Page 6 of Footprints in the Sand (Coleman #13)
Chapter Six
E va had never been on such a massive boat before.
The Blue Star Ferry from Athens to Paros was nine stories high, featuring three restaurants, enormous garages for cars, sleeping cabins, and numerous small shops that sold snacks, bottled water, and small gadgets for bored children.
She’d never been on a cruise, but she imagined it was like this, sort of.
Kind of. At the coffee shop, she bought an iced cappuccino called a “Freddo Cappuccino” and immediately spilled it on her thigh.
Cursing herself, she sped to the bathroom to try to clean herself up.
But the problem was, she’d opted for a light yellow dress, and the stain was prominent and somehow getting worse as she scrubbed it.
Exhausted after the ten-plus-hour flight, Eva squatted in front of her backpack and searched for a ratty T-shirt and a pair of shorts, which she changed into, not wanting to go down to the lower luggage hold to get anything better out of her suitcase.
Her life had fallen apart, and she looked like it.
Dimitra’s sister would probably try to ship her off on the next boat.
Out the window, it didn’t look like a glittering Greek postcard-worthy day.
Storms frothed over the water, and the boat began to teeter strangely, making her stomach churn.
The last thing Eva needed was to get seasick.
Hurrying to the on-board pharmacy, she bought a Dramamine equivalent and hunkered up in the corner, willing the four hours to pass.
But suddenly, her phone began to explode with messages from her mother.
MOM: I know you think you have to be brave right now, but nobody is forcing you to do this. If you want to come back to the Vineyard in a week, your dad and I would be happy to host you while that woman is at your place.
MOM: I’m worried, you know. It isn’t like you to be so rash. I know that what Finn did was absolutely atrocious, and I know it’s knocked you off your feet. But that doesn’t mean you have to run away from your life.
MOM: We want to be there for you during this time! We want to help you! I wish you would let us.
Eva took a deep breath and closed her eyes as another wave of nausea took over her.
Eva had waited till the very last minute to tell her mother about her plan to leave Martha’s Vineyard and go to Greece for the summer. Her mother hadn’t let up on her nagging since. Theo said she hadn’t stopped crying.
Of course, Eva had been very sparse in detailing what had happened between her and Finn. She didn’t want her mother to know quite how much money had been lost. The staggering amount was embarrassing. It made Eva worry about her own future, so she couldn’t imagine how her mother would feel.
Eva wanted to tell her mother that all this nagging was part of the reason she needed to get away.
She didn’t want to spend her summer talking about Finn and her money situation and her breakup.
She wanted to go somewhere she could pretend she was somebody else for a little while. Was that too much to ask?
Just then, the boat surged to the right and cast her off her chair. She bruised her knee in the fall and felt more sorrowful than ever. Nobody looked at her when she fell, and nobody came to her aid. Why did it feel like everyone else on this boat was immune to the turbulence of the high seas?
It was three in the afternoon, which meant eight in the morning on Martha’s Vineyard. Theo usually woke up around then, she was pretty sure, so she called him and got a groggy and slightly grumpy version of her brother.
“Did you make it?” he asked.
“I’m on the ferry, and I’m sick to my stomach,” she said. “And Mom won’t stop messaging me.”
“Turn off your phone,” Theo grunted.
Eva filled her lungs. “Can you make sure Mom actually goes to get Dimitra from the ferry? I’m worried that she’ll pretend this isn’t happening and forget her.”
“What time does she get in today?” Theo asked.
“Around eleven, I think,” Eva said. She was anxious for Dimitra to meet her mother, anxious for her mother to meet Dimitra, and anxious for Dimitra to enter into the life she’d abandoned. What would Dimitra make of it? Would Dimitra want to run back to Greece?
“Oh, I wanted to tell you,” Theo said. “Marty ran into Finn the other day. In Boston.”
Eva’s heart shattered. It felt incredible that Finn was out in Boston, living a normal life, going to the grocery store, going on runs, cooking food, and working, just as he had been doing alongside her in Martha’s Vineyard for the past eight-plus years.
But what did she want him to be doing? Mourning her? Staying inside? Crying?
“Oh,” Eva managed to say.
“Apparently, he looked terrible,” Theo said.
Eva wasn’t sure if that was what she wanted to hear either. “Okay. I hope he’s taking care of himself.”
“But you look great, Eva,” Theo said, which was what he’d been telling her for a few days now. “You’re going to have a crazy Greek fling this summer. You’re going to live in the way you haven’t in years and years because you’ve been strapped to that creep.”
Finn? A creep? She wasn’t sure she liked the description. She wasn’t sure she liked to think of herself as someone who’d dated a creep for eight years.
