Instead of panic at the thought of all these important events in her diary, she felt oddly relieved. For so long she had borne the brunt of her duties alone. For the first time it felt as if she had someone with her to share the load. Even if only to make the decision she would have known she had to make, but been incapable of making.
She caught sight of Theo’s cocked head as he observed her. ‘What?’ she asked, feeling around her mouth and chin for flakes of the pastry that might have remained from her breakfast, oddly self-conscious under his scrutiny.
‘You don’t mind,’ Theo stated.
‘Mind what?’
‘That I rearranged it all. I thought you would be hissing like a cat, threatening to throw me overboard and leave me behind in the sea as you hightailed it back to dry land and the nearest helicopter.’
‘That’s quite a long chain of thought you had there.’
‘You were asleep for quite a while. I had enough time to imagine several possibilities.’
‘There was definitely a time that tossing you overboard would have seemed like the right thing to do.’ But her words reminded her that that was almost exactly what she had done ten years before. And just like that the dam was lifted on the all the questions and all the curiosity about him she had hidden beneath layers and years of denial about him. About them. ‘Can I ask...how did you get here? Your own yacht, a billion-euro wine industry...how did you make it happen?’
* * *
It hurt him, scratched at a wound that he had buried deep, that she had never thought to find out what had happened to him after that night. That she had so easily discarded him, even as he had at first stalked the internet to find any trace of news of her, as if knowing what she was doing would make the hurt and betrayal any less...or worse in some masochistic way. He pushed back his bitter thoughts and focused on her question.
‘When I returned to my mother, she was already packing our belongings. Moritz, my mother’s employer, was understanding, but his wife...not so much. She was furious that I had squandered the opportunity they had so generously provided and was determined that we should not bring further shame to their family name.’ He still remembered the woman screeching at him and his mother from the top of the stairs, the way all the servants in the house had gathered to watch and the way, despite all this, his mother had placed her arms around him as if to protect him. He remembered the last look Moritz had cast him before they had left. One of pity, not shame, but full sadness and disappointment. He had never wanted to see such a look ever again.
‘We returned to my mother’s family because there was nowhere else to go. And it started up almost immediately. The snide comments, the years of resentment. My father’s abandonment of his pregnant lover had consigned my mother to a life of shame. And the expulsion from school? Just compounded it.’
He couldn’t look at Sofia as he told her this. He didn’t want to see her expression, to see the truth of her feelings, so instead he looked out to the horizon as he steered the yacht to some indefinable destination.
‘My mother had saved some money. Not a huge amount, but some. Enough to buy some land from her family. They were happy to get rid of it, and us, to the small home nestled in its boundary. The land was hard, dry and difficult and not one of them had ever been able to grow a thing on it. Their small winery was failing and, though they did not welcome her, they welcomed my mother’s money, every last, single cent of it.’ He couldn’t help the bitterness in his tone. He hated them for what they had done to his mother. ‘They could just as easily have given it to us because it had never made them any money and they hadn’t used it for years, almost two generations. Which, ironically, is why it was much easier for me to work with it.
‘For the first six months, I simply cleared the land. Each day, each night, bit by bit.’ It was as if the mind-numbing work had been the only thing that had kept him going in those first few months where he’d been so raw it felt as if his very heart was exposed to the elements. The pain, the ache of her betrayal, the humiliation that he’d been taken in by her lies. But now, after all that had happened between them, he began to recognise something else in his feelings... the heartbreak that she had turned her back on him. That she had left him. The jagged, wrenching pain that had made it almost difficult to breathe at times.
‘My mother would help.’ But only when she was feeling up to it, he now recognised. ‘I hadn’t realised how much knowledge I’d garnered from working in my mother’s family’s fields. The soil was good, having been left fallow for so long. I worked to ensure decent irrigation systems were in place to not undo all the work already achieved.
‘Nikos, my neighbour, would watch from the seat in front of his home. He and my mother would sometimes share a coffee, and occasionally he’d call out suggestions. Mostly he was calling me several shades of a fool for doing it, but,’ Theo said with a smile, ‘it just made me more determined.
‘Once the land was cleared, the night before I was to start planting Nikos called me over for dinner. Of course, his idea of food was three-day-old, tough-as-a-boot rabbit stew, but the raki was good. And so was a bottle of wine he produced from his cellar.
‘He explained that it was his own wine, from a small variety of grape that had been growing on his land for generations. He’d never told my mother’s family because in his opinion they were money-grabbing, pious malakes—his words—something we both agreed on. We stayed up until about three in the morning that night, drinking the few bottles of wine he’d produced. The problem with his grape was that, while it was hardy, it was also harsh. But it had potential. I think we must have talked about the characteristics of the grape, the barrel, the age, with more detail than scientists discussing genetic testing.
‘So the next day, instead of planting pure malagousia, I took a risk. Half the land was the malagousia, and the other half was Nikos’s grape. He didn’t know the lineage of it, and his grandfather had probably forgotten the name of it. To Nikos, it was just wine. To me, it was the perfe
ct grape to blend.
‘The first two years were terrible.’ He huffed out a reluctant laugh. It covered the sheer hours of the day he had spent outside, tending to those damn vines. But he wouldn’t have changed it for anything. Those years were ones spent with his mother. Eating together, working together, laughing... Before it was nearly cruelly ripped away from him and he realised the true cost of the land.
Could he really lay the blame of his mother’s illness at Sofia’s feet? Could he hold to the anger that had driven him over the years and once again the moment she had refused to make a different decision? One that might have prevented his mother from ever having to experience such a devastating attack on her health?
In the silence that had settled between them he realised that the wind had picked up and set about securing the lines, considering whether or not he needed to bring down the sail.
‘Did you ever think about giving up?’
‘Every single hour of every single day,’ he replied.
‘But you didn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t be standing here today if I had.’
‘Do you...?’ She paused and it drew his gaze to her. ‘Do you ever wonder,’ she pressed on, ‘what would have happened if I had stayed? If perhaps...we could have had the life we’d hoped for?’
Whether he blamed her for what happened to his mother or not, Sofia had still not learned the consequences of her actions. Or she would never have asked that damn question.