Page 22 of Footprints in the Sand
“Vagabonds have a way of swooping in, don’t they?” Oriana said with a funny laugh.
“He’s a handsome one, though,” Meghan said thoughtfully.
“I’m more into the dog,” Dimitra quipped.
Oriana suggested they grab some dinner and then head back to Dimitra/Eva’s place to see Dimitra’s paintings. “I’m dying to show your work to a few of my clients up in Manhattan,” she explained as they moseyed toward a little Italian place Meghan and Oriana adored. “I can tell you have a unique voice, a unique vision.”
Dimitra burst into laughter. “I’m sorry. How can you tell that? You hardly know me!”
“Oriana has a brilliant eye for detail,” Meghan said.
Dimitra thought,she’s just buttering me up. But she rather liked the experience.
At the Italian place, Dimitra ordered spaghetti Bolognese and a glass of red wine and fell into easy conversation with Oriana and Meghan. They were dying to know more about their “mysterious Greek visitor,” so Dimitra told them what she could, that she’d lost Kostos in a fishing accident last year and had been struggling ever since. “Meeting Rachelle was eye-opening, but she’s filled with so much joie de vivre. She reminded me of myself before I met Kostos and settled down,” Dimitra said.
After that, Meghan and Oriana explained that they’d only known Rachelle a little more than two years. Their father Chuck had left his first wife and family to live with their mother and them here in Martha’s Vineyard. The scandal broke many years ago and served as proof, they thought, that their father had only truly loved their mother.
“But it was complicated,” Meghan said. “Our brothers Roland and Grant didn’t want to acknowledge us. It took forever for the story to come out for the rest of the Coleman families.”
“You have to meet everyone!” Oriana cried.
Dimitra laughed. “You might have a bigger family than I do.”
But when Dimitra told them that on the island of Paros alone, she had about forty cousins, Oriana and Meghan laughed. “We can’t keep up with that,” they said.
Oriana talked about her children and grandchild, her husband Reese, and the artists she’d worked with lately. After another sip of wine, she furrowed her brow and said, “Do you have children, Dimitra?”
Dimitra experienced a stab of sorrow, then cursed herself for it. Oriana was just being polite. Most married people had children, probably.
“We never did,” Dimitra said. “We tried, but it just wasn’t in the cards.”
Oriana’s cheeks went pale. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay. I’ve made my peace with it,” Dimitra said. “My sister, Athena, is convinced I’m the loneliest person in the world, but it isn’t so. I have my art. It’s all I’ve ever really needed, even before Kostos came into my life.”
“How old were you when you fell in love?” Meghan asked.
“Mid-thirties,” Dimitra said. “I was painfully independent before that. I think people have forgotten that I can be that again. People want to know you’re safely in a couple, but being in a couple, in my experience, doesn’t mean you’re safe. It means you face the world together, sure. But anything can happen.” She swallowed and didn’t add what she wanted to—that she should have protected her heart from love, that maybe she never should have fallen for Kostos at all.
Her heart pounded with sudden memory of that horrific night, how she’d been waiting up, watching bad television,waiting for the front door to scream open. She remembered the knock on the door, the police officers standing with their hands clasped nervously. She’d known the police officers since they were all children, playing in the sands together, tanned to deep brown.
“We found his boat,” they’d explained. “But the waves were high today. It looks like he fell out of it.”
They never found his body. In the cemetery near Aliki was a gravestone with his name on it, but there was nothing buried beneath. Dimitra didn’t bother going to the cemetery to grieve. For her, Kostos’s spirit was in the water, in the sand, in the olive groves. His heart still beat with her heart. In Paros, he was all around.
But he wasn’t in Martha’s Vineyard. That was clear.
Chapter Twelve
Paros Island - June 2025
The fallout after the Gretchen Collingsworth brand went under was swift. Very suddenly, Eva couldn’t log into any of her company accounts, the website went under, and even the Instagram and TikTok were deleted. Payday, which usually came every two weeks, was ignored completely. When Eva reached out to other colleagues, including her marketing boss, Melanie, she was either outright ignored or told to “keep quiet about everything if a journalist or lawyer contacts you.” Eva spent the days in a delirium, wandering up and down the beach, wondering what to do with herself. Because she spent so much time outside in a tank top and a pair of shorts, she was tanned and muscular-looking and so different than her meek, slim, pale self of the wintertime. She’d even begun swimming endlessly around the Aegean, so far out that she sometimes felt nervous about ever making it back to shore. She wondered if Finn would even recognize her like this, and then she cursedherself for ever thinking of Finn. Hadn’t she come all this way to get away from thoughts of him?
Aphrodite kept tabs on Eva. It was Greek hospitality turned up to eleven. She brought her snacks and drinks, sat with her on the rooftop and listened to Eva’s every worry about the company. Five nights after news of Gretchen’s arrest had broken, Aphrodite took a long drink of wine and said, “I’m sorry for saying this. But were you actually happy doing marketing for somebody else’s company?”
Eva bristled. “Um. Yes?” But even as she said it, she felt the cracks in her logic.
“I just mean, don’t you want to do something for yourself? Something artistic? You’re still so young, you know. You have time to make something beautiful.”
