“Of course,” Victoria said. “The electricity is still functioning, thank God. I’ll make us a pot of green tea.”
“Before you go,” her mother said, hurrying toward the passenger side of the truck, “I found this upstairs, near where the wall collapsed. I know it’s not yours—or I presume it isn’t. Anyway,” she said, pressing something cool and hard into Skye’s palm, “best you take it. Maybe hide it somewhere?”
“Hide it?” Skye asked. “Why would I need to do that?”
Andreas put the truck in gear and they began to move away.
Skye glanced down at her hand. The object was a medal. Silver, with rounded edges. One side bore the motif of an eagle, talons curled around a wreath of leaves, while the other showed a three-columned building.
Above it, carved deeply into the metal, was a symbol that turned her blood to ice.
A swastika.
Forty-two
It was a clean break.
Martyn sat in mutinous silence as the doctor patiently took him and Skye through a series of X-rays, explaining that the ankle would need to be put in a cast and that crutches would be provided. His head injury was superficial, although a concussion had not been ruled out.
“If you take him home, you must watch him closely,” the doctor told Skye. “Any dizziness or nausea, the room starting to spin, anything like this, then you must quickly return.”
“Entáxei,” she murmured, the Greek coming through naturally. “I mean sure, yes, of course.”
Andreas made a small noise of appreciation from the corner of the room. He had insisted on accompanying them and ignored Martyn’s terse mutter of “For God’s sake” that had followed.
The medical center was crowded with the walking wounded. Rather than being allowed to wait in the examination room, Skye and the two men were ushered back to the small waiting area,Martyn thoroughly disgruntled to be pushed there in a wheelchair.
“They are saying that the earthquake measured over five points on the Richter scale,” Andreas said. He was staring down at his phone, brow furrowed. “There have been some landslides on the north side of the island, a few buildings damaged around the port.”
“Not your house?” Skye checked. He smiled briefly.
“Éla, no. That one, I reinforced myself.”
Martyn said nothing, merely continued to scowl into the middle distance. Skye studied his profile. So much about him was familiar, and yet she didn’t know the man beside her, had never really known him at all. The version he’d charmed her with was not the same one she’d married nor the monster that man had swiftly become. Martyn’s crow’s-feet had deepened, and there was more salt than pepper in his dark hair. She had teasingly asked him once if he dyed it and been met with a stony silence.
“I wouldn’t care if you did,” she’d said, hurrying to repair the damage. “I quite like gray hair on men. In fact—”
“I’d quit while you’re ahead, if I were you,” he’d snapped, the meanness in his tone coming as a shock. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then it’s better to say nothing at all?”
She hadn’t meant to offend him and meekly told him so, but Martyn had taken her remark and stewed on it, bringing it up time and time again. It came to a point where Skye herself began to second-guess her recollection of the conversation. Had she deliberately set out to goad him? Was she really as bad a person as he claimed?
“How long does it take to get a goddamn cast done?” Martyn said, addressing no one in particular.
Skye went to reply, only to think better of it, though Andreas had no such restraint.
“There has been an earthquake,” he said. “There are many people injured, and this is not a hospital. We are on a small island, and the resources we have here are limited. Everybody must wait their turn.”
Martyn’s neck flushed puce, his lips twitching with what Skye recognized as fury.
“This is going to put me out of action for weeks,” he complained. “Perhaps even months. I have a full roster of flights booked. I can’t very well honor those now, can I?”
Andreas exhaled long enough to count to ten.
“Can I perhaps make an observation?” he said, crossing his legs at the ankles. He was in his thick-soled boots, the laces knotted tight around the bottoms of his coveralls. “It appears to me that you are not a man who has been told no very much in your life. This is not a good thing. We cannot always have what we want exactly when we want it. A good man, a patient man,” he went on, “understands this and does not blame other people.”
“I think in this case,” Martyn replied cuttingly, “the blame can be fairly laid at Skye’s feet.”
“You think so?” Andreas scratched behind his ear.
