Page 50 of Footprints in the Sand
“But how can we know we’ll get Kostos and not Nico?” Eva asked.
Aphrodite shrugged. “Can’t we show a photograph to a local dealer?”
“Even if they know who he is, why would they tell us where he is?” Eva asked.
Jean-Paul suggested that they get a hotel in the area and maybe talk to market stall owners and grocery store clerks. “Somebody has seen him,” he said. “And on these islands, everybody talks.”
Eva’s plan was different. She suggested that she pretend to be Kostos’s long-lost daughter, here on the island, looking for him. Jean-Paul and Aphrodite laughed at that but agreed it could be their last-ditch plan if it came to that. They didn’t want to put her in harm’s way.
After tying up the boat in the harbor, the three of them checked into the same hotel where Eva and Jean-Paul had stayed during the marble-carving conference. Aphrodite and Eva shared a room, while Jean-Paul got another, smaller one down the hall. Eva couldn’t help but watch him walk away, her chest heavy with longing.
Aphrodite read her like a book. “Why don’t you tell him how you feel?” She opened her suitcase and began tossing clothes on the bed, eager to change.
Eva laughed nervously. “I don’t think I have time for romance anymore.”
“You should have seen Kostos and Dimitra,” Aphrodite said glumly. “When they first got married, I was maybe ten, and I couldn’t believe how in love they were. It was the happiest I’dever seen Aunt Dimitra. At their wedding, I was allowed to stay up as late as all the adults, and I ate so much dessert that I got sick.”
Eva laughed sadly.
“It’s just hard to accept that he’d do that to her,” Aphrodite said after a pause, her eyes out the window. The day was hot, and there was a glossy sheen to her face from sweating on the water. “I’m so afraid of what Dimitra will say when she finds out.” She collapsed on the bed and added, “I hope it’s worth it.”
Eva didn’t know what to say.
They started simply enough by heading to the market to begin Jean-Paul’s plan of asking the local farmers and artisans if they’d seen Kostos around. Eva had first seen Kostos there, so it was the perfect place to sniff around. But before long, it felt as though most of the farmers, gardeners, honey-makers, and so on were being willfully obtuse.
“We don’t know him,” they said in a mix of Greek and English. “We’ve never seen him before.”
But sometimes, Eva thought there was a glimmer in their eyes that suggested they really did know him and didn’t want to say. Why would they be hiding him? What did they owe him? Did they know he’d abandoned his wife, thrown her into a world of turmoil, and destroyed her life?
At one, they broke for lunch and a glass of wine in a beautiful square with a view of the winding streets on either side, alleyways filled with tourists and donkeys and locals ladened with groceries. As she sipped her wine, Eva watched the shadows, daring Kostos to appear among the walkers. What would she say to him if they ran into him like this? How dare you?
All day long, they looked, asked questions, and dug around. They even tried to buy drugs from a local dealer who got spooked by them when they started asking too many questions.It was becoming clearer and clearer, with each passing hour, that they weren’t meant to be private detectives or secret agents or anything like that. Even Jean-Paul looked resigned.
“Let’s head back to the hotel and rest a bit,” he suggested. “We can grab dinner after that and regroup.”
They agreed and walked back through the winding streets, entering the hotel and preparing to go upstairs. But the woman at the front desk in the lobby stopped them with a smile.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said in English. “A man was here looking for you.”
“For me?” Jean-Paul asked.
She shook her head and nodded toward Eva. “I believe he was looking for you. For Eva. That’s your name, isn’t it?” She’d looked at Eva’s passport when they’d checked in.
Eva felt a shiver down her spine. “That’s my name, yes.”
The hotel receptionist didn’t sense anything was wrong. “He said he’s your father,” she said, reaching for a note she’d made. “He said to hang tight in Aliki and he’ll come find you when he’s done.”
Eva’s heart pounded. Her real father was in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Her real father had no idea where Naxos was on a map, let alone which hotel Eva was staying in. Jean-Paul and Aphrodite looked at her quizzically until Eva reached for her phone and, with a shaking hand, pulled up the photograph of Kostos. She showed the receptionist and asked, “Is this what the man who talked to you looked like?”
The woman’s smile melted off her face. “Is that not your father? He said he was. I’m so sorry. I thought he was someone safe. I thought he was someone else.”
Eva thought she was going to faint.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Martha’s Vineyard - July 2025
Three nights after the disastrous night on the yacht with William Cottrill and his horrendous friends, Dimitra was hard at work in her studio, painting full-speed-ahead for her upcoming exhibition in Athens. The fact that William had threatened her, told her that she’d made a powerful man very angry, no longer bothered her very much. The podcast inquiries had dried up, and sales had shrunk a bit, but because of Eva’s amazing work on social media, people were still very much interested in Dimitra’s work. Maybe what William could or couldn’t do to affect her career was minimal. Perhaps she had more control than she’d thought.
