Page 35 of The Silent Sister

‘Is she all right? I’ve been thinking all sorts of things. Awful things. Gabriella rang after you left. She was crying so I don’t know what happened.’

Cassia pulled her younger daughter into a hug. ‘She’s going to be fine, Bron. She’s got a broken arm, which will heal. And a nasty bump and cut on her head, which they’ll check again in the morning.’

By this time, Tom had joined them, and they went into the sitting room.

‘Her injuries are the least of our worries . She was in a Mini with five others, all squashed in like sardines in a tin. Gabriella was one of them, but what was Eléni thinking? She was lucky her injuries were not more serious. They could all have been killed. You know the bend going into Nant Felin? Whoever was driving came off the road there. Ended up in the hedge.’

Cassia’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I can’t believe she’d act like that. She got into a car with a driver who’d been drinking!’

‘The nurse didn’t say Eléni had been drinking. She said the police could smell alcohol in the car. She’s overage anyway, but it’s all so unlike her. I’ve never known her to have a drink even here in the house. The worst bit, Bron, is that she hasn’t spoken since it happened.’

‘Oh, no. Auntie Gwladys isn’t here to help her now.

’ Although she was too young to remember all the details of what it had been like for her sister, it was talked about so Bronwen knew the struggle the whole family had gone through.

‘I remember Auntie Gwladys sitting side by side with her and coaxing her to say more words, and then giving her tight cwtches if she got it right. I couldn’t have been very old but I was quite jealous of her. ’

Cassia remembered. For a time, Bronwen had pretended she couldn’t talk either just so she could get extra hugs from their great-aunt, even though she’d always got plenty anyway.

It had brought it home to her and Auntie Gwladys that little Bronwen had been feeling a bit left out.

After that, one of them would play with Bronwen while the other had helped Eléni practise her speech.

‘Come here . ’ Cassia pulled her daughter into her arms. ‘We’re all going to make sure she doesn’t stop speaking again.

Come with us to visit her tomorrow. We need to let her know we understand how upset she was about us not telling her the truth about who she is.

She needs time to take it all in. I’m afraid the crash has just made things worse, so the sooner we’re all together again under one roof, the better.

Now, back to bed. What would Auntie Gwladys say? Tomorrow’s another day .’

It took Cassia a long time to drift off to sleep.

Every time her eyelids started getting heavy, an image of Eléni in bandages roused her with a start.

What if? questions whirred in her brain.

What if the bump and cut on her head led to a brain injury?

What if Eléni never spoke again? What if she did go to Kefalonia and shunned the Welsh side of her family?

What if she did find her uncle and he reported Cassia and Tom for illegally taking his niece out of the island? Tom lay awake beside her.

‘Can’t sleep either?’ Tom squeezed her hand. ‘I think we’ve got to make it up to Eléni somehow. This sorry business tonight is all a reaction to her finding out the truth. We should take her out to Kefalonia. Go as a family. Find this uncle with her.’

Cassia sat up in bed. Her pulse raced. She’d vowed she’d never go back.

‘No. No! We must persuade Eléni that her place is here. We don’t even know if there is an uncle now. It’s been almost twenty years since he looked for her. Perhaps he left Kefalonia when he didn’t find her and thought there was nothing left of his family. No. I refuse!’

She began to sob. Tom pulled her close and they fell back onto the bed in each other’s arms.

‘Shh. I didn’t mean to upset you. Eléni’s going to go anyway. She’s twenty-three, so we can’t stop her. I just thought if we all went together, Bronwen as well, it would be like a family holiday and would make up for keeping her in the dark. I still feel I’m to blame.’

Cassia felt the warmth of her husband’s chest beneath her.

His heart raced alongside hers. What he said made sense, but the panic she’d tried to suppress ever since reading the missing-child advert in the Celtic Chronicle all those years before loomed close to the surface.

She couldn’t risk it. What if they were prosecuted for taking her illegally?

Maybe the uncle had married and had children of his own now, and would welcome his lost niece back to live with them.

It would be tempting for Eléni to be the Kefalonian Greek girl she and Tom had denied her becoming.

Cassia had often wondered why she’d been so keen that Eléni learned to speak the Greek language and yet she hadn’t shared anything about her Greek homeland or heritage with her.

If you were so keen on denying her that, why didn’t you keep to English or even help her learn Welsh?

She couldn’t answer. All she knew was the pleasure she felt hearing her once-silent daughter speak in her home language and converse with her Theía Katerina and her half-Greek cousins.

I’ve done the same with Bronwen, she reasoned, yet deep down she knew she might not have bothered if Bronwen had been her only daughter.

‘We’ll talk about it in the morning. Nos da .’

Cassia turned away from Tom in her usual position in the bed. ‘ Kalinychta. ’ She knew there would be no sleep coming. Her mind was too busy with images of Eléni emerging from a crashed car, and being carried out of the earthquake rubble by Tom as a three-year-old.

Once she heard the gentle breathing that told her Tom was fast asleep, Cassia crept out of bed and felt under the divan for her precious journal.

She tiptoed out of the room and went downstairs to the sitting room.

She turned on the floor lamp and sat on the chair beside it.

The book had been her only lifeline when she’d been so unhappy the first time they’d lived in Porth Gwyn.

She’d even doubted her love for Tom and had berated herself for doing what her sister had accused her of — marrying him for Eléni’s sake.

She flicked through the pages, stopping every now and then to read a letter from Eugenia or a diary entry.

One dated ten years ago was from her sister telling her their mother had died and how she’d asked for Cassia before she’d passed.

Cassia’s throat tightened. As her daughter, she knew that she should have gone to make amends for the rift between them.

But she hadn’t even told Tom about what was in Eugenia’s letter.

She’d replied to her sister, explaining she couldn’t go and she’d not heard from her since.

That decision had caused a falling-out with the sister who’d been so good to her and Eléni. Her eyes burned with unshed tears.

She found the newspaper cutting she was looking for.

It was one that had caused her to flee to the anonymity of a big city.

A beautiful child stared up at her from the page.

The large black-and-white photo Rhodri Jones had used in the missing-child advert was striking and there was no mistaking that the little girl was Eléni.

Cassia remembered cutting her long black curls to try to change her looks, but her huge dark eyes would still identify her.

She’d even worked out an explanation if anyone in the neighbourhood where Aunt Gwladys lived had challenged her.

No, her daughter’s name was Eléni, she was three, not five, and, yes, she was half-Greek, but they’d find lots of little girls from Greece with black hair and dark eyes.

However, in those early days, not a day had gone by when she’d not been constantly afraid the charismatic reporter would knock on the door and find her and Eléni.

She read the appeal in the advert again.

The uncle’s name was Kostas Koulouris. But perhaps he was the brother of Eléni’s mother, so her married name would be different.

If Eléni did go to Kefalonia, where would she start looking?

Cassia tried to imagine what Eléni’s uncle would look like.

She’d never met Eléni’s parents before they’d died, so she had no idea.

Her thoughts were filled with devastating images of the piles of rubble that had been all that remained of Eléni’s house on that awful August day.

Argostoli had been razed to the ground by the force of the earthquake.

Now, almost twenty years later, buildings would have been erected, but it would be unrecognisable as the town she’d once lived in.

I have to stop her from going. I can’t lose her after all we’ve been through.