Halfway to You(78)

Ann opens a drawer and digs through a stack of colorful takeout menus.

“It wasn’t over for you and Todd, right?”

Ann pauses, her fingers brushing the edge of a menu—but she doesn’t look up. “Todd and I were never truly over.” She lifts a simple trifold, mint green, with faded letters. “How about Greek food?”

“Not Italian?” Maggie jokes.

Ann waves a hand through the air. “Carmella ruined me for any Italian food other than hers. It’s why I visit every year. But this Greek place . . .” She smiles warmly, wrinkles forming around her eyes. “The owner is from Crete. The food is very good.”

“Sounds great.”

Ann dials the number listed on the front of the brochure. She utters a greeting in Greek, and there’s muffled joy on the other end. While she relays a few dishes, Maggie watches her, the thin bones of her wrists, the wispy ends of her hair, the way the overhead light illuminates freckles that had once been darkened by the Greek summer sunshine. Here is a thoughtful, successful woman. A woman who has experienced pain and heartbreak and disappointment for much of her life. A woman who has seen the world. A woman Maggie once envied so hard she could barely stand it.

She doesn’t envy Ann now—but she does admire her, respect her.

Maggie lifts her gaze to the windows again, but the world outside has grown dark. All Maggie sees is her own reflection, watery and unclear. She has no idea who she is or where she came from. She fears what is beyond the windows, the nocturnal secrets of her life barred only by thin panels of glass.

“Should be here in thirty minutes,” Ann says.

“Thank you.” Maggie smiles at Ann, this woman who has already changed Maggie’s life irreversibly, with so much story yet to be told. “Do you want to record more while we wait?”





ANN


Crete, Greece

August 1995

“Can you pass the suntan lotion?”

Dimitri stepped closer, his bare feet slapping the deck. A floppy hat covered my face, shielding my eyes from the harsh sun; when a shadow crossed my vision, I peeked out from under the braided brim, the holes in the weave splaying little sun dapples across my chest. My eyes traveled up Dimitri’s body, unabashedly lingering on his strong legs, hard abdominals, and bare chest. Tan skin everywhere, most of it fuzzed with black hair.

“Need help?” he asked through a half grin. The boat bobbed under his feet, but he had his sea legs; he didn’t hold the railing.

I set my hat on the folded towel nearby and turned over. “Sure. Get my back?”

I was tanning on the bow netting of his catamaran, my new favorite pastime. Underneath me, the Aegean was crystal clear, sloshing against the double hulls. I spotted the dark, jagged outline of coral thirty feet below, and a school of electric-blue fish turned this way and that, showing off their colors.

Dimitri’s rough hands delicately pulled on the strings of my bikini and spread the lotion across my back. Todd had done this same thing for me on Mykonos eleven years before; each swipe of Dimitri’s slick hand wiped away another memory of Todd’s traveling the same path.

Dimitri was nothing like Todd. Boisterous, confident, and broad chested, he was every woman’s Mediterranean fantasy. Even his accent was charming, a mix of Greek and the British English intonation of someone with family in the UK. I liked his dichotomy. He was a fiercely loyal family man who cried when he spoke of his nieces and nephews. But he also held his liquor, smoked cigars, and wanted sex every hour of the day.

Plus, he had a boat.

(This fling might’ve been terribly immature, but when I lost Todd, I lost some of my dignity too. I thought recklessness was the path to forgetting.) When I had befriended his cousin Chloe in a London pub, I thought she was joking when she invited me down to Crete for the summer to party on Dimitri’s tour boat. Since I’d suffered a year of anguish over Todd—and the Chasing Shadows movie had been officially delayed for budgetary reasons—getting lost in the Aegean with strangers sounded like the perfect distraction.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t done that before.

And this time, I knew to keep my infatuation in check. Light and lustful and casual.

What I didn’t expect was to stay. But there I was, three months later, still tanning on Dimitri’s boat.

When Dimitri finished slathering me in sunblock, he rolled onto his back beside me. The netting dipped exaggeratedly under his weight, and gravity slid me closer to his body. I caught a whiff of the sea salt that creased his skin from our earlier swim.

“Chloe and Katerina arrive tonight,” he said with a relaxed grunt.

Settling my cheek on the back of my hand, I said, “Can’t wait.”

It was late August, nearing the end of tourist season. Chloe had spent the past month island-hopping with her older sister, Katerina. More of Dimitri’s relatives were coming to Crete for the occasion, before Chloe returned to university in England.

“Nikolai and Bella will be big,” Dimitri said of Katerina’s children. He spoke of them all the time.

“Kids grow so fast,” I said. “They’re like weeds.”

He frowned. “I don’t like missing it.”

“What?”

“Their childhood.”

I patted his barrel chest. “They love you, though.”