Page 43 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

“Is this what keeps them at bay?” He did not need to wave a hand around the humble little church, or the village around it, full of simple people with simple lives. Or so he had always believed. “Is this what you do to banish them?”

He thought too much of his father when he thought of the influences on him. His drive, his focus, when his father had only ever truly paid attention to his vices. Somehow he always forgot that it was this woman who had survived.

The way she looked at him then, canny and knowing, with that interior core of steel that he knew had built him up from the start, made him wonder why.

But she did not say one of her enigmatic, usually dark little prophecies over him. Instead, she came to a stop in the narrow aisle and looked at him. “You are married.”

He did not expect that. Maybe he should have. “I am.”

“I do not seek out the papers, but I could not avoid them. They’re filled with speculation about this wife of yours. This American. It is rumored you even have a child, though I know this cannot be true. Because I would be a grandparent, and I know that, surely, my own son would inform me if I had become one.”

And despite himself, Anax actually felt...ashamed. Like the small boy he could barely remember being, trying to sneak a snack from the kitchen—back before he’d understood that all of them needed to follow the rules for their own safety. That even then, it wasn’t all that safe.

“It was a complicated situation,” he told her by way of an apology.

His mother nodded sagely. “So it is with ghosts, and marriages.”

“You are the expert, I think.”

Her mouth curved, though he was not foolish enough to think it a smile. “Your penance is an act of building yourself up so that no one can break you down again. I understand it. Mine is different. You think that I do this—” and she waved at the church “—because I wish to punish myself.”

“I assumed,” and he was careful as he spoke, “that there was a certain familiarity in the punishment. That perhaps you had grown accustomed to it.”

She looked as close tosadas he could remember seeing her, at least in as long as they’d been free of Paraskevas. Then she shook her head. “You’ve got it wrong,yiós.”

He could not recall the last time she’d called himson,either.

Evgenia sighed. “I wish only to humble myself some little bit. To remind myself that were it not for my pride, I might have saved all of us, long ago. When it was my job to do so, and I failed.”

Anax stared at her, sure he couldn’t possibly have heard her correctly. This was not something they talked about. Not so directly.

She smiled then, a real smile, as if she knew it. “I am an old woman, Anax. And I would like to see my grandchild.”

“I am not holding her ransom,” he said darkly. “You know where the island is, though you have refused every invitation to visit it. And what do you mean, your pride?”

“I mean exactly that,” she replied, seeming to pull herself straighter and taller where she stood. “There was a time when I was the only thing that could soothe your father. And it took me too long to accept that I was not more powerful than his demons. Or his liquor. And in the meantime, I had two children who needed a better situation than the one I gave them. Who is to blame for that? Your father, diminished as he was? Or me, who stayed with him?”

“Him,” Anax bit out.

His mother only gazed back at him for a moment. “Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not.”

“You have a granddaughter,” Anax gritted out, though there was a deep, pounding thing inside him that felt as if he was breaking open from within. “Her name is Natalia. She is...”

And that ache in him threatened to knock him over, though he was already sitting down. He hadn’t seen her in weeks. He hated it. She was so young now. She might be someone else entirely by the time he went home to see her—

Anax stopped there because that island wasn’t home. He had no home. He had many homes, and he prided himself on that.

His mother was watching him, far too closely for his peace of mind. “She’s perfect,” he said. “And her mother...”

But he couldn’t finish that.

“The thing about ghosts,” Evgenia said quietly, much too quietly, “is that they don’t always haunt you in the dark of night, Anax. Sometimes they are right in the mirror, staring back at you.”

And this was what he had always wanted to avoid.

This conversation.

This moment.

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