after school. Her father, Giorgos – the girls called him Baba, but their mother always introduced him as George – scooped her into a hug and tossed her in the air, spinning her around and cheering. Grace, Anna’s mother, simply said “well done” and poured herself another glass of wine.
Anna asked if she could hang the ribbon on the refrigerator, but her mother said that that space was only for important things to remember. Giorgos had looked coolly at his wife, but then nuzzled Anna’s hair and smiled. “What your mother means, my darling, is that the refrigerator is for boring things, and your award is anything but boring. Why don’t we go hang it somewhere in your room?”
The next morning, Anna’s mother had left for work without saying a word to any of them. Giorgos had piled Anna, Lizzy, and their school things into his painter’s van like always to take them to school. But when they got there, he’d told Anna to stay put; that he wanted to talk to her.
“Baba, what’s wrong? Am I in trouble?” Anna asked, watching her sister walk into the building.
But as soon as Lizzy was inside, Giorgos took Anna to the local breakfast chain for as many chocolate chip pancakes as she could handle. “Model Students get celebratory breakfasts,” he said, taking a bite of his short stack and putting his arm around Anna, who was sat on the stool next to him, still barely able to reach the counter. As he chewed, a bit of syrup dripped out of his mouth and down his face. Anna pointed and laughed. Her father pretended to be confused before leaning in and planting a big kiss on Anna’s cheek, rubbing the syrup in and tickling her with his beard.
After they ate, Giorgos drove Anna back to school and dropped her off at the front door with a note saying she had been at a dentist appointment. Anna was about to ask why they were lying if Model Students were allowed celebratory breakfasts, but when she looked up at her Baba, he looked so sad, so she just gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek and went inside.
A couple of weeks later, just after Anna’s sixth birthday, Giorgos was kicked out of the house, and Lizzy held Anna back as they watched from the window. Their mother would cite this incident of skipping school, alongside temperamental outbursts and a string of affairs she had discovered, in the ensuing divorce and custody battle that would result in Giorgos being sent back to Greece. Grace had never taken the last name Xenakis, and as soon as the divorce was finalized, she changed her daughters’ names to Linton to match her own. Anna and Lizzy would never see their father again.
Anna had a difficult time coming to terms with her father’s infidelity. It didn’t make sense to her. “Baba loves us,” she told her mother. “He would never do anything like that. He would never hurt us.”
“You’re a child,” Grace had said. “One day, you’ll understand just what a man will do, and then they’ll never be able to surprise you with how terrible they can be. But until then, you’ll just have to trust me.”
Standing on the sidewalk outside Marcus’s apartment, her mantra repeating in her mind, Anna finally understood what her mother meant. She did not love this man. She did not have a family with him. But as she watched him through the window, as she felt her world crumbling around her, she began to feel, for the first time, as her mother must have felt: discarded.
Half an hour later, Anna slammed her bedroom door shut and slumped against it, the tears finally coming. She had probably woken her roommate, but she didn’t care. She had been fighting back the tears the entire subway ride home, and she was at her breaking point. She tried and failed to push out of her mind the image of what she had seen, but it stayed front and center as she wept.
It wasn’t even the fact that Marcus was sleeping with someone else. Anna had known as soon as she started seeing him that their relationship wasn’t a monogamous thing. It had been borderline cliché, the way they had hooked up at an opening just over a year before. She had been working at the gallery for months, but it was the first time she had spoken to Marcus, the gallery’s owner and world-famous photographer. Well, as world-famous as a photographer could be, anyway. To Anna, who had studied photography in college and been working for years trying to get a job at a gallery, he may as well have been Chris Hemsworth. She nearly died when he walked up to her at the event, and within a couple of hours they were in a hotel room.
No, the awful thing for Anna had been watching her future crumble with every thrust. Anna was just a gallery assistant, and one with ambitions to become a photographer at that. Girls like her were a dime a dozen for Marcus. And despite the fact that she had worked for years to get a job at MarMac, if she wasn’t useful to him anymore, she would simply be cast aside for the next girl waiting in the wings. At least, that’s what she feared. After a few minutes, Anna crawled up onto her bed, settling on top of a pile of clean laundry, tears still streaming down her cheeks, images of that woman’s boobs pressed against Marcus’s window burned into her mind, and cried herself to sleep.
Anna awoke what felt like seconds later to find her elbow buzzing. As she opened her eyes, she was confused to find that the sun was streaming brightly through the window, and she quickly snapped them shut again. The buzzing stopped for a few seconds and then started up again. Anna used the hand that wasn’t pinned underneath her body to feel around on the bed for her phone. She dug through the pile of clothes and pulled it out, swiping to answer her sister’s call.
“It’s so early,” she said with a croak. “What do you want?”
“Nice to talk to you, too, dear sister,” Lizzy said, barely audible over the noise of other people talking and what sounded like cutlery scraping against crockery. Anna could imagine the mess hall of the farm as it had been the one time she’d visited: crowded and sparse, but full of suspiciously happy people. “And it’s nearly nine, Banana. Not exactly the wee hours of the morning.”
Anna jumped a bit at the realization of what time it was, but them images of what she had seen last night came back to her, and she instantly lost all motivation to go into work.
“Hey, that’s still early for some people. What do you want?”
“Touchy, touchy.” The noise behind Lizzy died down as she presumably stepped outside. “You okay, sis? You sound like you’ve been up all night crying.”
Anna knew there was no point hiding anything from her sister, but she didn’t want to get into it with her. She had somehow managed to keep it from Lizzy that she had been seeing her boss for the last eighteen months. “Not all night,” she said, “but I don’t really want to talk about it. What’s up?”
“Well, it’s probably better that you’re not at work now,” Lizzy replied. “I have some news.”
Anna sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, her breathing shallow. Those were the four most terrifying words in her sister’s vocabulary. “What happened?”
“Well,” she said, “some lawyers called from Greece.”
“Greece?” Anna asked. “You mean Santorini?”
“Well, actually, the law firm is based in Athens. But yes, it was about Dad.”
Anna took a deep breath in. Talking about her dad was not what she needed this morning. “And?”
“And it turns out we have a bit of an inheritance on our hands.”
“What kind of inheritance?”
