Steam filled the kitchen. Cold sweat dappled her chest.
“Skye?” her mother repeated.
“Oh, sorry. No, nothing else,” she said, pouring hot water into the mugs. Her mum and Martyn liked their tea barely brewed, a detail she’d always found odd. Skye took after her dad, preferring it the color of mahogany.
Not that it mattered now. Her stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut.
“So were they animal bones?” her mother persisted. “Or did you win a house built on an old burial ground?”
She made it sound as if the whole situation were a joke. But Skye would not play along, not this time. She’d gone along with too much for too long, and look where it had left her. The lessons had come hard, and she was not about to forget them.
“We don’t know yet,” she lied, sloshing in milk. “The police haven’t let us know.”
“We?” Martyn said. “Us?”
“The villagers.” Skye passed a mug across without looking at him. “It concerns all of us.” Andreas’s words came to her then, and she almost smiled.
“We’re a community,” she went on. “It’s not like London, where you can live next door to someone for years and never even learn each other’s names. Here, we talk to one another, help each other.” She stopped short of sayinglook after each other, though from the disgruntled expression taking shape on Martyn’s face, it was clear the implication had been received loud and clear.
Her mother turned from the back door and faced her.
“Is that why you ran away?” she asked.
Skye recognized a cross-examination when she heard one beginning and braced herself.
“So you’re saying the reason you threw away a perfectly nice life, a perfectly acceptable existence,” her mother persisted, “is because you wanted to be part of a community?”
“No,” Skye said. “I left because my life was perfectly awful and perfectlyunacceptable.”
Cassandra scoffed, and tears stung behind Skye’s eyes. She stared hard at the ceiling, willing them not to fall.
It wasn’t her mum’s fault. Cassandra had been completely unaware of what was going on. Skye had never told her, had never felt able to shatter the illusion.
“Now do you see what I mean?” Martyn said purposefully. “Nothing I do is enough, Cassandra. Your daughter is determined to find faults where there are none.”
“Faults?” Skye was incredulous, her voice wavering. “I found faults? Me? You were the one who—The one who—”
But it was no good. She couldn’t say it. Not with her mum in the same room.
Skye’s mother had always called her father weak—too sensitive, too idealistic, too easily hurt by the world. Everything Skye had loved about him, her mother had dismissed. And selfishly, Skye hadn’t wanted the same judgment aimed at her. It had been simpler to pretend, to play a part. Eventually, that had become easier than being herself.
But since arriving in Folegandros, she’d started to find her way back. To abandon that now would be the worst kind of betrayal, and she was done with that. She had been for a long time.
“Mum,” she began, ready at last to speak the truth, to be vulnerable, to trust that the only parent she had left might finally see her pain, understand her fear, and help her carry it.
The words were right there, on the tip of her tongue, so close to setting her free.
And then, a loud crack.
The floor shifted beneath her and the world began to shake.
Forty
May 1941
They came as the shadows lengthened, a swath of uniformed bodies as unwelcome as a plague. Katerina watched the military ships from a distance, stretched out her arm as if it were a rifle, and took imaginary aim at the disembarking soldiers.
“Brave and righteous” was how Stefanos had described these men in his letters, though to her, they were the antithesis of that. Invaders and thieves, no more worthy than bacteria. They had barely placed a boot on her island before they began to steal, claiming property, livestock, and boats, as well as confiscating anything that could be used or repurposed as a weapon. Only the most meager of farming tools were left in Greek hands, and the Italians were unscrupulous when it came to searching their homes.
