleeping with someone else. Anna had known as soon as she started seeing him that their relationship wasn’t