Page 40 of Bluebell Promises

It was then, though, as she passed by an alley, that she remembered that first night in Santorini, when she’d gone to that local taverna. Angelos was friends with the man who owned it—potentially even best friends. And because Wren had hung out with both Angelos and the friend a few other times, she thought the friend had to tell her where Angelos had gone. Maybe he’d want to cover for his friend. Perhaps he knew secrets that Wren would have to squeeze out of him. But at this point, she was desperate, and she needed to know.

Wren ducked down the alley and into the taverna, which was empty but not closed. This was funny, as it seemed nearly every other restaurant and bar in Santorini was full of tourists at that moment. But Angelos’s friend was doing everything wrong in the marketing department, all in honor of “tradition.”

Wren sat in the same chair she’d had that first night, praying for a repeat. She studied the menu, wondering if she should also order the same thing. She imagined Angelos bolting in, crying out, “Wren! You’re here! I was looking all over for you!” She imagined him covering her face in kisses.

The kitchen door whipped open, bringing Angelos’s friend, the fifty-something pot-bellied taverna owner, into the dining area. He took one look at her, and his eyes bugged out.

Wren stood. “Please, don’t leave,” she said. She didn’t want a repeat of the coffee-shop owner.

The man raised his arms to either side. “Where would I go?” He sounded defeated.

Wren wrung her hands. “Please, can you tell me where Angelos is?”

The man closed his eyes. Wren’s heart rate spiked. “If he’s hiding from me, or something, then I need to know that. Or if he has a wife, or kids, or something. I just need to know. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

The owner shook his head and pressed the tips of his fingers into his temples. He said something in Greek that Wren didn’t understand. “Nobody told you, I suppose,” he said.

Wren’s throat was tight. She took another step toward him. “Please, can you tell me where he is? Did he move? Why is the hotel boarded up?”

The Greek man was quiet and terribly pale. “It happened when he was coming back from seeing you.”

Wren shifted. “What are you talking about?”

“He was sailing,” he said. “There was an accident. All I know is he is dead.”

Wren knew at once that this couldn’t be so, that the taverna owner was lying to her. “Come on,” she said. “Angelos is an amazing sailor. Something like that couldn’t happen.”

The Greek man raised his shoulders. “It did happen. The sea is not always so docile. And you know, Angelos was hurrying back. His parents were very angry with him for leaving all the time to spend his days with you. He was needed here. Now?” He shook his head again.

Wren’s ears rang. Nothing he said made any sense, yet at the same time, she couldn’t understand why he’d lie about something so heinous. There was a pressure behind her eyes. She knew she was about to cry, although she really didn’t want to. Not here.

“Where are his parents?” she asked, although she could barely hear her own voice.

“They boarded up the hotel and went to the mainland to mourn their son,” the man said. “They couldn’t take another tourist season, not like this, not in that hotel. They’re devastated.” He hesitated. “But you need to know that they blame you.”

Wren was taken aback. “I don’t understand.”

“I know it is not your fault, but the Greeks, we are sometimes very superstitious. We do not like people from the outside, not always. The way they see it, you came, and you took him away, and he died because of it. They think you are cursed.”

Wren remembered the coffee-shop owner, and how he’d locked himself in the kitchen. She knew that he thought she was cursed, too. He’d wanted her out of his shop immediately.

Realizing that she was on an island where all of its residents hated her and blamed her for Angelos’s death, Wren couldn’t stop her tears. She wept into her hands and shook so much that she had to sit down again. Although she cried, she couldn’t imagine that Angelos was really dead. It all felt like a practical joke, as though the taverna owner and Angelos had teamed up to tease the stupid American woman.

And then, she asked, “Where is he buried?”

Because the taverna was empty, the Greek man—who finally introduced himself as Kostos—locked up and drove her to the cemetery where Angelos was buried beside his relatives and his baby brother, who’d died at six weeks old. This was a story Wren didn’t know about, and it made her heart ache all the more to learn it here.

Angelos’s stone was new and simple, but it shone beneath the June evening light. Kostos smoked a cigarette and gazed at his friend’s name before stepping away and giving Wren a little time alone with it.

As Kostos went back to the truck, she tried to imagine what he was thinking. Probably to him, Wren was a nobody, just a fling Angelos had had during the last weeks of his life. In truth, that was sort of all she’d been. They’d been falling in love, but their story had stopped abruptly.

Well, sort of. The baby in her womb told her that the story was ongoing. But she didn’t know how to say that aloud.

Now, she sat before the grave of the only man she felt she could have built a future with and put her face in her hands. “I don’t know what to do, Angelos,” she whispered. In her mind’s eye, she could see his face, the laugh lines around his eyes, and the glint of his gorgeous blue irises. “There’s no roadmap for this. There’s no way forward.”

She wished Angelos could speak to her from somewhere beyond and tell her what to do. But all she could hear was donkeys braying over the yonder hill, and all she could see was the sea, stretching turquoise in all directions. It was a beautiful final resting place. She wished she could sit here beside his grave for another ten hours, at the very least. But she knew that Kostos would soon be ready to go. She had to be ready to go with him.

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