CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER TWELVE

T HEY PRIDED THEMSELVES on falling a little more in love every day.

They worked on it.

They did not keep score—though Apostolis took some time before he forgave himself.

Jolie was quicker.

But then, she had a secret weapon.

When things did not seem to be going in the right direction, all she needed to do was smile in that sharp, barbed way that never failed to get his attention.

“Are you certain you wish to smile at me like that?” he would ask, dangerously.

“You sound like a small man making big noises,” she said once in response—

And then laughed and laughed when he swept her up and tossed her, fully dressed, into the pool.

Then spent a good deal longer kissing her dry in the privacy of their bedroom.

Because they liked a spark. They would never run out of their fire.

She wouldn’t know them if they did.

Mathilde settled into life at the Andromeda beautifully. At first she didn’t want to leave Jolie’s side. The two of them spent hours and hours together, first comparing notes. Then building new memories.

And it was no more than a couple of years later that Mathilde came to them and said that she thought it was time she tried a bit of independence—and she knew just the place.

Because by then they all knew about Dioni’s adventures in New York.

“I cannot quite get my head around choosing a concrete city when there is all this,” Apostolis confessed one evening.

The sunset was settling in, spectacularly. The guests had drifted out from the terrace to gather at the cliffside, the better to truly take it in.

“Everyone must find their own path, my love,” Jolie told him.

He looked down at her, that smile on his face that was only hers. “As long as your path always leads to me, latria mou. ”

Jolie let him pull her into his side as the sun put on its nightly show. Later, there would be dancing. It was that kind of night. Later still, they would walk back across the drive and laugh as they found each other in the dark hall.

They had no secrets left. He knew she understood Greek. She knew every last detail of his dealings with Alceu and the soft heart he kept hidden so deep inside of him.

There was only one thing that she was hiding from him, but it was new.

And she resolved she would tell him. Tonight.

Later, when they were both naked and breathing too hard, she turned so she could prop herself up on his chest and look deep into his fathomless eyes. And so both of them could bathe in all the moonlight pouring in the windows.

“I have something to tell you,” she said. Solemnly.

Apostolis smiled. “I was wondering when you would get around to it.”

She felt her smile bubble up from the deepest place inside of her. “Of course you know.”

“My darling wife,” he said, kissing her in between each word, “my favorite stepmother, fos tis psihis mou, I love you. I know everything about you. It is my religion.”

And then, together, they shifted so they could both smooth their hands over her only very slightly rounded belly.

“This baby will be born a month after our five years is up,” she told him, old ghosts dancing around them but not getting close.

There was too much fire between them for that.

“Good,” he said, pulling her mouth back to his. “Now you will be stuck with me forever.”

But he was laughing while he said it, and she was laughing, too, because they knew the only truth that mattered.

Forever, for them, was only the beginning. This baby would only be their first.

And their legacy would be love and it would stand the test of time, until long after the Andromeda was nothing but rubble.

That was the story Jolie liked best.

So together, day after day, they made it come true.