Page 20

“No.” She was fighting to regain her composure, swiping the edge of his shirt against her damp cheeks again. “But you should have woken me to tell me where you were going.”

Since when? “That takes this marriage thing a little too far, doesn’t it?”

She glared at him. Her expression was the frustrated anguish of the deeply misunderstood, but he didn’t understand. He really didn’t.

“I’ll wake you to tell you I’m leaving the country, Alia. I won’t wake you to tell you I’m going to the kitchen.”

She shifted her attention to the stove, eyebrows pulled into a disgruntled line. Her mouth pushed against itself, as though she was looking for words.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.” She was still quivering like a tuning fork.

I think she only ate because we insisted she join us.

“Eat with me anyway. It will warm you up.” He returned to the stove and relit the burner under the soup.

After a moment, he heard one of the stools scrape out from the far side of the island.

“I’m afraid to be alone.” Her admission was heavy with shame.

He turned to see she’d taken a seat and held her face in her hands.

“You had a panic attack over waking up alone?”

“I know it’s irrational—”

“It’s not,” he cut in. “I mean…” He thought of the way Khristos fell into holes of depression that weren’t predictable or preventable or even the result of a specific cause, but they were very real and sometimes debilitating.

A familiar helplessness struck Spiro. A desire to fix something that was beyond his ability to resolve. He hated nothing more than falling short and being ineffectual.

“Have you seen a doctor about it?” he asked.

“Once. He gave me pills that made me tired and forgetful. They didn’t even help. I was still terrified, but also exhausted. I couldn’t be like that while I was looking after Yaya. I threw them away and now I’m in this new house with all these empty rooms. I had to walk so far to find you. I know it’s stupid to be afraid of that, but I am.”

“It’s not stupid,” he said firmly, taking the bubbling soup off the stove. “But I’ll call my brother’s therapist tomorrow. It sounds like it’s a difficult thing to live with so we’ll try to find you some ways to manage it.” It was an inadequate response. He knew it was, but he didn’t know how else to make this better for her.

She had fallen silent again.

When he looked over, she was watching him with a mixture of uncertainty and tentative hope before she dropped her gaze. “Yaya always said I was letting it control me, not the other way around, then she’d make me walk to the shops by myself.”

He gritted his teeth. “That sort of tough love solves nothing. It only makes it worse.”

She watched him as he filled a pair of bowls, then came around to sit beside her.

“Eat.” He pointed.

She threaded her arms into his shirt and shook back the cuffs so she could close a couple of buttons.

“I thought you would say there’s something wrong with me,” she admitted in a low voice. “You don’t seem like someone who has a lot of patience with weakness.”

“In myself, no. I don’t.” It was the deep, irrational fury of not being a brain surgeon at fourteen, capable of predicting and preventing his father’s aneurism. Of the lifelong inability to win his mother’s loyalty or real concern for him. “I don’t see you as weak, though. You know Khristos has struggled with depression?”

“I saw his medication when they stayed with us.” She blew across her spoon. “Julian told me a little when they came to ask me to marry you. He wasn’t gossiping. He only wanted me to understand why it was hard for Khristos to take on Lambros alone.”

“Does Julian know about this? Your fear?” He waved his spoon at her, then asked with a touch of ire, “Did he use it to pressure you?”

“No. I mean, he knows about it, but he didn’t use it against me. One of the reasons I was so reluctant to put Yaya in a care facility was because it meant she would probably be sent off-island. I kept trying to imagine how I would start a new life near her, but not with her. Julian said that if I came to your villa, I would be closer to him and have time to adjust.”