ONE
Chapter 1
“Mummy” Sophia, her little girl, chirped as Isabelle drove them back towards home from the airport. “Yes, darling?” Isabelle asked, trying to bring her daughter out of the sad mood she seemed to be in. Sophia was just back after spending a month with her dad in Greece, and ever since she had been picked up from the airport, she had done nothing but sit silently, staring out of the window with a sad expression.
Frankly, it was starting to scare Isabelle, too. “Was everything alright in Greece?” Normally, this would get her girl talking about her dad, non-stop about how amazing he was, where he took her, the private jets, big restaurants, and grand gifts. Today, though, Sophia said nothing.
“Sophie, baby, won’t you tell mummy what happened?” She tried to pry again, only to see tears starting to form in her small eyes. It scared Isabelle.
“Daddy asked me something.” She said, at last, a hiccough caught in her throat.
“What darling?” She asked, her heart already running a mile an hour with worse thoughts at the forefront.
“He-he asked me to stay with him….foever…” Loud sobs followed that statement but Isabelle was unable to console her weeping child because suddenly she needed consolation too. It was like someone was trying to attack the small life she had built over the years. Like someone was trying to hack her into pieces.
“What did you tell him, darling?” Her heart broke even asking that question. Asking whom she should choose, her rich billionaire dad, who could give her everything, fulfill her every whim. Or the mother, who barely scrapes by for both of them.
“No.” Sophie slowly quieted down again as she said the next words. “Not unless you come with me for …foever too.” That was perhaps the sweetest and the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to Isabelle, She looked towards her daughter with her heart on her sleeve. She had loved nothing more in this world than this little cute creature.
“Is that why you are sad because you can’t live with your daddy forever, in Greece?”
“No.” Sophie shook her head a little as she said the next words. “I am sad coz daddy is going to marry Daphne, and-and I don’t like her, she said-she said daddy is never going to see me again after he gets married to her.”
It was raining now, a torrential downpour out of nowhere as they drove towards Pollokshaws from Glasgow. Isabelle had always known that this day would come, that sooner rather than later, Nikolous Dimetriou would take another wife, a better wife with upper-class Greek breeding and someone of his mother’s choice, ready to pop out half a dozen pure blue-blooded Greek children.
In fact, she had been surprised, that he hadn’t married immediately after she had been kicked out of his life. Nevertheless, somehow, despite all her defences erected over the years, despite her hardening her heart like a stone, the news still hurt.
She had never meant to hurt him and in the end of it all, she had been the one to be hurt most.
“I told daddy what Daphne said, but grandma said I was making up lies, like my mother….” Sophie was no longer the one sobbing, it was her mother. Tears blinded Isabelle, her hands shaking. So, it had come to this at last. Callista Dimetriou mistreated her little girl because much like Isabelle herself, her mother was a poor nobody.
She couldn’t drive in this condition. Isabelle realized the rain was only increasing with every second plus her hands were shaking now, this was no mental state to drive, especially when the roads were a slippery slope, clouds darker than night engulfing the sky.
She decided to park it nearby, in front of the small stores beside a gas station. “Sophie, you don’t think that your mummy is a liar, do you?” She asked, knowing that if anyone’s opinion mattered to her, it was this little girl’s.
Sophie looked dubious. “Of course not, mummy. You are not a liar!” She shook her head. “I am sad coz, I am never getting to see daddy again.” It was Isabelle’s turn to gasp. “What? Why? Did daddy say something…”
“No, I am not going back to that place where they call my mummy a lair.” It was such a strange thing, to see her little girl defending her, loving her…and yet at the moment that little girl looked like an exact copy of her strong-featured father. A mirror image of Nikolaos Demetriou, ready to fight.
She called him that night, for the first time in three long years. She wasn’t sure how she would feel listening to his voice. Not sure if he would even speak to her. He hated her so, after all. She was the one downfall, one muddied dark spot in his otherwise pure white, spotless, perfect life.
She smiled bitterly as she made that call. Surprisingly, he picked up. “Isabelle?” Strange how in seconds the distance of three years was suddenly wiped out. His voice sounded the same, and yet she knew he looked different now; she had seen his photographs here and there in the media, a few streaks of white had appeared in his hair now, small lines around his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. But he sounded just the same to her now, as he had done to her 18-year-old self. “Is Sophie okay? Has anything happened to her?” he sounded worried.
“Yes.” She hardened her heart once again as she spoke the next words. “She had been inconsolable the whole day. Crying her eyes out because of you.” It was easier to slip into old habits, and easier to be angry than to die of pain.
Silence met her. “What is this about?”
“Your new fiancée told Sophie that she was never going to see her daddy again.” Again, dead silence met her. “It was just a misunderstanding.” The words were hissed out of his mouth. “Oh really, then calling your three-year-old daughter a liar just like her mother was a misunderstanding too? Was it?” her voice came out sharper than she had wanted it to, but she wouldn’t back down, not today, not for her daughter.
For a long moment, he said nothing; it was all so still, so silent that Isabelle wondered if he had already dropped the call. “So, this is not about Sophie at all. It is about YOU!” Isabelle gulped down the bile that suddenly arose in her throat. “I hadn’t called to bicker with you.”
“No, you had called to insert your two-bit nose into my life once again! I do not care who or how many men you take into your bed. I haven’t once interfered into your RELATIONSHIPS in the past years, so keep out of Daphne and my relationship as well.”