My dearest little Lysette,
Immediately her eyes filled with more tears.
I’ll always think of you that way, no matter how old you are when you read this letter. You’re the daughter I never had. Danae and I couldn’t have children. The problem was mine. I found out early in our marriage that I was infertile. It came as a great shock, but I’d dreamed of having children, so I wanted to adopt. She didn’t, and I could never talk her into it. I decided she didn’t love me enough or she would have agreed to try because I wanted children more than anything.
Six months ago, Xander let me know that he knew of a baby we could adopt. I went to Danae and begged her. It could be our last chance, but she still said no. In my anger I divorced the woman I loved and always will. Now I’m paying for it dearly because I don’t believe she’ll forgive me.
You need to know that you were never the reason for our marital troubles. I ruined things at the beginning of our marriage by making an issue that she stay at home. I insisted she quit her job because I was raised with old-fashioned ideas. I was wrong to impose them on Danae. She’s very much a modern woman and a part of me resented the fact that she couldn’t be happy at home.
Please realize that your coming to us helped keep our marriage together and deep down she knows it. I’m afraid it was because of my damnable pride—my greatest flaw—nothing more, that made me divorce her, so never ever blame yourself. If I was hard on you because of the men you dated, it was only because of my desperate fear you might end up in a bad marriage with a man who didn’t value you enough. Danae felt the same way.
Forgive us if we hurt you in any way.
“Oh, Nassos—” Lys cried out in relief and anguish.
You have a massive inheritance from your father that will be given to you on your twenty-seventh birthday. He dictated that specific time in his will to make sure you’d be mature enough when you came into your money.
Lys was incredulous. She’d thought it had all been incorporated into the Rodino empire. Nassos would have deserved every euro of it.
Again, I have no idea how old you are now that I’m dead. I suspect you’re a very wealthy woman, hopefully married with children, maybe even grandchildren. And happy!
As you will have found out from Danae, she inherited everything with one exception...the hotel is your inheritance from me to own and run as you will.
Lys reeled physically and clung to the arms of the chair.
No. It wasn’t possible. The hotel should have been given to Danae, who understood the hotel business very well. It was Nassos who’d hired her away from another hotelier to come and work for him twenty-four years ago. How sad that even after his death, Nassos couldn’t allow her to continue in a career she’d enjoyed.
Lys’s eyes closed tightly for a moment.
Danae hadn’t contacted Lys yet. There hadn’t been time. How could Nassos have done this to the woman he’d loved? Wiping her eyes, she went on reading.
But you’re not the sole owner, Lys.
What? The shocks just kept coming.
Before you take possession, you must give the sealed envelope to Takis Manolis. You’ve heard me and Danae talk about him often enough. When he came to Crete periodically, we’d discuss business on my yacht where we could be private. I never did believe in mixing my business matters with my personal life. The two don’t go together.
You’ll know where to find him when the time comes. The two of you will share ownership for six months. After that time period, you’ll both be free to make any decisions you want.
By the time you read this, he’s probably married with children and grandchildren too. I’ve thought of him as the son I never had.
It was my thrill and privilege to be your guardian, friend and adoptive father for the child of my best friend Kristos.
Love always,
Nassos.
* * *
You can’t go home again.
Whoever coined the phrase was wrong. Yes, you could go home again.
In the last eleven years, Takis Manolis had made four trips a year to Crete and nothing had changed... Not the pain, not the landscape, not his family.
Naturally they were all a little older each time he flew here from New York and later from Italy, but everything had stayed the same if you looked at the inner vessel.
The village of Tylissos where he’d been born was still situated on the northeastern mountainside of Psiloritis near the sea. Time hadn’t altered it a whit.
Nor had it altered the views of Takis’s father or his elder brother, Lukios, who helped their father run the old ten-room hotel.
His family followed the philotimo creed for all Cretans to maintain their unflappable dignity even if their existence bordered on poverty when the hotel didn’t fill. They respected the rich and didn’t try to become something greater than they were. Takis was baffled that they didn’t mind being poor and accepted it as their lot in life.
Until recent years there’d been very little inherited wealth in Greece. Most of the Greek millionaires were self-made, but envy wasn’t part of his brother’s or his father’s makeup.
Takis’s older sister, Kori, married to a cook at one of the village restaurants where she worked, didn’t have to tell him that she and her husband, Deimos, struggled to make a decent living.
They had a little girl, Cassia, now three years old, who’d been in and out of the hospital after her birth because of chronic asthma and needed a lot of medical care. He was thankful that at least Kori kept the cash he’d given her for a belated birthday present, knowing she’d use it for bills.
Though the family accepted the gifts he brought whenever he came, pride prevented his father from taking any monetary help. Lukios was the same. Being a married man with a wife and two children, who were now four and five, he would never look to Takis for assistance to make life a little easier for his family and in-laws.
This centuries-old pride thwarted Takis’s heartfelt need and desire to shower his family with all the things of which they’d been deprived and caused him deep grief.
Early in life he’d known he was different from the rest of them, never going along with their family’s status quo. Though he’d never openly fought with his father or brother, he’d struggled to conform.
His mother knew how he felt, but all she could do was urge Takis to keep the peace. When he’d told her of his dreams to go to college to better himself, she’d said it was impossible. They didn’t have the money. None of the Manolis family had ever gone for a higher education.
Takis just couldn’t understand why neither his father nor brother didn’t want to expand and grow the small hotel that had been handed down from an earlier generation. He could see nothing wrong with trying to build it into something bigger and better. To be ambitious didn’t make you dishonorable, but his father and brother weren’t risk takers and refused to change their ways.
There were times when he wondered if he really was his parents’ birth child. Except that his physical features and build proclaimed him a Manolis through and through.
By his midteens, Takis had feared that if he stayed on Crete, he would turn into his brother, who was a clone of the Manolis men before him, each having so little to show for all their hard work. More and more his ideas clashed with his father’s over how to bring in more clients and build another couple of floors on the hotel.
Takis had worked out all his ideas in detail. One day he’d approached his father in all seriousness, wanting to talk to him man-to-man. But when he made his proposals, his father said