Page 80 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

All the lights in the Antoniadis house were on, shadows flickering in the windows.

The taxi driver one of the maids had called for Lydia drove past the dozens of cars parked outside and followed the driveway as far as it would go until he reached the small white cottage where the only illumination came from the outdoor sensor light.

Dressed in her usual slouchy top and jeans, the top button of which had refused to do up, she treaded heavily to her front door and let herself in.

Once she’d paid the driver, who’d kindly brought her suitcases in, she gazed around at the walls that felt so much smaller than they had eight days ago.

Was that really all the time that had passed since she’d last been in her cottage? Only eight days? It didn’t seem possible.

In her bedroom, she looked in the mirror and then, unable to bear the dullness in her eyes and the strange ashen colour of her skin, looked away, brushing her hair and tying it back without looking again at her reflection.

The noise coming from the main house filtered into the night air when she was halfway through a walk that felt twice as long as it ever had before, and suddenly it came to her that she was free.

Free from Alexis. Free from a marriage she’d never wanted.

Free from all those overwhelming emotions being with him made her feel: the jealousy, the possessive need, the tortured thoughts.

Her family was saved and she was saved too.

The plan she’d originally made to get through the pregnancy and then tell her family about her baby’s father was viable again…

Her heart sank a little as she thought of the party she’d gatecrashed earlier. If they’d been seen arguing outside the house, then her brother would be bound to hear about it. What had possessed her to take such a risk?

She would cross that bridge when she came to it, she decided, and then smiled to know that within just two hours of her newfound freedom, she was feeling like her old self again.

Alexis hadn’t burrowed into her heart as deeply as she’d feared or as deeply as his arrogance had let him believe.

Love? Oh, she’d come close to falling in love with him but she hadn’t crossed the line from lust into love and now there was no danger that she ever would because she was free, and it felt fantastic, like the heaviest weight in the world had been lifted from her.

With a beaming smile on her face, she opened the kitchen door and stepped into the most raucous party she’d ever known her parents to throw.

Fighting her way through the throng in search of them, a search that seemed to take for ever as all the partying guests knew her and enthusiastically embraced her, she thought every member of her family, her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and all her parents’ friends and every senior employee of Antoniadis Shipping were crammed into the house celebrating the miracle.

‘Baba!’ She turned her head to find her mother elbowing her way to her from the dining room.

‘You’re back!’ she cried, throwing her arms around her.

After smothering Lydia’s face with kisses she stepped back a little and cupped her daughter’s cheeks.

‘Let me look at you… baba , you look tired! Oh, this is such a lovely surprise—we weren’t expecting you home until Sunday.

Come on, let’s find your father, and get you a drink and get some colour on those cheeks. ’

Hands clasped together, Lydia let her mother drag her through the crowd to the kitchen where her father—she must have walked straight past him—was supervising one of the caterers in the making of a vat of punch by pouring liberal amounts of vodka into it.

‘Baba!’ he cried when he spotted them, and then Lydia was pulled into another tight embrace and her face smothered with a dozen more kisses.

A glass of punch thrust into her hand, her parents raised their glasses and she followed suit, and when they both drank liberally, she kept her lips tight around the glass rim to stop any of the potent liquid seeping into her mouth.

They were both too high on the euphoria of their business being saved to notice, too euphoric to notice too when Lydia discreetly switched her punch for an alcohol-free one.

‘Is Thanasis not here?’ she shouted over the noise.

‘No, he’s gone away with Lucie . They want some “time alone together”.’ Her mother rolled her eyes gleefully at this.

Lydia hardly dared to ask. ‘Does this mean you are okay now about Thanasis loving her?’

Her mother threw an arm around Lydia’s shoulder and kissed her temple. ‘How could I not be? She has saved us and your brother loves her and she must love him too to have forgiven him for what he did to her.’

Hope opened its wings in her heart. ‘Even though she’s a Tsaliki?’

The glee on her mother’s face deepened. ‘But she isn’t, is she? She was never properly one of those devil’s spawns, and now she has turned her back on all of them to join the Antoniadis camp and hates them as much as we do, if not more!’

‘If that doesn’t call for another drink then I don’t know what does!’ her father interjected, his glee as evident as her mother’s, and the wings of hope closed back up again.

Her fingers tightening around the glass, Lydia joined her parents in raising a toast to Antoniadis prosperity, and wondered why she’d even felt that hope.

This was where she belonged. Here. With the people she loved and who loved her.

Her family. She should be counting her blessings that Alexis had set her free.

She was counting her blessings! Except…even in the haze of her euphoria, sickness roiled deep in her belly, and she didn’t understand why she’d had to tighten her hold on the glass to stop herself from throwing the liquid in her mother’s face or why she felt so strung out beneath her skin that there was every danger that one wrong word addressed to her would see her dissolve into a puddle of tears.

Alexis lay fully dressed on his hotel bed watching the early morning light filter through the curtains. Or trying to. The room was spinning. A whole bottle of the hotel’s finest Scotch had finally kicked in.

Good. Let oblivion take him. Let him have this one night to wallow in misery and drink himself into a stupor. One more night of making terrible choices.

Lydia had gone. The message from his staff had come before he’d even settled into his hotel room.

He’d laughed to read it. Of course she’d gone.

The path of least resistance, that was Lydia’s way.

The only thing she’d ever fought for was their baby and he was the fool who’d let himself believe she would ever fight for him.

It had never been about him. If her family’s business hadn’t been so close to destruction he still wouldn’t know she was expecting their child.

She would have kept it a tightly wrapped secret because she was a coward.

A coward who loved her family and was terrified of losing them.

She loved him too even if she couldn’t—wouldn’t—see it.

But, as with the two fools who’d come before him, she didn’t love him enough, and he was the arrogant fool to have let himself believe what she felt for him was different.

If it was different then it wasn’t a difference that was enough. Not for her.

He tried to drag air into lungs that no longer knew how to breathe for themselves.

Better they end it now. He didn’t want to hate her.

Okay, he did want to hate her. He wanted to convince himself that his father had been right and that she was all the things he’d said the Antoniadises were the whole of his life. A scorpion.

He’d always known Lydia had a sting in her tail.

She’d stung him the morning after their glorious passionate weekend together.

He’d just never appreciated how deeply the sting would penetrate the second time it hit him, embedding so deep that he didn’t know how to begin ridding himself of its pain.

If half a bottle of brandy and a whole bottle of Scotch couldn’t touch it then what hope was there for him?

Somehow, he needed to learn to navigate the rest of his life without her.

The darkness he craved was getting closer, his heavy eyes closing.

A solitary tear rolled down his cheek and then oblivion.