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leans back on the grass. His hair is ruffled and there’s a bright spot of red on one cheek.
    â€˜I’m looking at you now.’
    â€˜Now kiss me. Kiss me and look at me.’
    He comes forward, covers my mouth with his. He’s gentle, a mere brushing of the lips. I draw his head hard into me and shut my eyes, inhaling his breath in tender resolution.
    10
    SYDNEY, SPRING, 2017
    I’M AWAKE AND it’s dawn. I stand on the balcony, gazing into the park, shielding my face from the early sun. I think of my mother, comatose downstairs. Her devotional neck, that suffering face. Her failed relationship twenty years ago. My own tug of love and defiance and with Zoi. My eyes are unaccustomed to the brightness and I stumble inside, trusting my instinct to find a way through the corridor, blurring the old sepia images on the bathroom walls. Olga as a bride, bareheaded, hand on hip, the other rattling the ice in her glass. Her eyes are focused on her drink, bluish milky liquid, cold in her hand as she flirts with boys and forgets she’s a married woman now. Bel canto inflections pervade the air. She poses in the photograph like some archaic statue in fluted robes; a wedding dress she made herself, my father’s dark face squashed behind her.
    I feel an absurd twinge of guilt at her hard life and the inevitable decline of love. This train of thought invariably leads me to Zoi. His trusting mouth. My indulgence toward him, the subtle worming expiation of guilt that followed each time I betrayed him. His face, his body. I’ve been down this path many times before. Foolish. Do I still love him? Irrational. I think of his open hands, strong eyes. Maybe.
    Of course I got pregnant. I was sleeping with both men, daily. And when I found out I had no idea whose it was. Even now, I look at Pan and wonder. He has so much of both brothers in him. One day, when he’s older, a teenager, I’ll tell him the story. At some point he deserves to find out, and to choose whether to take it further. And I will carry no weight of blame; I refuse it.
    When I found out I was pregnant in Athens, I kept staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I leaned over the basin, willing myself to vomit. A swell of nausea rose, and just as quickly subsided. The speck, the soul, a child; red in whorls of white. A shaft of light pierced through the window. I heard neighbour’s voices in the next apartment, uninspired toasts. Dimitri came to my side and rested his head on my shoulder so that his face was also framed in the mirror. We looked at one another, eyes focused on the other’s face.
    â€˜Well?’ I could see his lips forming the word as though they belonged to somebody else.
    Near the plughole lay the discarded test wand. It was stained a pale baby-girl pink. Dimitri’s hand was on my head, his fingers working in my hair. I could sense an anxiety filling me, spreading now slow, now quick through my body.
    EVERY DAY, WHEN everyone was gone, Dimitri and I would go back to bed, scattering his sheets with crumbs of fresh bread, surrendering to the soft coolness of each other’s skin, each other’s naked arms, in a cocoon of darkness shot with light from the street. He was careful of my growing belly and our lovemaking was stilted, formal, like the couplings seen in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
    Reckless, we no longer tried to find anywhere else discreet or neutral. Always, in these hushed still afternoons, the gypsies in their trucks broke the silence on suburban streets violently with their repeated refrain: karpouzia , karekles , watermelons, plastic chairs going cheap – two unlikely phrases that will be forever associated in my head.
    I would rip off my dressing gown in front of him, twirl slowly with my arms over my head. There was no denying it: my belly was rounder, hips filling out, breasts like somebody else’s. I looked closer into the mirror then shocked myself by smiling at my reflection.