“I can’t love,” I told her once, after another silent dinner where the only sound was cutlery against porcelain and the ocean pounding below the villa. “This isn’t enemies-to-lovers. We stay enemies. Until death.”
She stared at me across the candlelight, dark eyes glittering with something between rage and resignation.
“Then why keep the chains?” she asked.
“Because some chains don’t break.”
The second pregnancy was an accident.
She stormed into my study, trembling, cheeks flushed with anger and fear, hands clenching the hem of her blouse as if she could wring the problem out of existence. “I... I can’t—this can’t happen,”she stammered, voice sharp, almost breaking. “We have to... terminate it. Now.”
I listened quietly, watching the storm behind her eyes, the desperate panic twisting her features. Then I refused.
“It’s a life,”I said flatly, my tone cold, unyielding. “We keep it.”
But I promised her there would be no more intimacy after that.
No more mistakes. No more nights that blurred lines we weren’t supposed to cross.
Maria had been a good mother.
That was the one truth no amount of bitterness, distance, or regret could ever corrode.
Whatever else she had been to me—wife by contract, enemy by circumstance, stranger by choice—she had been everything to our son.
She cradled Yannis when the doors were closed and the world could not hear—in her arms the way sunlight cradles the sea at dawn: gentle, unwavering, complete.
She moved with him as if the universe had recalibrated itself around his small body.
Her voice softened when she spoke to him, lost its sharp edges, became something almost tender.
At night she sang him old Greek lullabies her grandmother had sung to her—songs about sailors guided home by stars, about mothers who waited at the shore no matter how long the storm lasted.
She read him stories of heroes and monsters and clever boys who outwitted gods, her finger tracing the words until his eyelids fluttered and grew heavy.
Every night, without fail, she kissed the crown of his dark head and whispered the same words.
Ta asteria se filane.
The stars are kissing you.
Even when our marriage was nothing more than a cold contract sealed in bloodlines and duty, even when silence sat between us at the table like a third presence, she never once let that frost reach our son.
Whatever resentment she carried toward me, she locked it away where Yannis could not see it.
She shielded him from the truth of what his parents were to each other.
After she was gone, Yannis simply... stopped speaking.
There was no gradual fading. No warning.
One morning he spoke, asked for honey on his bread, told me he dreamed of a ship with black sails.
That night, after I told him his mother had gone to sleep with the sea and would not wake again, something inside him folded in on itself.
The lively boy who once chattered endlessly about pirates and spaceships and how he would one day captain a ship bigger than the Acropolis went silent overnight.
Not a cry.
