Page 50 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

Was he prepared to admit to himself that the fortune he’d amassed and the empire he’d built was more important to him than his family?

In what way,he asked himself then,are you any different from Paraskevas? He used alcohol. You use money.

After he thought that, in precisely those words, he had to stay there a minute with that thundering, pounding thing going wild in his chest.

His heart, he supposed.

And though it felt like it was breaking, he had the strangest notion that what it was really doing wasworking.

At last.

Because Constance was his family. Natalia was his family. He had always treated his family the way he treated his mother and sister. Close enough to care for, but distant enough to make sure that he could get away with the kind of care that came in the form of financial support and little else.

He had assumed that was how they all wanted it. That the arm’s length version of familial harmony suited them all, when it occurred to him only now that it was him. It suitedhim.

Because he thought he could control it. And they’d let him.

Or rather, they’d allowed him to do what he liked and had maneuvered around him. Anax had always considered his mother and sister disrespectful and troublesome, in their different ways, as they each pretended to listen to him and then did as they liked.

It only dawned on him now that perhapshehad been the disrespectful troublemaker all this long while.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out to his sister when he called her, still down there at the bottom of Constance’s house.

“I beg your pardon? Who is this? What have you done with my brother?”

“I think I have not been the best brother to you,” Anax said stiffly, ignoring her incredulous, amused tone. “That has only very recently become clear to me.”

Vasiliki was silent for a long, long while. He heard a voice in the background and almost smiled, because he recognized it. But he did not ask after Stavros. She would tell him if she wished.

“Thank you,” Vasiliki said to him, after some while. “I think that you have always been the best brother but this is because I, naturally, have always been the very best sister possible.”

“That is the truth,” Anax agreed.

They quickly turned to business matters, but he thought she sounded as rough-voiced as he did when they ended the call.

And then he stood there in that basement a bit longer, because he did not have the slightest idea how to go about proving that he could be the man that Constance wanted him to be. Over the course of the next two days, if he wished to meet her deadline.

But one thing Anax knew he was good at was the impossible.

He walked up the stairs into the kitchen. He had the strangest sensation that he was catapulting back through time to this same town a year back, when he had opened that door to the church and stepped inside to a place that was warm and bright and filled with emotions he did not understand.

This felt very much the same. Now, as then, he found Constance immediately.

She was at the stove, stirring something in a big pot. Maria was singing to the baby, who sat in a high chair and was making a mess of what he assumed was a dish of pureed carrots, given the shocking orange color. Outside, the snow was beginning to fall again.

No one was cowering about. There was no whispering, no covert glances, no jostling for position—because there was no one in this room playing the part of a ticking time bomb. No one had to creep around, hoping not to cause the next explosion.

This,a voice in him whispered,is what family issupposedto feel like.

And maybe that was the point of all of thishope. All these messy, quicksand-like emotions that served no purpose except to lead him here. To a moment like this, when he could decide who he was.

So in that moment, though he had no idea how to do any of the things Constance wanted from him or even if hecould, Anax took a leap of faith.

He closed the basement door behind him and he walked into the kitchen. He shrugged out of his jacket that was far too stuffy for the moment at hand. He nodded at Maria, and took the spoon from her that she was using to feed Natalia.

And then he played the role of the father.

Anax had observed the men in this town in all his previous visits, and had often thought it was like visiting a different planet. But he had visited, and he had studied, so he knew how it was meant to go. He’d known a lot less when he’d decided to jump face-first into finance.

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