Yet she knew Theo was trying to help.
“Make sure Dimitra’s welcomed,” she urged. “She’s being so kind to me.”
“All right, all right,” Theo said. “Get there safe. Love you.”
“Love you.”
When they got off the phone, Eva continued to surge with seasickness and a surprise jolt of fear. What if Finn was already dating someone else in Boston? What if the only way to get over his guilt was to distract himself with a fresh love?
She was a fool.
The island of Paros appeared on the glinting waters, a beautiful dark green and brown island dotted with gorgeous white square homes with blue shutters.
It looked like something out of a dream.
Along with the other tourists, Eva hurried down to retrieve her suitcase and head into the sunlight, which felt far brighter and more penetrating than what they had back in Massachusetts.
Sweat bubbled on her upper lip. As she paraded down the ramp with her suitcase, she scanned the crowd, looking for some sign of Dimitra’s sister, Athena.
But the crowd near the port was made almost exclusively of tourists, hurrying around an old windmill like chickens with their heads cut off.
Eva veered off to the side, hovering over her suitcase and searching through her phone for Athena’s contact.
It was then a busted-up white car pulled up and honked its horn. The window rolled down to reveal a Greek woman in her fifties with penetrating and dark eyes. She spoke English with a very harsh accent. “You are Eva?”
Eva wondered what gave her away. Did she look that clueless?
“Hi!” Eva said, giving her best American smile. “Athena?”
Athena got out of the car and opened the trunk so Eva could drop her suitcase into it. Athena watched her ruefully, in a way that suggested that she was about as keen on this situation as Eva’s mother was.
“My sister, she is almost to your home,” Athena said, gesturing for Eva to open the passenger door and get in.
“I know. My mother and brother are going to meet her.”
“And what do they think about your house swap?” Athena asked.
“I think they’re surprised by it,” Eva said. “My brother thinks it’s great.”
“I do not think we are ever meant to be far from our families and homes,” Athena stated.
Eva’s stomach churned with a mix of leftover seasickness and fear of this formidable woman. What had she gotten herself into?
The drive from Parikia to Aliki was about twenty minutes.
Athena didn’t seem keen on talking, which gave Eva plenty of time to gaze out the window and try to figure out where she’d ended up.
Greek drivers seemed especially reckless, whipping around them at a million miles an hour, but Athena wasn’t fazed.
“Here is Aliki,” Athen said as they entered the little village, population no more than three hundred. “It is where my father’s family is from, going back generations. Where you are staying used to belong to our grandmother when she was a girl. It is a very important house in our family.”
Eva was suddenly even more frightened. What if she messed up the house in some way? She had no allegiance to the house where Dimitra was staying in Martha’s Vineyard. It was only a rental filled with bad memories. But this was an ancestral Greek home!
But when Athena parked in front of a quaint two-bedroom white stucco house on the hill, Eva forced herself to breathe easier.
The place wasn’t pretentious in the least. It was instead homey and quaint, with beautiful furnishings and pieces of very cool art on the walls.
Athena explained that Dimitra had made all the art herself.
“I think she thinks she will be inspired in your Martha’s Vineyard,” Athena said as she snapped on the lights and showed her around. “She has not wanted to make very much art since her husband passed away. It has been very difficult for her.”
Eva nodded. Rachelle had mentioned that Dimitra lost her husband, which felt like a much more staggering loss than Eva’s own. Finn was still in the world. He was just the worst, sort of. (Of course, 80 percent of Eva’s heart still ached for him.)
The bedroom Eva was staying in, Athena explained, was the guest bedroom, and it was also where Dimitra had been sleeping since Kostos’s death.
It was shaded and cool, which provided a welcome relief from the unrelenting sun.
Eva left her suitcase here and clasped her hands as Athena walked her through what else she needed to know: the better restaurants in the village, where the grocery store was, and who to call if something bad happened.
“And we want to invite you tonight to a family party,” Athena said, almost begrudgingly. “Dimitra wants you to meet everyone so you can feel at home.”
Eva nearly groaned with fatigue. A family party? She wanted to go about as much as Athena wanted her to, which wasn’t very much. But Athena had to ask, and Eva had to say yes. It was the game they were forced to play.
“What time should I come?” Eva asked.
“We start at nine,” Athena said. “In Greece, we eat late and stay out later. It’s just our way.” Athena wrote down the address for the family party and said she had to go prepare. It looked like she was glad to be free of Eva, a complication she hadn’t asked for.
After Athena left, Eva collapsed on the guest bed and curled into a ball, listening to her heart pound. She’d been far away from home before, but Finn had always been with her. She felt like a fish out of water. She knew that was the point.