Alex and Damon Terzakis. The combined view of them hit her like a punch in the stomach at the graveside. She went white with outrage, considering their presence a desecration of Callie’s memory. How dared they come here and mourn her sister when between them they had made her sister’s last months a living hell? How dared they! Damon was studying the ground. He was thinner, older than she remembered, both hands clasped tightly before him.
‘Decent of them to come...the way you feel,’ Gina muttered out of the corner of her mouth. She was a large woman in her late forties and an inveterate talker, no matter what the occasion.
People began to leave, shaking her hand. Mostly very young people, Callie’s friends from her schooldays. Nobody from the university, but then Callie had abandoned her studies many months previously and broken all contact with the friends she had made there. Without warning, Gina darted from her side and approached the Terzakis males. Infuriated by her defection, Sarah walked on with the minister and parted from him beside Gina’s car.
Sickened, she stared at the black limousine with its tinted windows and chauffeur standing by on the other side of the churchyard. She hadn’t been able to afford even one funeral car. But then things like that weren’t important, she reminded herself painfully, and she had to conserve what little money she had for her nephew.
‘I’m going to call him Nikos, after Damon’s father,’ Callie had announced months ago, after a scan had revealed the sex of her unborn child. She had wanted to know whether she was carrying a boy or a girl and she had been over the moon when she’d learnt that it was a boy.
‘Damon won’t be able to stay away,’ Callie had forecast almost smugly, patting her swollen stomach. ‘Not from his son.’
Sarah had been amazed at the strength of her sister’s naïve faith in the man who had abandoned her to single parenthood. After all that had happened, she had been unable to comprehend how Callie could still hope, but during her sister’s pregnancy she had been reluctant to deprive her of any belief that bolstered her spirits. She had been dreading the aftermath of the birth when poor Callie would have been faced with reality. She would have waited in vain for a proud father to show up. Damon was a wimp, utterly under big brother’s thumb, and the threat of disinheritance and exile from his beloved family had completely overpowered his much vaunted great love for Callie!
Gina swam back to her, beaming all over her round face, and unlocked the car.
‘Why did you speak to them?’ Sarah whispered painfully.
‘Because you’re being absolutely stupid!’ Gina said bluntly. ‘If you want to keep that baby, be practical. Bite your lip and let them keep you both—’
‘I’d sooner be dead!’ Sarah exclaimed.
‘He’s little Nicky’s dad, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he pay up?’ Gina demanded. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll pay a packet to keep all this out of the newspapers.’
‘Gina—’ Sarah muttered, dismayed but not particularly surprised by the older woman’s calculation.
‘You’ve got to be realistic, love,’ Gina continued, not unkindly. ‘You want little Nicky and I think you’re crazy, but then you always were the maternal type, even as a kid. So keep him and raise him and make them pay through the nose for it!’
‘I don’t want anything from them!’
‘If you don’t take their money, you’ll have to live on benefit,’ Gina pointed out drily. ‘And the social services will pursue Damon.’
‘To Greece?’ A hysterical laugh was lodged like a sob in Sarah’s constricted throat.
‘Well, they wouldn’t have much trouble tracking him down, would they?’
‘I won’t take anything from them,’ Sarah stated tightly. ‘Ever!’
‘Callie would have wanted the very best for her son,’ the older woman said shortly. ‘And I think it’s time you faced the fact that Callie knew damned fine what she was doing when she got pregnant.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Sarah looked at her father’s cousin in shock and reproach.
‘It was no accident in my opinion. Callie wasn’t that careless. She wanted that boy and when things weren’t going as she wanted them to she let herself fall pregnant,’ Gina opined wryly. ‘Women have been using pregnancy to trap men into marriage for centuries, love. Teenage girls are particularly fond of the method. Unfortunately your sister miscalculated.’
‘I disagree.’ Sarah had to struggle to hold her voice level and conceal the depth of her anger on her sister’s behalf. ‘Callie didn’t try to trap Damon. He had already asked her to marry him, bought her an engagement ring—’
‘Talk’s cheap, but where was he when the chips were down? Men!’ Gina said with rich cynicism. ‘He took off for Greece and she never saw him again. He never even answered her letters. Rat! I’d bury the two of them in the back garden with pleasure if it weren’t for little Nicky! Mind you, it would be a sinful waste to do away with rat’s big brother,’ she sighed reflectively. ‘Now, he really is gorgeous. Like Apollo the sun god...’
Unused to Gina making mythological references, Sarah stared at the other woman wide-eyed.
Gina flushed slightly as she drew up in front of her small terraced house. ‘I went on holiday to Greece once and I saw this statue... Forget it, I’m being silly!’
A neighbour had sat with Nicky while they were attending the funeral. Sarah rushed upstairs to see him. He was fast asleep, snug in his wicker basket. She had brought him home from hospital only yesterday. As she looked down at him, just itching to hold him again, her eyes moistened. In her darkest hours of grief, she had learned to thank God for the gift of Callie’s child. She felt needed again and that strengthened her.
Gina was out on the tiny landing. Her plump face was tight. ‘If you take that child on, you’ll never have any life of your own. Didn’t you sacrifice enough for Callie?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘You’re only twenty-four and you’ve got lonely old maid written all over you!’ Gina looked her over in rueful despair, taking in the tightly restrained silver-blonde hair ruthlessly confined in a French pleat, the complete absence of cosmetics, the conservative navy suit that had seen better days and the sensible flat shoes. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted a man in your life?’