only practical suggestion she’d ever made that Louisa had no argument with. ‘It was therefore down to me to make the decision that such a situation could not be allowed to go on.'
Sitting back in her seat, Louisa looked at this beautiful, dainty Greek woman who possessed a heart of steel behind all the visible signs of softer living, and wondered what her practical solution was going to be if her son had to break the news to her that he could have made his estranged wife pregnant again?
‘You both need to move on with your lives,’ Isabella continued, unaware of what was going on inside Louisa’s head. ‘It has become very clear to me that neither of you were going to do that until you had confronted your past.'
‘So you set Andreas and me up for a face-to-face confrontation?'
‘You needed to look at each other and see that you are no longer the same two people you used to be—see for yourselves how widely you have grown apart!'
A vibrant flashback in which she’d played a very intimate part in Andreas’s life recently hit Louisa’s vision.
‘We came to love you dearly, Louisa,’ Isabella persisted in her oh-so-deceptive gentle voice. ‘And we hurt deeply for both you and my son when fate dealt you such a cruel tragic blow. My dearest wish would be to see both of you happy again—in love and married to some other wonderful person who will give you more children to help heal the gap in your hearts dear Nikos left behind.’
In a sad, painfully aching way, Louisa agreed with those wishes. She too would like to be truly happy again. But how could she ever be happy with someone else when the man she had been in love with since she was seventeen still commanded so much power over her?
‘It is time for you both to let go …’
It was the way Isabella said it that grabbed Louisa’s full attention. ‘You want me to stop coming to the island,’ she said.
For a moment Isabella said nothing, allowing her answer to sound in the paining silence that hovered over them for a second or two. Then she stood up and came round the table. As she bent to kiss Louisa’s cheek she repeated gently, ‘It is time.'
Then she walked away, leaving Louisa on her own to absorb that cold little stab of cruel truth.
Andreas had already left the island, making his statement about letting go by putting distance between them as quickly as he could. His mother was now telling her that when she left here she would prefer it if she did not come back.
She got up, tense—shivery suddenly though the sun was hot. Andreas had gone. His mother did not want her here. Up on the hill above the harbour stood a tiny domed chapel with its neatly kept gardens where her son had been laid to rest. Did Nikos need her to come here? Did she have to come all this way to find him? He lived in her heart, would always live there, she knew that, but—
The but suddenly lost itself in the next thought to shoot into her head. She had done a very stupid thing last night and now retribution was looming large in the form of a pregnancy she could not allow to become real.
Truly pale now, the natural creamy tone of her skin wiped away, Louisa moved across the terrace like someone not of this life. An hour later and she was in town, standing outside the old-fashioned pharmacy with its distinctive green and white sign above the door. Tears were in her eyes and one of her hands was covering her trembling mouth because she knew now that she couldn’t do it. She just could not walk in there and calmly ask for the morning-after pill as if the tiny thing maybe struggling for life inside her did not have rights of its own.
It would be a part of her, a part of Andreas—a special part of their son. How she had even been able to convince herself she could just take a pill to ensure no child would come from what had taken place last night was appalling her now.
Let nature make the decision, she told herself as she turned and walked away again. Surely fate would not be so cruel as to make her pregnant again. Didn’t they say that lightning never struck in the same place twice?
She spent the next few days almost entirely with Jamie. She was quiet and withdrawn, though he was too busy enjoying himself to notice. Each morning they would eat breakfast together then he would walk her up to the chapel on the hill, stay with her for a little while before shooting off again, leaving her alone while he went back to the hotel.
Reclining on a sun bed in the shade of an umbrella, Louisa spent the rest of her day watching as Pietros, the hotel owner’s son, showed Jamie how to windsurf or how to ride his pride-and-joy jet ski, and they even talked someone into taking them out on his speedboat so that Jamie could try his hand at water-skiing too.
She tried not to think about Andreas. She tried not to beat herself up over what they had done. She tried not to agonise over the decision she had made outside the pharmacy. It won’t come to anything, she kept telling herself.
Then there were other times when Isabella’s blunt speaking would suddenly grab hold of her and she would take off on a tight-limbed, restless walk down the beach and battle with the tumbling morass of other feelings that swirled around her. It was a battle because, deep down, Lousia knew that Isabella was right. She had to let this island go.
Let Nikos go.
Let his father go.
Dressed in a pale blue wrap-around skirt and white summer top, Louisa sat on the stone seat set beside her son’s little grave with its marble headstone gleaming white in the sun. Today marked the fifth anniversary of his passing and she was glad she’d been able to convince Jamie to go with Pietros on a boat that was going out fishing for the day.
She needed to be on her own.
Moving to rest her forearms along the length of her sun-warmed thighs, she looked around her through blue eyes misted by the love she felt for this place. There was nowhere more beautiful on this earth than this tiny corner of Greece in her opinion. All around her the loving care and attention laboured on each square inch of the chapel and its garden was there to see in the carefully tended graves and the profusion of colour bursting from flowers that bloomed hot and bright in the fierce summer heat. Birds sang. The air was full of the scent of summer jasmine, and the tiny chapel with its handsome dome stood backed by a clear blue sky.
Nikos had been baptised here. She and Andreas had been married here, watched by curious islanders. She had been the quintessentially shy and uncertain blushing bride but because she had been carrying Andreas’s baby she had felt as if everyone looked on her as if—
Curtailing that memory, because it did not really matter any more what other people had once thought about her, she tried to concentrate on the here and now, and another painful decision she still had to make.
Did she leave here on the ferry in a few days’ time and never come back?
Lowering her face to her hands, she let her silk blonde hair flood forward to hide her face. It was all so muddled up, so painful and complicated. She wanted to think only about Nikos but all she could think about was herself! What was happening to her? What was going on inside her head?
A shadow suddenly fell across the sun to douse her in shadow. Pulling her face out of her hands, she had to squint to take in the tall, dark silhouette standing there. She couldn’t see his face because the sun was coming from directly behind him but she knew who it was.
‘When did you get back?’ she questioned flatly.
‘This
