her mind, they were replaced with a feeling of resentment for her father.
“A house,” Lizzy said. “In Santorini.”
“I think it’s on Santorini,” Anna said reflexively. “Santorini is an island.”
“That doesn’t even remotely matter,” Lizzy said. “The point is that you and I now share a house in Greece.”
“How much is it worth?” Anna asked, apparently too quickly.
“How is that your first question, Anna?” Lizzy asked, her voice raising. “Not about Dad, or why he left it to us? Not even ‘when can we go there on vacation?’”
“Sorry,” Anna said with a laugh. “But you know I’m not the number-one fan of Greek exports, so I doubt I’ll be headed there on vacation any time soon.”
Anna swore she could hear a wicked grin in Lizzy’s voice as she responded. “That’s just it, baby sis. Looks like you’ll be going there sooner than expected.”
“What? Why?”
“One of us has to go accept the inheritance in person.”
“To Athens?”
“No, actually to Santorini. There’s a Greek law that says you have to accept real estate in front of a notary public in the region where the property is.”
“So one of us has to go to Santorini. Why does it have to be me? Why can’t you go?”
Lizzy sighed. “I really wish I could, Anna. You know how much I’ve wanted to go back since Dad’s funeral. But it’s asparagus season, so I can’t.”
Anna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Asparagus season?” she said, almost shouting. “Are you kidding me? You want me, the one who didn’t even go to Greece for her own father’s funeral, to go now because you have to harvest some asparagus?”
“Anna, that’s not fair,” Lizzy said. “You know I’m responsible for the well-being of this farm.”
“It’s a cooperative farm! You don’t even get paid!” Anna was definitely shouting now. “Surely, it’s not the end of the world if you take a few days off to do something this important.”
Lizzy was quiet for a moment, then responded softly. “I’m really sorry, Anna. I know how much you hated Dad and everything to do with him. But for us to get the house, you have to go accept it.
“As for the farm, I hope that one day you understand what it’s like to be a part of a community – a family – that has each other’s backs. But, until then, don’t pretend to know what sort of obligation I should or should not feel to the people here.”
She was quiet for a long time, but eventually Lizzy sighed, and Anna knew then that she wasn’t too angry.
“I’m sorry, Liz. I didn’t mean to get mad. I just don’t want to go. I know you’d like to have a vacation home in Greece, but that’s just not important to me. Plus, I have work. And it’ll take me months to accrue more vacation time.”
“I’m sure if you ask your boss and explain the situation he’d let you have the time. He likes you, doesn’t he? What’s his name? Martin?”
“Marcus,” Anna said, wincing as she said his name. “I don’t know, Liz.”
“I’ll tell you what…” Lizzy said. “If you go there for a week and still hate it, we can sell the house. How does that sound?”
Anna cringed at the idea of having to spend a week in her father’s house, interacting with his family, sleeping in his bed. It felt weird after hating him for so long. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it, okay?”
“That’s all I ask,” Lizzy said over the sound of a bell in the background. “Now I have to go. That’s last call for breakfast. But let me know soon. There’s a bit of a deadline on us accepting, and the grandparents are not making it easy for us. I don’t think they expected anyone other than Dad to ever have it.”
“Okay. Good to know, thanks. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Bye, Banana.”
Anna held the phone up for several seconds after the call disconnected, so unsure of what to do that she felt paralyzed. But regardless of her family drama and what happened with Marcus, she did still have to go to work, so she got up and got dressed. She took noticeably less care with her appearance than usual, which was saying something. She pulled on the first clothes she could find and caught the subway to work.
The entire commute, she bounced back and forth between wondering if she should go to Greece and wondering if she should confront Marcus. On the one hand, she didn’t want anything to do with her cheating father’s legacy and, regardless of their relationship, Anna felt hurt by what she saw at Marcus’s the night before. On the other hand, surely her dad owed her at least this, and Marcus hadn’t really done anything wrong since they weren’t technically exclusive. The two issues swirled around in her head as she emerged in SoHo and walked up the steps to the MarMac gallery.
As she walked in, she was almost immediately greeted by one of the other assistants, who threw a thumb drive at her that she barely caught.
“These are the early entries for the Emerging Talent contest. Marcus wants us to screen them as they come in so there aren’t hundreds of entries for him to go through all at once. And make them anonymous; he wants to be able to tell his sister that the reason her kid didn’t win is because he’s a shit photographer, not because he’s trying to mess with her.”
Anna nodded and turned the thumb drive over in her hand as she walked up the stairs to the office. A couple of years ago, she would have jumped at the chance to enter something like this. Even though there were dozens of contests young photographers could enter, Marcus’s was special in that it usually resulted in the winner actually gaining momentum in the art world. She even had a collection she had shot just before starting at the gallery that she knew Marcus would like; a series of photos of forgotten Manhattan landmarks. But she was a gallery assistant now, not a photographer. And she worked for Marcus. She couldn’t enter.
She sat down at an open desk and looked out over the gallery below. A buyer was there already, someone she recognized from previous events. Rumor had it that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds were her clients. As the gallery manager shook her hand and put a sold sticker next to the painting, Anna wished, not for the first time, that her photos could be seen by so many influential people. Almost everyone who showed at MarMac went on to do well. But instead she was sat behind the desk trying to anonymize Marcus’s nephew’s contest entry.
Anna took out her laptop, connecting to the server and opening up her email like she did every morning. An email came in from Marcus almost immediately.
U ok?
She looked up toward his office, where she could see him peeking through the window.
Not really, she typed out, but she couldn’t press Send. It didn’t feel right to confront him.
Instead, she stood up to go to the bathroom, avoiding looking toward Marcus’s office on her way. As she passed through the door that separated the gallery from the office, she
